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Reveal your possible self.
Two pictures, and the whole method sits between them. The first says what we are looking for — meaningful, purposeful productivity is not a job title, it is where four things about you overlap. The second says why it so often does not happen: the same person in a different setting, doing a different thing, is a different story.
The three-circle model is the person–environment–occupation model (Law et al., 1996). The four-circle one is often labelled “ikigai”; it is not — it was drawn by Marc Winn (2014) from a “purpose” diagram by Andrés Zuzunaga (2011). Full citations at the foot of this page.
Forecasts and estimates as popularly cited — informed predictions about an uncertain decade, not settled facts. Read them as a reason to prepare, not as a schedule.
Why we ask. Where you live changes which roles actually exist and who is hiring; your age range changes what a realistic next step looks like at this point in your life. Both are optional, neither is shown to anyone, and skipping them only makes the suggestions a little more general.
This is not a health service. It is not occupational therapy, assessment, diagnosis or treatment, and no therapeutic relationship is created by using it.
Parts of what you are shown are generated automatically and may be wrong or unsuitable for you. It does not replace advice from a professional who knows your circumstances — you decide what to act on.
If you are in distress, this service cannot help and does not monitor what you write. In Australia, Lifeline is 13 11 14, 24 hours. In an emergency, call 000.
Meaningful and purposeful productivity is not something you find in a job listing. It appears where four different things about you overlap. Answer each one honestly and the overlap starts to show.
Most guides start at the fourth circle and work backwards from a job title. We start at the first two, because they are the only ones nobody else can answer for you — that is the Person section, which comes next. Then we turn outward to the third.
This four-circle diagram is often labelled “ikigai”. It is not: it was drawn by Marc Winn (2014) from a “purpose” diagram by Andrés Zuzunaga (2011). Ikigai, as Mieko Kamiya (1966) wrote about it, is a broader idea about what makes a life feel worth living — and it does not require that anyone pay you.
Two parts, each a deck of face-down cards. Turn over whichever one draws you, in any order. Cards marked with a star are the ones the reflection is built from; the rest add depth if you want to go further.
What you are able to do — including the things that feel so easy you have stopped counting them as skills. Eight cards, three of them required.
Volition is what moves you to act. It has four parts: personal causation (your sense of what you are capable of), motivation, values, and interests. Seven cards, five of them required.
From the Model of Human Occupation (Kielhofner).
What you are able to do — including the things that feel too easy to count. Turn over any card that draws you.
Volition is what moves you to act — your personal causation, motivation, values, and interests.
In the person–environment–occupation framework, this section connects the person to occupation. Here we reframe work as productivity: a broader concept of purposeful contribution and achievement.
What do I contribute, create, learn, or accomplish?
Productivity is a lot more than a job or a career. It is a problem you would like to solve, or something you would like to contribute to the world.
Here we connect the person from the previous section to productivity — how to bring your volition into what you do.
We do not want work–life balance alone. We want productivity that gives purpose, meaning, and satisfaction.
Many people live a default life without ever questioning it. You are more than a job, and there are many potentials and possibilities open to you.
Now let's look at what the world needs.
Considering your strengths, your volition and your area of interest, we look up community and world problems that would be worth considering — then draw everything together into statements of this shape:
You can help this population to solve this problem with your strength and volition.
Answering these makes the statements sharper. Skip any that do not apply.
Edit any of these into your own words, and put them in the order you would actually pursue them.
Use the ↑ and ↓ arrows on each statement to move it up or down, so they sit in the order you would actually pursue them. You can change the order at any time.
The top three are the ones the rest is built from. Roles are suggested for each of those three, and your goals are built from the one you choose to plan. If you were given a fourth and it is the one you care about, move it up — otherwise it stays here as a note to yourself and nothing is built on it.
A career can be replaced. A service statement cannot — no one else has brought the same strength, passion and problem area together as you have. This one is yours alone.
Optional, and read by a person. Nothing here is shown to anyone else.
What worked, what did not, what you were hoping for.
Yes — I'm ready to be the top 10%: to keep track of my goals and update my profile as I keep exploring.
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Whatever you tell us shapes what we build next.
Reading what you wrote
Your service statements name a problem and the people facing it. Possible self is where you find your own position in them — how you could actually step in.
Where you could step into the statements you ranked, and what that version of you would be doing.
Occupational therapy looks at the whole environment, not just the task — the physical, social, cultural and institutional conditions you do your best work in, and the ones that quietly hold you back.
Taken as binding rather than assumed — employment, self-employment, a business or something unpaid are different lives, and a role that cannot pay you the way you need is not a fit however well it reads.
Our aim is to normalise occupational therapy concepts — so that anyone can use them to pursue a meaningful lifestyle, not only people referred to a service.
Nothing here is asked twice. Your strengths, your volition, the problems and the statements you ranked are the input to this section — the roles are worked out from them, not from a database of job titles.
Occupational therapy never looks at a person alone. The same person thrives in one setting and struggles in another, and the difference is rarely effort. These questions map the conditions you do your best work in.
From the Person–Environment–Occupation model (Law, Cooper, Strong, Stewart, Rigby & Letts, 1996).
