The ideas that shaped From Here.

Motherhood and identity

• Matrescence, the identity shift of becoming a mother. Named by anthropologist Dana Raphael, and brought back into focus by Aurélie Athan and Alexandra Sacks

• Zoe Blaskey and Motherkind, which gave me language for my own matrescence and opened the door to a lot of what's on this list

• Rick Hanson, on maternal depletion and why self-compassion comes before clear decisions

• Sophie Brock's motherhood studies, including her work on the perfect mother myth, which places mothers' experiences inside the bigger systems around them

Motivation, values and meaning

• Meaning, Viktor Frankl's work on how a sense of purpose carries us through the hardest stretches of life

• Self-determination theory, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan's research on what people need to feel motivated

• Acceptance and commitment therapy, Steven Hayes's work on acting from your values

• Dialectics, from Marsha Linehan's dialectical behaviour therapy, the idea that two things can be true at once

• Brené Brown's research on values, courage and belonging

• Martha Beck, on integrity and living in line with what you know to be true

• The zone of genius, from Gay Hendricks's The Big Leap

• Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's research on the work that absorbs us completely

• Ikigai, the Japanese idea of having a reason for being, which career writing often draws as the overlap of what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for

• Carl Rogers's person-centred psychology, the belief that people grow best when they feel understood

Burnout, rest and self-compassion

• Burnout, from Christina Maslach's research on burnout at work, and Loes Meeussen and Colette Van Laar's research linking pressure to be a perfect mother with burnout and with mothers' career ambitions

• Nervous system regulation, the wider research on how stress lives in the body and how we build the capacity to stay steady enough to choose, even when life is stirred up. This includes Emily and Amelia Nagoski's work on completing the stress cycle, Dan Siegel's window of tolerance, Peter Levine's work on how the body holds and releases overwhelming stress, and Stephen Porges's polyvagal theory, which I hold loosely since parts of it are still being actively debated by researchers

• What makes something stressful, Sonia Lupien's NUTS framework from the Centre for Studies on Human Stress: novelty, unpredictability, threat to the ego and a low sense of control (which, honestly, describes becoming a mother pretty well)

• Self-compassion, Kristin Neff's work

• Wintering, Katherine May's idea that rest and retreat are part of the cycle

• Megan Anna Neff, on neurodivergent burnout and the hidden cost of masking

Relationships, the body and the senses

• Internal Family Systems, Richard Schwartz's idea that we each hold different parts, often pulling in different directions, each one trying to keep us safe

• Sensorimotor psychotherapy, Pat Ogden's work on how the body carries what the mind hasn't yet made sense of

• Attachment, Gordon Neufeld's developmental approach, including Hold On to Your Kids with Gabor Maté, on how much we all depend on safe, close relationships to grow

• Kim Barthel, an occupational therapist whose teaching brings together trauma, attachment and sensory processing

• Sensory processing, Winnie Dunn's work on the everyday sensory patterns we all have, and Kelly Mahler's work on interoception, how we notice what's happening inside our own bodies

Change and career

• Hope-Action Theory, a career development model from Spencer Niles, Norman Amundson and Roberta Neault

• Growth mindset, Carol Dweck's research on how we see our own ability to change

• Dan Gilbert's research on how much we underestimate our own future change

• Squiggly careers, Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis's idea that most working lives don't run in a straight line

• Tiny experiments, Anne-Laure Le Cunff's approach to trying things out in small steps

Occupational therapy

• The Kawa model, Michael Iwama's occupational therapy model, which pictures a life as a river, with rocks, driftwood and riverbanks shaping how it flows

• The Burn In model, from occupational therapists Rhiannon Crispe and Michelle Luken, on how you feel most like yourself when your doing, being and belonging line up

• The Canadian Model of Occupational Performance and Engagement (CMOP-E), which sees a person, what she does and the world around her as one connected picture, with spirituality at the centre