Discovering Our Purpose Through Microflowing

Posted on July 08, 2020 by Virginia Zuloaga, One of Thousands of Performance Coaches on Noomii.

Running our daily lives is a full-time management job. Better yet, a full-time micromanagement job.

We never care to think about the relevance of the C Level position that we occupy in our personal enterprises. Only because we get used to our own daily rush, it doesn’t mean that whatever we fill our hours with should feel meaningless or unenjoyable.

I have been reading about Ikigai lately. Trying to learn how to create microflows while structuring our reason for being. The realization of our hopes and expectations through passion.

We all have a purpose in our lives. That one thing that makes us uniquely driven, passionate, and happy while we are working at it. Unfortunately, many of us trade our purpose for conventionality, settling for that comfort zone we always work so hard to create for ourselves.

The irony here is that things should be exactly the opposite. Why are we stripped from our dreams since childhood, ordered to follow a set of rules to become the kind of adults that we have to become, according to our families and societies?

We have been inheriting from generation to generation that this is the way the world functions: We are born, we grow, we learn, we go to school, we graduate, we get a job, we get married, we buy a house, we have kids, and grandkids, we retire, we die. That’s it.

And where is all the woo woo that life is beautiful, that we should enjoy it to the fullest? Where is the real-life in-between everything else? Do we really have time for that while we are rushing (not flowing) through our lives to reach our pre-established goals?

It does feel like we are not actually living our lives. We are instead, living the lives that the rest of the people expect from us. Funny thing is, they are doing it too.

Vicious cycle.

So what does this all have to do with Ikigai, exactly?

Ikigai is a Japanese concept that more or less translates into “a reason for being”. That is our real goal in this world. Finding our reason for being here. What have we been brought to do? Why are we born? What is our specialty? What can we do for planet earth and all of its inhabitants?

Because it is not about us. Is about us and our connection to everything else contained in the Universe that we have been kindly invited to cohabitate.

Back to the micromanaging point, because this is something that we definitely have to do, at least while we embark on the adventure of discovering, or rediscovering, our purpose in this world, I came across a very interesting concept inside the Ikigai concept defined as Microflow, as named by Csikszentmihalyi.

Now, this very interesting micro-concept within Ikigai teaches us to enjoy the mundane tasks. Those things that we dread to do like doing the laundry, washing the dishes, cleaning the house, the repetitive of our daily living.

I have come to enjoy the “washing the dishes” plan by creating a ritual. I put on my wireless headphones (it’s easier for free movement purposes), I play my “Starting Over” playlist on Spotify, and I dance and sing while I’m at it.

We often tend to expect too much from things that we are not even sure we want to get, leaving our real dreams in the backburner, and dreading the everyday tasks that, actually, keep us moving.

Ikigai is about finding that beautiful, passionate core that will keep absolutely everything else flowing around us, for us, effortlessly. Happily.