Pick as many as fit. Nothing here is exclusive.
How you want your life apportioned, and how you work when you are in it.
The fourth circle in the framework, asked directly rather than assumed. There is more than one honourable way to be paid for the same contribution, and the way you want to be paid changes which roles make sense — someone building their own practice needs a different path from someone who wants a salary and a team.
With your environment, how you want to be paid and your top three statements together, we can name the roles that would put you in all three.
Around 70% of occupations have not existed before. The second list on each statement is not a gap in the answer — it is where most of the work is going. Some of what you could do does not have a name yet because nobody has done it.
Before we plan anything, we need an honest picture of where you are standing right now. Nothing here is a test, and there is no right answer to give.
Career capital is what you already hold that a change can be built on. Rate how much of each you feel you have right now — your own read, not anyone else's assessment.
One sentence is plenty. Optional.
The Stages of Change model describes five places people move between when they change something. It is not a ladder — as the map below shows.
From the transtheoretical model (Prochaska & DiClemente).
Which one fits you today?
This is not static, and it is not a straight line. People move forward, slip back, and sit in one stage for a long while — and you can be at different stages for different parts of your life at the same time. Going backwards is not failure; it is information. What matters is recognising where you actually are, because that is what decides which step makes sense next.
Task analysis means taking something large and breaking it into steps small enough to actually begin. Each step is written as a SMART goal — specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound — so you can tell whether you have done it.
A step that outruns your current skill produces anxiety, and you avoid it. A step well below your skill produces boredom, and you drop it. The useful zone runs between the two — stretched, not swamped. Occupational therapy calls this the just-right challenge, and it is what these goals are sized against.
A long-standing idea in occupational therapy; closely related to Csikszentmihalyi's work on flow.
Sizing a step well does more than make it possible. It gives you a reasonable expectation of succeeding, and the opportunity to actually experience success and satisfaction — and that experience is what sustains your passion and keeps you doing the work.
A plan is built for one statement and the roles you chose under it — that is what keeps the steps in one direction instead of pulling three ways at once. The others are not lost. Come back and plan for one of those whenever you want to.
There is more than one honest way to get to the same place, and they are not better and worse — they ask different things of you and they give you different things back. Which one fits depends on things only you know. Pick the one that sounds like you, and the steps are built for that way of doing it.
You can change your mind at any time, and nothing you have written is affected.
Meaningful and purposeful productivity takes trialling, reviewing and evaluating along the journey. We encourage you to reinforce your mindset and act on the goal plan that guides your exploring — then come back along the way to modify it, review it, and mark off what you have accomplished. From there we set new goals with you through an OT lens, sized just-right so your success and satisfaction keep building.
Your plan comes in two horizons, and it needs both.
These are graded steps: sized against the capitals you rated so that you can be reasonably sure of finishing them. That is not timidity. In occupational therapy, grading a task down is how you make success likely, and the experience of succeeding is what sustains the doing. A step you abandon teaches you that you cannot; a step you finish teaches you that you can, and buys the confidence the next one needs.
The change itself: the role, the setting, the qualification, the practice, the first time somebody pays you. These are not bigger versions of the short-term steps. They are what the short-term steps are for, and they are what makes the plan worth having.
A plan of only small steps feels productive and arrives nowhere. A plan of only large ones has no first move. What connects them is grading — each short step is chosen because it makes a longer one possible, which is why the order matters more than the length of the list.
Both horizons are also sized against the stage of change you placed yourself in. Earlier stages get goals about looking, asking and finding out; later ones get goals that commit you to something. If a goal feels wrong-sized, say so in its review — the next round is graded from what you write there.
Grading and the just-right challenge are core occupational therapy practice; the stages are from the transtheoretical model (Prochaska & DiClemente).
Edit any of these into your own words, order them the way you would actually do them, and set the date you are aiming for.
What S1, S2 and S3 mean. Each goal says which of your service statements it serves. S1 is your first service statement, S2 the second, S3 the third — in the order you ranked them. So “S1” in a goal means “this step is working towards your first statement”.
Come back to this page as you go. Each goal carries a review — mark how far you have got, say how well it went and how you feel about it, and keep a note of what helped and what got in the way. The date on a goal is the day to sit down with it, not a deadline to miss.
What the path happens to build. Your goals are a sequence towards your statement — this is only a tally of the capital each step develops along the way, so an uneven spread is normal.
Every round you have set, newest first — what you accomplished, what you got part way through, and what is still waiting, with how you rated each one and what you wrote at the time. However a round went, you set it and you came back, and that is the part that compounds.
The steps still waiting belong here just as much as the ones wearing a seal. A step that has not happened yet is telling you something useful — almost always that it was sized or timed wrong for the season you were in, rather than anything about you. It is read back into your next round, so you are not handed the same goal again in different words.
Nothing here yet. Your current goals move to this page when you set your next round — all of them, however they went — so that every time you come back you can see how far you have already come.
Shown here: the top-ranked service statement of people who chose to share it — nothing else. No names, no areas of interest, no answers, and nothing at all from anyone who left the box unticked.