Ready to stand out? A 7-step plan to write your brand story

Congratulations, you launched your new service business! Your website is up and running, you printed your business cards, and you’re attending your weekly networking meetings. You’re in business. So why does finding new clients feel like running through knee-deep mud? Most likely it’s because your primary offering isn't as clear as you think. Until your brand story is written and your key messages defined, you’re still in hiding.

This business clearly targets moms

Here’s the good news. Take the time now to present your offering in clear, concise terms and it will simplify every other new business task. When you’re clear:

• Your presentations let people know exactly what you do and why you do it. 
• Your forms present potential clients with clear options and well-defined costs.
• Your marketing efforts result in new contacts who want what you offer. 

Writing a brand story and defining key messages must be the first action you take to improve your visibility. I’m not a writer, you say. Or, I know my message, I don’t need to write it out. Here’s the thing. Even good writers, really good writers like Anne Lamott, end up writing lousy first drafts that bounce all around what they want to say before they can drain the sludge and find the gems. If your brand story isn’t down on paper, and you haven’t prioritized a written list of key messages, you won’t be able to reinforce those messages in your presentations, web copy, Facebook posts, blog entries and tweets. To craft these messages, follow the steps outlined below.

First, to get a grip on your brand story, make a list—a lengthy list—of what you do and the primary benefits your clients receive from working with you. You want at least 30–40 items on this list. Insert long pause here while you go write your list.

Second, scan your list and circle all the items that jump out as part of your primary offering. Sometimes you’ll find you’ve said the same thing in different ways. At other times, your statements may still seem disconnected. Don’t worry. Right now you’re simply identifying the most important items on your list.  For example, a professional organizer might have listed items such as:

•  I help people get their paperwork in order.
• My clients benefit from my technical expertise.
•  I learn new computer programs quickly and easily.
• I help my clients convert to a paperless office.

Third, experiment with umbrella statements that collapse your selected statements into a single encompassing message. In the above example, such an umbrella statement might be:

• I provide the technical expertise to walk clients through setting up and managing a primarily paperless office.

Fourth, once you’ve plucked your primary offering from obscurity, you can select another three or four items from your list that support this primary offering. A good way to ensure that these services truly do support your primary offering is to start each sentence with:

• In order to _______, I also _______.

In the case of our professional organizer, she might say: “In order to help clients set up and manage primarily paperless offices, I also provide hands-on training in new computer systems.”

Fifth, now that you have greater clarity as to what it is that you do, describe the person who would most benefit from your service. Our professional organizer might describe her ideal client as someone who “desires to increase personal productivity through implementing technology and systems that help her work smarter.”

Sixth, begin writing your brand story by speaking directly to your ideal client. You might say, “you value personal productivity and are ready to let go of organizing systems that no longer work.” You then tell that ideal client what it is about your business that will help her solve her problems. “You want someone to help you select and implement the technology and systems that can support your productivity and professional growth.” Continue writing to your ideal client, telling her how each of your support activities will ultimately help her reach her primary goal.

Lastly, identify both a rational benefit and an emotional benefit for choosing your business. This statement is written from the client's point of view. For our professional organizer, the rational benefit might be:

•  ____’s expertise will help me select the most robust productivity systems, and will provide the hands-on training I need to implement those systems successfully.

The emotional benefit for the same business might be:

• I feel relieved and able to implement new systems, since I know I will get the support I need to see this transition through.

If, once you start drafting your brand story, you decide you want additional support in moving through all seven steps, contact me at New Ink. I’ve written hundreds of brand stories and will help you craft yours in a way that lets you stand out, no matter how crowded your marketplace. Contact Sharon at info@newinkcopy.com. 

Travel memories

A log rests precariously on the edge of a rocky ledge. I took this photo while traveling through British Colombia last week. The area is part of Francis Point Provincial Park, wilds that have only been open to the public for a few years. They feel raw, undisturbed by humans, elemental.

