About Dr Farzaneh Yazdani
My initial thoughts of conducting a primary research project cohered around exploration of the experiences and perspectives of occupational therapy practitioners and academics who use the term Occupational Balance in their field of work. A series of studies led me to coin the term Occupational Wholeness. I proposed the Model of Occupational Wholeness that I have introduced in the MOW book to help fill the gap between theoretical concepts and their application in practice.
While I have been an academic for 30 years, with experience of teaching in Iran, Jordan and the UK and leading international workshops in different European and Middle Eastern countries, for the first 16 years I was also a practitioner. My other formal education and training, in the areas of educational and psychological counselling, also contributed to the content and structure of the MOW book.
I was born into a family in which both my father and mother valued hard work. That said, I was a teenager during the war between Iran and Iraq (1980–1989), when spiritual values were talked about fervently and continuously at school, in the community and at home. While young men were defending the country at war zones, girls were expected to study in order to become skillful and educated to build the future of the country. Like many girls of my generation I was deeply influenced by these values. For some, like me, with an ongoing health condition, I had to choose where to spend my little energy. My decision was always education and work over other activities. After completing my BSc and MSc in Occupational Therapy, I became a young professional, and my values continued to dominate my time management, with priority given to serious activities most of the time, over and above leisure and socialising.
I was about 30 years old when invited to help with the establishment of an occupational therapy programme in Amman at the University of Jordan, where I then stayed for more than eight years, studying for my second master’s degree and PhD in Psychological and Educational Psychology alongside working full time as a lecturer. It was only when invited to the Faculty of Rehabilitation, McGill University, Montreal, to speak on establishing the occupational therapy programme in Jordan, that I faced a reality which made me think. While I was so proud of the hard work I had done in Jordan, I suddenly felt aware of the strange looks given by some of the audience, followed by some difficult questions. Why have you really gone so far without taking care of yourself? How about other aspects of your life?
These questions became more entrenched in my mind when I moved to the UK, and some of my colleagues used the term Occupational Imbalance to explain my lifestyle. I was so disappointed — what I had thought was the selflessness of a young professional and academic who had contributed to do big things, such as helping establish several rehabilitation centres and programmes, was considered by some people as madness and Occupational Imbalance. I genuinely became interested in exploring what Occupational Balance really is, and in my research I learned about life Balance as well.
Source: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003034759
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