Organisational consultancy
Applying Occupational Wholeness to how teams work: workload design, meaning at work, and the gap between what a role demands and who people are.
Details →The Model of Occupational Wholeness
Where what you do meets who you are.
Occupational therapist, researcher and author Dr Farzaneh Yazdani built a model that explains why a full life can still feel empty, and how to re-think and re-plan it around four forces.
Three needs, met through what you do
The model, one piece at a time
Occupational Wholeness is not about doing more. Select any part of the figure, whether a need, a relationship between two needs, or the Context around them, to see what it means.
A diagram of the Model of Occupational Wholeness. Being, Belonging and Becoming sit at the three points of a triangle. Doings sits at its centre, joined to each of the three, as the intermediate need through which the other three are met. Each pair of needs is joined by a named relationship, and the whole model sits inside Context. Select any element to read about it.
Intermediate need
Doings: the intermediate need
Everything a person occupies themselves with (work, care, study, rest, worship, play) and, equally, what they deliberately do not do. Doings sit at the centre as the intermediate need: not an end in themselves, but the means through which the needs of Being, Belonging and Becoming are formed and met. To count as a Doing an act has to be voluntary and intentional rather than reflexive, and it has to have a purpose; the meaning a person assigns to it may be positive or negative, and either can motivate.
About
Thirty years of asking one question: what makes a life feel whole?
Occupational therapist, academic and Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. MSc Occupational Therapy Programme Leader at the University of Roehampton, Associate Researcher at Oxford Brookes, and Research Interest Groups Lead on the board of the ROTOS Foundation.
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Years in occupational therapy practice and education
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Peer-reviewed publications and book chapters
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Countries where the model has been taught
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Books, including the Routledge guide
Work together
Consultancy, training and speaking
Practitioner training & supervision
Small-cohort training for occupational therapists and allied health professionals, supervised directly by Dr Yazdani.
Details →Workshops & seminars
Interactive sessions built around the questionnaire and real re-planning exercises, for students, clinical teams and community groups.
Details →Keynote speaking
Conference talks on occupational wholeness, migration and enterprise, and the cultural dimensions of wellbeing.
Details →
The book
Occupational Wholeness for Health and Wellbeing
A guide to re-thinking and re-planning life. Published by Routledge, it sets out the model in full: the theory, the assessment, and the practical work of bringing Doing back into balance.
Chartreuse
Deep navy
Teal
Warm paper
Every colour on this site is sampled from this cover.
Free self-assessment
How whole does your life feel right now?
Six minutes, 24 questions. You get a score across Being, Belonging and Becoming, plus a plain-language reading of where your Doing is out of balance. Nothing is published, and nothing is shared.
Question 1 of 24: try it, nothing is scored
Thinking about your life over the last four weeks
What I do helps me be myself
1 — Far below my expectation for satisfaction
6 — Far above my expectation for satisfaction
Research & writing
Latest from the work
New writing will appear here.