How memory worksBut what happened in my brain when I saw the log, and what in addition had to happen for me to remember it? The simple answer is a network of neurons fired and a memory was born. But memories are not available for retrieval like items left in a locker at the train depot. Retrieving the memory requires the repeat firing of the same network of neurons. These neurons are spread all over the cortex with no single commander telling them when to fire. We now know that “neurons that fire together, wire together,” but how do we get a mass of neurons to fire together again without repeat exposure to what made them fire in the first place? It’s not like we can carry around a set of flashcards, like foreign language students, drilling our brains to recall our favorite memories. Viewing a photo can help evoke a memory or taking the time to write about something in a journal or blog, or yes, even tweet about it. These all help. But how does the brain remember one-time events without such memory devices?

Memory is making connections
Memory is making connections, linking one thing to another. Much of this linkage is subconscious and we preserve memories of events that can be activated by encountering something as simple as a smell. Re-encountering a smell that was part of an original sensory experience can cause the entire network of neurons involved in the memory to fire. Thus when I smell old wallpaper, I often recall sleeping in my Grandma’s house the week before she died in a bedroom with rose wallpaper and a white crocheted coverlet.

The brain's ability to form and retain connections makes comprehension possible. To a mind that cannot make connections (as studies on epilepsy and amnesia patients have shown) each instant is an isolated event without continuity, each thought fleeting and unrelated, each precept without relevance, each person a stranger, every event unexpected. No connections between the past, present and future would be like living a life with total amnesia.

Connecting an event to our life story makes it memorableSo memories are strings of neurons that fire together. But what’s interesting to me is the role our life stories play in what we remember and what we forget? Encounters become memorable when we link them to something known. We use phrases like “I put two and two together,” or “Fill in the dots” to describe how one thing gets linked to another in our minds. A life story is a valuable tool for organizing and connecting otherwise random events. You could think of your life story as a substrate upon which new memories are built. This substrate contains themes and characters, even expected plot twists and endings. When we connect a current event to a known theme or a known character, the new event is remembered. But there’s a drawback to this helpful memory aid. We often ignore the ways in which the new events or the new people are unique, different from what we’ve previously encountered.

Every new event has novel elements
A 2009 experiment by psychologist Daniel L. Schacter of Harvard showed that neuronal firing in the brain is different every single time a subject experiences an event, even when the circumstances are quite similar. Our brains have evolved to not only link things together through an ongoing narrative, but also to see what’s different this time around. To me that means, no matter how important our life stories are, they are not us. We can continue to see through them, around them. We can draw apart the veil they cast over our current experience and direct our attention to what’s different. To me, this is the true power of "living in the now."

Attention allows us to shape our life stories
The ability to direct our attention allows us to continue to shape our life stories throughout our lives. We are not stuck with some scratched record that keeps playing the same line of a song over and over. We can use our life stories to make sense of new events while also using our attention to expand our stories through those events. The story provides general categories (themes) and our ongoing experiences provide the ability move beyond the general and perceive differences. These perceived differences can then lead to new categories (new themes). For example, a general theme that “men cannot be trusted,” can benefit from the brain's ability to discriminate differences leading to “some men cannot be trusted, but Tim can.”

Working backwards
Once we know that neurons anchor life experiences by connecting them to our life stories (with their themes and characters and expected endings), we can expand our life experience. All we need to do is to look for what's different. If you have a story about so-and-so being unreliable, you can ask your brain to look for at least three instances in which so-and-so was actually reliable. If you have a story about never being lucky, you can ask your brain to find at least three instances in which you were the lucky one. Soon, instead of seeing all life events as unlucky, you’ll begin to notice that there is always more going on, always more you could turn your attention to, should you choose to do so. This is the gift of attention. I, for one, choose to turn my attention towards thoughts that feel good. When I'm distressed, I look for thoughts that feel kind, thoughts that feel accepting, thoughts that feel peaceful. I can always find a better feeling thought.

