The thinking behind From Here.
From Here grew out of my background in occupational therapy and years of thinking about how motherhood changes our relationship to work. This page explains how the assessment works and where that thinking comes from.
Your whole life, as it is right now
Occupational therapy is built on the idea that what we do with our time shapes who we are. An occupation is anything that occupies your time, paid work and parenting and rest included, and OT is about helping people engage in what they want or need to do, with the people and in the places that matter to them.
One of the OT ideas I love most is that you feel most like yourself when doing, being and belonging line up, and becoming a mother touches all three at once. The question about work tends to show up somewhere in the middle of that, tangled up with who you are now, and while some of what's in the way is personal, plenty of it comes from how workplaces, childcare and leave are set up for mothers in the first place.
The assessment starts there, with the season you're in and what you're carrying alongside your work.
Where it started
Back in 2010, years before I had children of my own, my capstone project for my master's in occupational therapy looked at how pregnancy magazines portrayed the transition to motherhood. What we found was that the magazines were very good at making mothers feel like they were falling short, and then selling them the expert advice to fix it, and then the next issue did it all again.
I think about that a lot more now that I'm the one selling something to mothers (the irony is not lost on me). It's a big part of why From Here is built the way it is. The report is something you buy once and keep, with no program to sign up for afterwards. The assessment draws out what you already know about your own life, and the report makes sense of it and lays it out so you can see your situation clearly, with a named pathway and a plan for what to do next.
What the assessment looks at
The assessment takes about fifteen to twenty minutes. After a few questions about where you are right now, it moves through your working life in a deliberate order. It starts with what matters to you most and what you're good at, and then turns to your energy and your finances, so you come to those questions having already spent some time with your strengths.
There's room along the way to say things in your own words, and the report uses them.
You don't need to know your pathway going in. Finding it is the assessment's job.
The five pathways
Every report names one of five pathways. None of them is braver or better than the others, and you might move through more than one over the years, so your pathway is a read on where you are right now. Change tends to go best in small steps that build on each other, which is why none of the five asks you to blow up your life (even the one with exit in the name).
Stay & Redesign
The role stays, and the shape of it changes, things like your hours, your tasks, your boundaries or who you work alongside.
Parallel Build
You keep your income and start building the next thing beside it, testing it out before you lean your full weight on it.
Skill Stack Shift
What you've already built up comes with you into a setting where it fits better.
Strategic Exit
A planned move out, with a clear sense of where you're headed and enough runway to get there.
Stabilize First
For when you're running so low that any big decision would be made from exhaustion. Recovery is the focus here, and it counts as real progress.
How your report is made
I designed the questions, the scoring and the way the report is put together, and I wrote the detailed instructions that shape how every section reads, including keeping it accurate to what you said without reaching past it. Your report is then written with AI (Claude, made by Anthropic), working from your answers and those instructions.
Using AI is what keeps a report this specific to you at $39. Your answers aren't used to train AI models, and the full details are in the Privacy Policy. Like the rest of From Here, the report isn't counselling or professional advice.
If you're curious about the reading behind all this, I've gathered the ideas that shaped From Here on a page of their own (it's a long list).
Where to start
If you've read this far, there's probably a question about work that keeps coming back for you (that tends to be how it goes). The assessment takes about fifteen to twenty minutes, and your report arrives within two business days. It's $39 CAD.
Not quite ready? The free Find Your Pathway quiz is a good place to begin, and if you'd like occasional reflections on motherhood and work in your inbox, you can join the newsletter too.
Alyson