My NHS Journey: Where Hataraku Ends and Ikigai Begins

Hataraku and Ikigai: Why I Stopped Trying to Make Them the Same Thing

For years I had a quiet argument with a Japanese concept.

Hataraku and ikigai. One is the work that puts food on the table, the other is the work that feeds your soul. On paper the idea is that they intersect, that there's a sweet spot where both live in the same place. I found that idea beautiful and also a bit annoying, because for a long time I thought I already had it. Then I didn't. And I couldn't work out if that meant I'd lost something, or if I'd just misunderstood the concept from the start.

When They Were the Same Thing

When I started working in the NHS, hataraku and ikigai weren't two separate ideas to me. They were one. I got paid to look after patients, and looking after patients was also what fed me. The job was the meaning. There was no gap to think about, no tension to resolve. It felt simple, the way things only feel simple before you've climbed high enough to see the terrain properly.

Then I went up the ranks, and the higher I climbed, the more that overlap started to thin out. The work that paid me increasingly looked like strategy, oversight, advisory input. Important, necessary, but not the thing that filled me up the way bedside care once had. I hadn't lost my ikigai. I just had to go looking for it somewhere new.

Finding It Somewhere I Didn't Expect

I found it in my Southwest CNO BME Strategic Advisory Group fellow role, but not quite where I assumed I would.

I sit on an advisory role for the regional team, and I've stepped further into the inclusion space over time. I care about that work. I believe in influencing change through lived experience, and in giving people a microphone for their own voice and their own reality within the NHS. But if I'm honest with myself, the strategic side, the papers, the committees, the policy language, was never where my ikigai lived loudest.

It lived in the roadshows.

Across five Southwest trusts, alongside two people I've genuinely come to admire, Mark and JJ, both as passionate as they are different from me, I got to do the thing I'm actually best at: facilitating, leading a room, holding space for a workshop. Standing in front of colleagues and helping them navigate their own journey through the NHS gave me something the advisory papers never quite could. It gave me a sense of accomplishment that was immediate and human.

The Domino Effect I Didn't See Coming

I went into that work thinking the impact stopped with the individuals in the room. Support a nurse, help them see their own value, watch them walk out a little taller, job done.

I was wrong, in the best possible way.

When internationally educated nurses and colleagues left those rooms feeling seen and genuinely empowered, something shifted beyond them too. Their true value started to show, not just to me but to their teams, their services, their patients. They engaged. They stepped into quality improvement projects. They led service development work they might never have put their hand up for before. The ripple I thought I was creating for individuals turned out to reach patients too, just a few steps removed from where I was standing.

That's the part of this work nobody tells you about. You think you're planting one seed and you find out later you planted a forest.

When the Role Ended, I Kept Going

Eventually my fellowship role came to an end. And I went looking for that same feeling again, the one I'd found in the roadshows, the one that came from standing in a room helping someone see their own worth. I looked for something that could hold it in the same way.

I couldn't find it.

So I built it. That's how the 90 Day Career Challenge came to life through Wednesdays with James. If the thing that feeds you doesn't exist yet in the shape you need, you don't wait around for someone else to make it. You build it yourself. That's been the real lesson underneath all of this: if you can't find it, build it

Making Peace With the Gap

So where does that leave me and my long running argument with hataraku and ikigai?

I think I was wrong to expect them to sit permanently in the same place. Maybe the honest version of the concept isn't a fixed overlap you find once and keep forever. It's something you have to keep re-finding, at every stage, in every new room you walk into. Mine started at the bedside. It moved into a roadshow with two brilliant colleagues and a room full of people rediscovering their own worth. It will probably move again.

What I've stopped doing is treating the gap between the job that pays me and the work that feeds me as a problem to solve once and for all. It isn't a puzzle with a final answer. It's a question I get to keep asking, and if I'm lucky, keep answering differently, in more rooms, with more people, for a long time yet.