How are you directing your attention?

My thanks to Anthony Greene, Associate Professor of Psychology at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for helping me shape these thoughts. Pr. Greene runs a learning and memory lab.

How our life stories impact our reality

A life story is a running narrative that impacts the present by filtering perceptions, highlighting certain sensory impressions and subordinating others. But a life story does more than influence our perception of the present. A life story also reshapes our memory of the past and our anticipation of the future.

Why we need a life story
We use this running narrative to place any single live event within the flux of an entire lifetime of events. We use it to decide what that individual event means—what it means about who we are, how we relate to others and what life holds in store for us. Without an ongoing narrative, each event would be spliced up and floating, sans context, in a meaningless sea of other bits and pieces.

Life stories come from the left hemisphere
New brain research can now show us (through fMRI scans, stroke victim research and split-brain re-search) that it is the left hemisphere of the brain that is the storyteller. The left hemisphere wants to string things together into a linear pattern, while the right hemisphere tries to observe the whole at once. In other words, our life story considers a distorted portion of our external reality, and is not built around some true representation of “the way things are.”

The way things are
In their 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann argue that all knowledge, including the most basic, taken-for-granted common sense knowledge of everyday reality, is derived from and maintained by social interactions. This theory, later extrapolated as social constructivism, can help us understand socially what brain research shows neurologically. Objective reality is a slippery slope, and what we see, think and feel is a construction of pieces rather than a given whole.

We have to believe it to see it
We have all heard the expression, “I’ll have to see it to believe it.” In large measure, the opposite is true. We have to believe something is possible before we can see its manifestation in the world around us. As Paul Simon said, “A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.” This is a literal description of how our eyes see. Our eyes take in sensory impressions, but from perceiving to seeing, the information our eyes relay is translated into “mental inventions.” The neurons in our brains respond to these mental inventions, and only after this translation has occurred does the image become conscious. Our underlying beliefs about what we’re seeing, based upon our interpretations of past experience, factor into the mental invention stage of seeing before we are even conscious that we are seeing anything at all. Basically, we don’t get a conscious say in what we decide to see. Vision is automatic, yes, but it’s also constructed—each and every glimpse.

Do you see the smiley face in the photo of the moon and stars or in the plant photo at the beginning of this post? Your ability to form mental categories is what allows you to think of it as a smiley face. In the same way you see a smiley face when there is no face at all, you also see representations of bits of your life story everywhere you go and in every interaction you have.

The life story’s greatest gift
A life story bestows a hugely important gift on each of us. It gives us a sense of self. We use our running narratives to perceive things as happening to a single consciousness. No story line, no sense of self. But stories of all kinds are by nature limiting. By placing a frame around our perceptions, they keep some in and others out. That’s why careful examination of the tone, themes, and buried beliefs in our life stories has rare value. I teach a life stories class for the University of Utah’s Lifelong Learning program that steps participants through this discovery process and would like to open up a similar online exploration. If you are interested in meeting with an group to explore your life story, please feel free to contact me at Sharon@newinkcopy.com.

The concept comes first

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Concepting is the most demanding part of my job. A concept is not a design, not a visual, and not text. It's an idea that brings all those elements together with seemingly effortless grace. Clients and readers must get it in a glance. It can require no thought, but must be clever enough to catch attention. Like I said, it's the most demanding part of my job.

Target moms was the concept for the XIGO product launch. 
The day begins. The creative director makes a simple statement. "We need a concept for this piece." What he means is, go knock your brains out and come up with no less than 40 original, creative ideas for how to communicate the story of this brand.. product... offering, etc. He's been doing this a long time. He knows it's not going to be the 7th idea, or even the 27th that moves forward. It's usually somewhere around 38 or 39 that I finally get an idea with enough juice to carry a brand--or a brochure--or an ad.

