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 others', and giving you a practical, "Storyteller's lens" for moving through the world more consciously.

Part One: 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, Part 1 is about reclaiming that 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.

Part Two: Relational

Doing your own narrative work creates the conditions for 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.

Part Three: The Living Practice

This is where it gets fun, and a little hard to explain.

Grounded in Angus Fletcher's work on Storythinking and narrative theory, the Living Practice is a storyteller's orientation — a lens for moving through the world that makes it richer. How you listen. Whether you stay curious or jump to conclusions. Whether you let people surprise you or file them into categories you've already decided on.

Everyone is already doing this. The question is how consciously — and what becomes possible when you do it more intentionally.