A Guide to Re-thinking and Re-planning Life — Farzaneh Yazdani, Routledge, 2023.
Most advice about “balance” asks you to squeeze more in. This book asks a different question: what if the problem isn’t how much you’re doing, but whether it actually meets what you need? It’s the book behind this site’s Model of Occupational Wholeness — a way of reading your own life for the gap between what you’re doing and what you actually need, and a practical route from noticing that gap to closing it.
What you’ll find inside
- A new lens on “balance” — why the usual work-life balance advice quietly fails most people, and what to look at instead.
- How to read your own life story for the gaps between what you’re doing and what you actually need.
- A step-by-step path from noticing something’s wrong, to planning, to making real change.
- Tools for reflection that build lasting self-awareness, not just a one-off insight.
- How the model plays out beyond the clinic — at work, in communities, in everyday life.
- The full Occupational Wholeness Questionnaire — the same free self-assessment on this site — explained in depth, with the thinking behind the scores.
Praise for the book
Yazdani’s work with the Model of Occupational Wholeness is the first contribution by a person who grew up, trained and worked for most of her life in a Middle East country — and the second within Asia.
Mehdi Rassafiani, Associate Professor, Charles Sturt University
A framework that can be applied across the diversity of communities and experiences we may encounter — and thus may be particularly useful when working with people whose circumstances make them vulnerable.
Nicholas Pollard, Senior Lecturer, Sheffield Hallam University
A way of supporting changes in occupational engagement through a non-judgemental process — perceiving occupation as potentially both health-promoting and illness-producing, regardless of the occupation itself.
Jane A. Davis, Assistant Professor, University of Toronto
About the author
Dr Farzaneh Yazdani is an occupational therapist and academic of 30 years, and the developer of the Model of Occupational Wholeness. Read her full story →
This page shares the ideas behind the book, not the book itself. For the full model, the worked examples and the practical exercises, the book — or a workshop with Dr Yazdani — is where they live.