Ikigai in Practice: A Live Coaching Walkthrough on Finding What You're Here to Do

This session is part of an ongoing Ikigai series, and it's best understood as a working demonstration rather than a lecture. If you haven't watched the earlier videos in the series, it's worth going back to them first — they lay out the four-circle Ikigai framework this session leans on throughout: what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Here, that framework gets applied out loud, in real time, to a real person's life questions.

Starting From What You Love

The conversation opens by pinning down what "love" actually means in this context: something you can return to for a long stretch of time without getting bored of it. Not a hobby you drop after a week, but an activity you keep circling back to. The coach is careful to separate this from sacrifice — doing something you love isn't supposed to feel like a grind or an obligation. It's a small but important distinction that shapes everything that follows: if a pursuit only survives because you're forcing yourself through it, it probably isn't sitting in the "love" circle at all.

Reading What You're Good At

From there, the session moves into strengths — the "good at" circle — and does it the way most honest self-assessment has to happen: through conversation, not a checklist. The coach probes for patterns in what the person naturally gravitates toward, what draws sustained focus, and what kind of feedback or recognition has come their way over time. This part of the session is less about arriving at a tidy answer and more about the process of noticing — paying attention to where energy and skill overlap, rather than where effort is being spent out of obligation.

Where the Money Actually Is

A significant stretch of the session is devoted to money — specifically, where value and income tend to concentrate over the next several years. The coach walks through industries worth paying attention to: education (especially online and knowledge-based education), coaching and counselling, wellness and mental health, and businesses built around helping people directly. The framing isn't "chase the money" — it's closer to "notice where the world is already paying attention and paying money, and see if your other three circles can meet it there." This is the "paid for" circle of Ikigai, treated as a real-world constraint rather than an afterthought.

What the World Needs: Disconnection, Mental Health, and Counselling

The most substantial thread in the session is a diagnosis of what's actually missing for people right now. The coach names it directly: people are disconnected — from nature, from themselves, and from each other. That disconnection shows up as stress, anxiety, and depression, and the session pushes back on the idea that this is something people should just "get over." Depression in particular is treated with some seriousness here — described as something that isn't simply willed away, no matter how strong someone appears to be.

Counselling comes up repeatedly as a genuine answer to this gap — not as a side hustle, but as a service industry built specifically around this shortage. The coach describes counselling's core value as helping people with their physical and mental health issues, full stop — no added agenda beyond that. This becomes a recurring theme: identifying a real scarcity in the world (attention, presence, mental health support, reconnection to nature) and asking whether that scarcity is something you're positioned to address.

The Inner Child and Early Conditioning

Partway through, the session shifts into more psychological territory, introducing the idea of different "child" archetypes shaped by upbringing — including what's referred to as the nature child and the divine child. The point being made is that a lot of adult patterns, including how someone approaches ambition, relationships, and self-worth, trace back to conditioning that started in childhood. The coach connects this back to the counselling and coaching thread: understanding these early patterns isn't just therapy for its own sake, it's foundational to helping other people do the same kind of work later on, if that's the direction someone's Ikigai points.

Building Something Real Out of It

Toward the end, the session gets practical: talk of building an actual holistic system — something that works on physical and psychological wellbeing together rather than treating them as separate tracks. There's mention of running this partly online and partly offline, of workshops, and of a course with its own structure and pricing. It reads as the natural conclusion of the exercise — taking the four overlapping circles (love, skill, need, payment) and turning them into an actual offering, rather than leaving Ikigai as a purely reflective exercise.