If you don’t know the trees, you may be lost in the forest, but if you don’t know the stories, you may be lost in life. —Siberian elder
the masterstory experience
The Groundbreaking Approach to Activate Your Company's Greatest Possibilities
There is one direction above all others that will lead your company to Its greatest possibilities. Do you know yours?
Every person, in fact, every human system including companies and organizations, has a framework of beliefs and a resulting worldview that establish a trajectory of possibilities and potential. For a company, among all of these possible perspectives, there is one set of beliefs and worldview that can lead to the company's greatest set of possibilities. While discerning it is challenging, it is knowable.
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The MasterStory Experience is designed to both address organizational challenges of discovering a company's deepest and most inspiring purpose and is focused on helping leaders discover their calling.
An Ancient Tool for a Modern Challenge
While technology accelerates, giving you massive new levers, has your imagination leaped ahead as far? StoryWork International brings you a new model for imagining your possibilities. The tool is not new but its application is. The vehicle to unlock 'Your Possible' is story.
- Story, properly employed, can open our minds to opportunities unavailable through incremental, linear thinking.
- Story uniquely activates imagination, solves problems, builds commitment, and reveals paths that would otherwise go unnoticed.
- Those who understand how to master the human narrative will be profoundly positioned to lead, to heal, and to envision a better world that is capable of fulfilling all of our deepest aspirations.
unleash the full power of your iq and eq
Story Intelligence: A New Paradigm for Becoming Fully Human
Every age has its unique challenges. The one we’re currently living through is no exception, leading us to question the status quo on nearly every front. People today have, for the most part, lost touch with the past and are deeply confused about their future. Is it any wonder that a recent survey of Americans found that four in ten of us have not discovered a satisfying life purpose, or that a quarter of us doesn’t have a strong sense of what makes our lives meaningful?[i]
If there was ever a proverbial perfect storm, we’re living in the middle of it, all of us searching for a clearer path to a better future. Many are questioning the tried and true stories we once used to organize our thinking and lives. Some of these stories have been rendered untrue by escalating events on political and social fronts. At this crossroads, we need to find new stories that uplift us and create the opportunity to discover and pursue new meaning and purpose. We also must unearth within ourselves new capabilities to manage and direct a complicated world that feels most of the time like it’s spinning out of control. What we need is a new paradigm for being fully human.
To create this new paradigm, we have turned to the most powerful force we know of in our universe—story. Story determines nearly everything we consciously perceive, feel, and do. What you’re doing now, what you’ll do next, and what you’ll do tomorrow. What you believe in and how you feel about your prospects. Whom you’re in a relationship with and how you relate to and interact with others. Where you work, why you’re there, and whether you like or dislike your situation. What you think happens when you die. Perhaps most importantly, why you believe you are here on this planet. In this way, story weaves itself into every facet of our being.
To change our paradigm, we must re-author and reshape the contours of our storied lives and world. To better understand what that means, consider this sentiment from Buckminster Fuller: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing reality obsolete.”[ii]We suggest a variation on Fuller’s words as the central premise of our book: “You never change things by fighting or clinging to your existing story.To change the trajectory of your possibilities, construct a new version that makes your existing story obsolete.” The capacity to do this is what we call Story Intelligence, or SQ for short. It’s an entirely new way of thinking about what it means to be a human being, to be self-aware, and to have agency in the world. If stories are this powerful, doesn’t it make sense that we understand their mysterious power and learn how to author the best possible story we’re creating for ourselves?
[i] Emily Esfahani Smith, The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life That Matters (Crown, 2017).
[ii] Steven Sieden, A Fuller View: Buckminster Fuller´s Vision of Hope and Abundance for All (Divine Arts Media, 2011).
We have identified 7 Powers of Story:
1. To Transport
2. To Communicate
3. To Enable Learning
4. To Create Meaning
5. To Transform
6. To Unite
7. To Envision Possibilities
Developing these 7 Powers, or what we call your SQ, you’ll learn to communicate with clarity and force to better engage others with your ideas and vision for the future. Developing your Story Intelligence will also fill your life with greater meaning and relevance, strengthening your capacity to fulfill your highest aspirations. Through enhancing their SQ, parents and educators will cultivate a depth of learning and discovery that will improve everything they do to nurture the lives of children. And you’ll unearth the skills to transform difficulties, challenges, and wounds into enlivening possibilities. Most importantly, you’ll find in these pages story-based tools to assist you in bringing together people divided by conflict and ideological differences.
Finally, we need today more than ever to gather around ritual fires to transcend the old metanarratives and create new stories that are inclusive, just, aspirational, and inspirational. Our world requires now, more than ever, a potent medicine to re-enchant our lives. We must restore and re-story ourselves, consciously building story into our everyday living. By extinguishing the fires of technology, at least temporarily, we can begin again to hear ourselves and the stories the earth is quietly whispering into our ears. Most significantly, we need to start listening more deeply to each other’s stories. Hopefully, the concept of Story Intelligence will help the world stoke a new kind of fire, assisting all of us to develop a collective Story Intelligence to illuminate and build a more durable source of meaning and personal fulfillment.
Who would have thought understanding and consciously deploying something as simple as a story could accomplish all of that!
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You can learn to master your ability to become the author of your story. Learn about our groundbreaking program that can profoundly enhance this capability.