The concept seems obvious after the fact. One of the best tests of a good concept is that, once you come up with it, it seems so obvious. Of course this is the way to convey this message. Of course this is our brand story. How could it be anything else? It speaks to the heart of what the client is trying to convey. And when you're lucky enough to hit the bulls eye, the client may even think they came up with it, it's that "right on."

The concept is not a training manual. Concepts are simple. They require no explanation beyond a headline, or at most, a subhead. Their purpose is not to educate the reader on the ins and outs of a business. No one should need to read the body copy to understand a concept, or have the clever meaning behind the concept explained to them. As a former university teacher, I often forget about this rule. I want to explain. I want to lay it out for my reader why this concept is so cool, if you just think about it this way. To guard against this "teacher tendency," I make myself scan my list of concepts on the printed page and ask, "Would they get it in a glance?" If not, it hits the trash.

The concept cannot wander off. Often I'll come up with a killer concept. It really gets the message across. Then I realize, yes, it's getting the message across, but it's not the right message. Sigh. I've been carried deeper into the forest, following creative breadcrumbs only to realize I've lost the original message. I had it somewhere back at the beginning, but I went astray. There's nothing to do but tuck your igeniuous, irrelevant message away for future use and return to the beginning of the path.

When a concept works, your reader remembers it. They think about it while jogging the next day. They have a little chuckle. Their brain automatically pulls up the image you linked with the copy and registers a positive emotion. You've done it. You've married a brand to an emotional response. You've raised recognition. You've engendered loyalty. You've sparked interest to know more. Congratulations, you can now call yourself a "concepter."

6 million moments

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A "psychological moment" in your life lasts about three seconds. That means you'll experience (excluding sleep) about 6 million moments in a month; 20,000 in a day. How many of these will you remember? Very few. The rest will simply disappear, wisps of clouds that slowly give way to the mental equivalent of a blue sky.

The tyranny of the remembering self
The only way we get to "keep" any moment of our lives is to store it in memory. It is our "remembering self" that determines what we remember and how we remember it. So what criteria does your remembering self use to determine what to keep and what to forget? It uses your life story. According to Daniel Kahnemann (Nobel laureate and psychologist), our ongoing life narrative sits in tyranny over our experiencing self, filtering and shaping our experience to fit our story's form. If I tell myself a story that I must defend myself against rejection from others, I filter my encounters against this story line, remembering what fits and forgetting what doesn't. If I tell myself a story that I am quite happy in my life and have everything I need, I also filter accordingly.

One sensational minute
For the next minute, widen your awareness to bring to consciousness as many of the sensations flooding through your body to your brain as you can. What can you see? What do you hear? What do you feel on your feet or between your fingers or under your skin? Is there a taste in your mouth? Although it can be exhilarating for the short term, opening to the rush of sensations for longer periods of time overwhelms consciousness. To guard against this overhwhelm, our brains filter our sensations. In other words, our stories keep us sane. It's interesting to note, however, that this filtering occurs before we are conscious of it. Most of what we experience remains forever lost to our conscious minds. In fact, about 98% of what you experience, you won't remember.

The good and the bad news
What are you choosing to remember? Are you focusing on finding a way to share yourself with the world? Are you focusing on how everyone you meet sooner or later dissapoints you? Are you focusing on how anchored and grounded you feel in nature? The good news is that whatever you focus on is what you'll remember and these memories will reinforce your "story filter" for future encounters. That's also the bad news.

Can you change your story?
You can change any story line that's causing you distress. How? Pretend that the opposite belief is true. Maybe that means "pretending" that people are trustworthy, that things do go your way, or that your life is simple and peaceful. And, here's the fun part. Spend a day living "as if" this belief were true for you. Consciously look for proof that this new thought is true. Go hunting for new experiences that contradict your old story line. You may find, as promised by Thich Nhat Hanh, that "we have more possibilities available in each moment than we realize."

