The Framework

Essential Storytelling has three parts. They work together, and you can enter anywhere — but at the core, they're doing three distinct things: helping you work with your own story, helping you work ethically with the stories of others, and developing a storyteller's orientation toward the world.

Personal

Most of us are carrying stories we didn't fully author — narratives shaped by circumstance, by what others decided about us, by experiences we never had the language or self-compassion to fully make sense of.

Grounded in Jonathan Adler's research on narrative identity, this work is about reclaiming your authorship through re-narration: finding different angles on your story, integrating what you've kept separate, and exercising your authority to decide what your story actually means.

Relational

Doing your own narrative work develops something equally important: the capacity to genuinely witness others. This is the ethics and craft of how we work with and tell other people's stories.

It means seeing people with the same complexity you'd insist on for yourself — refusing to reduce them to the most useful or dramatic angle of their experience. Working with people rather than on them. Staying accountable to the person, not just the story you came to tell. It's not a box you check before the interview. It's the interview, and everything before and after it.

Communal — aka "The Living Practice"

The Living Practice means maintaining the storyteller's orientation. It's about moving through life with a lens that makes the world richer and more coherent. It's a set of skills you practice: staying curious longer than is comfortable, resisting the urge to file people into categories, noticing the narrative threads that connect us.

Everyone already has this capacity. The real question isn't whether you're a storyteller (you are) — it's whether you're putting these skills into practice. Imagine what your family, your team, your corner of the world would sound like if everyone in it got to be a full person in the stories we tell.