Katie Anderson, whose favorite word is “intention,” decided to incorporate it into her business card as her logo. She chose to represent it in Japanese using the word shikou, which she later learned signifies the strength of heart and direction. To Katie, intention came to embody both purpose and the actions required to fulfill it. She then encountered the word kokorozashi, which further deepened her understanding of intention.
Deliberately taking steps to achieve our purpose
Nick: Speaking of learning and goals, we could touch on our favorite Japanese words. Both of us have them written in Kanji or calligraphy, and they're quite similar. So I have kokorozashi, it's actually used by Japan's biggest business school, GLOBIS, and their MBA students develop kokorozashi, which is like this personal mission, where you're using your professional skills where you want to change an aspect of society.
It's a highly ambitious goal, it's going to take, potentially decades, and you need supporters, you need a team and you need an incredible leadership with lots of energy. But it's also rooted in Bushido. So it's a word rooted in Bushido. And it's sort of represents literally either the warrior’s heart, or the samurai’s heart or the samurai’s mind. And it makes what is part of your favorite word. So what is your favorite word?
Katie: My favorite word is intention. And you can see behind me, so the first of the two kanji symbols is kokorozashi. It was a few years later that I learned of that it was a standalone word as well. And then the lower symbol is compass or direction.
And when I moved to Japan, I didn't have business cards for my new company, I'd had been in practice for a year. And you know, it's very rare that we give out business cards in the West, so much so but of course, I knew moving to Japan, I needed a business card.
I didn't have a logo, and so I worked with a meishi business card company, and I said put the word for intention in Japanese on my card, I'll use that as my logo. I had no idea what it looked like, or what it represented. And you know, that's what it came back, shikou.
And so I started introducing myself, making connections in Japan, and contacts who were bilingual said, this is a very powerful word. And they explained that the samurai’s heart, and then direction, and actually I came to describe intention equals heart plus direction, you might even say the strength of your heart plus direction.
So what's your purpose? What impact do you want to have? And then what actions do you need to take to fulfill that purpose? And that's how I see is intention is about, knowing our purpose and then taking the actions that align with that. And then I later learned of the word kokorozashi. And it's like, oh, this is why it's so powerful. And it made sense. I mean, that was just innate to me.
And so I have shikou, intention written on my big Daruma, and it's on my business cards, and it's such a core part of who I am and how I show up. It's about how do we intentionally take action to fulfill our purpose. So we have to have knowledge of both, right? What is our purpose and then what are the things we need to do?