The need to get away

Story archetypes:
1. Overcoming the monster (see April 26 post)
2. Rags to Riches (see April 30 post)
3. The Quest (see May post)
4. Voyage and Return (this post)
5. Comedy
6. Tragedy
7. Rebirth

The need to get away
In the best-selling book Eat, Pray, Love, a woman travels to Italy, India, and then to Indonesia, three continents removed from her New York City residence. She gets there by falling down a modern rabbit hole—a nasty divorce. Away from her ex-husband and their suburban home, this woman learns Italian, eats a lot of pasta, sits for months in an ashram, studies with a Balinese healer, and takes on a passionate lover. Eventually, she comes back home. But what has really happened during this, or any other, Voyage and Return tale? As readers, we want to know the point of the whole thing? What did she learn? How did her life change as a result?

Not all Voyage and Return tales satisfy our need for a lesson and a life change. Some tales, such as Gulliver’s Travels or Peter Rabbit, stay focused on describing a strange world with strange creatures. The main character is often just an observer, watching how the odd people or creatures behave in this strange land. Such tales end with the main characters returning magically to their prior reality, often barely escaping a Mr. McGregor or the Lilliputians or some other twisted villain. The story seems limited to the thrill of the final escape coupled with the relief of being back home.

But the heart of any Voyage and Return tale is to return home and know the place for the first time. By venturing into the foreign, the odd, the unusual, we seek perspective. A Voyage and Return moment in your life can be as simple as going to see a movie where strange things happen and the characters escape versions of doom in thrilling ways (I can’t imagine anything stranger than the Las Vegas portrayed in the new movie, The Hangover). It can be reading through someone’s Facebook page or escaping for a couple of days into (one of my favorites) a Candace Bushnell novel. It’s like looking away from the page, so that when you return your glance to your own life, you see a little more of what goes on in your own daily reality.

These tricks of perception are necessary because of how the human brain takes short-cuts. As soon as we encounter an experience similar to something we’ve already encountered, the brain fires up a select group of neurons and starts shaping our expectations. Take the gorilla movie for example (google Davies Gorilla Movie to watch it yourself).

In graduate school, I watched a video of two groups of people, half in white shirts, half in black shirts, passing a basketball back and forth. Those of us watching the video were told to count how many times the people in white shirts passed the basketball. A bounce pass counted as a pass, but just a bounce did not. The whole class watched. Some of us counted 16 passes, others were sure there were 17 passes, but then the instructor asked how many of us had seen the gorilla. The gorilla? I obviously hadn’t seen it. So we watched the video again, and this time, because my attention wasn’t focused so intently on counting basketball passes, I saw a man in a gorilla suit walk out into the middle of the people passing the basketball, beat on his chest a few times, and walk off in the opposite direction. There was a gorilla in that video, yet had someone told me about the gorilla before I watched it a second time, I wouldn’t have believed it.

Psychologists call this “inattentional blindness.” We don’t see what we’re not looking for. The Voyage and Return tale offers one way to restore sight. We need to find ways to head down a rabbit hole or sneak into Mr. McGregor’s garden and have what we thought was true turned upside down for awhile. Then, hopefully, when we return, it’s with a broader, more balanced perspective.

Finding and fulfilling your calling (The Quest)

Story archetypes:
1. Overcoming the monster (see April 26 post)
2. Rags to Riches (see April 30 post)
3. The Quest (this post)
4. Voyage and Return
5. Comedy
6. Tragedy
7. Rebirth

I heard the door click shut behind me. I was outside, but Austin was locked inside the neurological institute. I could look through the window in the door and see him, five years old and fiercely defiant, refusing to look at me, furious that I had admitted him into this place. At the time, I’d felt alternatives were few. Since he’d run out into the street and been hit by a motorcycle a year prior, Austin’s head injuries had led to more and more violent rages. He was no more than 45 inches tall, yet I was terrified of him. A week ago he had broken a family picture and tried to stab his older brother, Ryan, with a shard of glass. The week before that he had started a dangerous house fire from the gas stove. Yet I couldn’t imagine a reality that did not include this child, and all I could think of as I watched him through the door window was how to get him back home.

