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Reveal your possible self.
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. Six 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 order them by which you would actually pursue.
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.
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.
Your occupational competence and confidence, then task analysis and goal setting to turn a direction into steps you can actually take.
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.
Everything so far has been free — all the questions, the problems worth your consideration, and your service statements. They are yours to keep whether or not you go on.
Task analysis and goal setting are not in Part One. Turning a direction into SMART goals, each sized to the just-right challenge, is in Part Two — and the only way to get it at launch is the bundle below.
Part One — my possible self: the roles that fit me, where I stand right now, and the environment and pay I need to do the work.
Both parts — everything in Part One, plus task analysis and SMART goal setting, so the direction becomes steps you can actually start.
Not yet — I'm not ready to take the next step.
It's okay. Come back to us when you're ready. Let us know whether this has been helpful.
What worked, what did not, what you were hoping for.
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.
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.
Kept from earlier rounds. Nothing you finished is lost when you draft a new set — and what you wrote here is what the next round is graded from.
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.
Everything you have entered and everything we have generated stays where you left it, so you can come back to it rather than start again.
Mark each goal not yet, partly there, or accomplished, say how well it went and how you feel about it, and note the wins and barriers — then we set the next round from what you wrote.
Subscribers only. See the areas of interest and service statements other people are pointed at — anonymously, and only from those who chose to share.
This is somebody else's plan, invented to show the shape — not your data and not a real person. Their statement was “You can help young people leaving out-of-home care to build the daily living routines nobody taught them…” and the role they chose was Independent Living Designer — a role that does not exist yet, which they would be creating rather than applying for. Every step below is on the path to it, in the order it has to happen.
1Find two services already doing this work and sit in on one sessionSocial capital
2Get one of them to co-sign a six-week pilot and give you a roomSocial capital
3Run the pilot and collect what changed for each participantCultural capital
4Price the programme and get that service to pay for the second roundFinancial capital
5Package it so a second service can buy it and run it without you in the roomFinancial capital
Two things to notice. Steps 1 and 2 share a capital and steps 4 and 5 share another — that is what a real path looks like, because you cannot run a group until someone gives you a room. And the plan arrives at being paid: step 3 proves the thing works, and only then do steps 4 and 5 turn it into something a service will buy.
By 30 November, run the six-week peer cooking group for eight care leavers at the partner service, deliver all six sessions, and finish with written feedback from at least six of the eight.
“Seven finished the six weeks and two now cook for their housemates. Hardest part was holding the numbers — three dropped to every second week, and I nearly folded it in week two.”
Both ratings are high, so step 4 grades up rather than repeating — the written feedback from six participants is exactly what makes a price defensible, so the next step is to ask the service to fund the second round. And because the note names attendance as what nearly sank it, step 4 builds that into what is quoted rather than leaving it to be discovered again.
You can help young people leaving out-of-home care to build the daily living routines nobody taught them with your patience and your own experience of the system.
You can help farmers in drought-exposed districts to make water decisions earlier with your habit of turning messy numbers into one clear picture.
You can help families caring for someone with dementia at home to keep the person doing what they still can with your calm and your eye for what a room is getting in the way of.
Illustrative figures and invented statements. The real page shows where people who chose to share are pointed and the statements they wrote, with no names attached — so you can see whether anyone else is working on your problem, and how differently they have framed it.
Yes — I'm ready to be the top 10%: to keep track of my goals and update my profile as I keep exploring.
This is the part that works over time. Goals are reviewed, re-graded and reset across months, not days — so the subscription is yearly, and there is no monthly plan to forget you are paying for.
Not this time — good luck with the journey. Leave us a review and tell us why.
Please note: without a subscription, what you have entered here is not kept in our database.
Whatever you tell us shapes what we build next.
Shown here: the area of interest and top-ranked service statement of people who chose to share them. No names, and nothing from anyone who left the box unticked.