When this moment occurred in my life over 12 years ago, I didn’t think I was being called on a quest (after all, I was a mom, not a warrior), yet looking back, I can see how the quest archetype played out for me in this arena of my life. After Austin had been institutionalized for violent behavior for a few weeks, I got to have him home, first for an evening, then for a weekend. Given his fury at being admitted, I expected him to be delighted to be home. I was wrong. During his home visits, Austin would intentionally act out. He wanted to get back to the institute. He felt safe there, something he did not feel at home.

This realization led me to an in-depth study of feng shui, the eastern art of arrangement. I wanted to know if there was anything I could do in Austin’s physical environment that would help me get my boy back home for good. My feng shui studies led to a career change. After a life-changing week with my feng shui mentor, Carol Bridges, I took Austin home from the institution for good, yet this was not the end of my journey. I realize now, this was the “tool gathering” period. I was equipping myself for what was to come, and the next decade would be filled with more strange encounters and anguished moments than Ulysses’ Odyssey.

The call
At some point in our lives, we are all called on a quest, called to take on a task that we often do not feel we will survive. The call is as individual as the person being called. My calling grew from an awareness of how much of our lives happens below the surface of our awareness. I felt called to help my clients and students understand how the unconscious aspects of their lives (including influences in their environments) impacted them, whether they realized it or not.

Of course, this is not everyone's calling. I have had friends whose callings have been to stay sober or to battle breast cancer or to deal with an idiosyncratic and demanding parent. Each of these callings has led to unique journeys through hostile territory, yet each journey follows the same archetypal sequence of events. No matter what you have been called to do or where your journey takes you, knowing this sequence can provide support.

Your magic tools
Your magic tools have been slipped to you, possibly while you were plowing your way through another ordinary day. You may have received the gift of loyal friends or a sensitivity to others’ feelings or an active imagination. You may have received an elixir of charm or a hive of cerebral activity. Your shield may be your immaculate house or your optimistic outlook. Your sword may be your piercing insight or your humor or your dogged persistence. As you consider what tools are in your tool box, remember, magic tools are many and varied, yet they will enable you to get past difficulties that would otherwise block your progress.

Your companions
The quest is not a story type focused on a single character. When you embark on a quest, you’ve got companions marching through the muck with you. In fact, a large part of the first half of a quest is to realize how your interactions with others enable you to be more fully yourself. By sharing your gifts, and by supporting others on your journey, you fulfill the human need to be a part of a community, a community that both cheers you on and desperately needs your success. Your companions will not be able to go all the way with you, but if you don’t learn how to draw on and appreciate their strengths, you won’t get very far on your individual journey. Consider how your companions provide support on your journey. What are their unique gifts? How do they allow you to more fully be yourself?

Your goal
On a quest, you’re after something of great value. Regardless of how you describe the end-goal, a quest is never for personal glory. In fact, a sure way to distinguish between a quest “calling” and personal ego satisfaction is that the ego is only concerned with the self. If you hear yourself thinking any of the following, it’s your ego speaking:

• How will this help me?
• What can I gain from this?
• What will people think of me after I accomplish this?

A quest has a different aim, although it may be expressed in many ways. The quest aims to ensure a high and lasting quality of life for an entire community. A true quest may engender the following types of questions:

• How can I help make sure this is around for the next generation?
• How can I help restore innocence, beauty, and goodness in the world?
• How can I remove this threat to a happy, fulfilling existence and renew hope in others?

Your goal may be revealed to you in greater detail as you journey. My initial goal was to get Austin home, yet as I continued on my journey and encountered others who needed support, I realized my goal was really helping others make the unconscious conscious, in order to help them achieve a higher quality of life.

The journey itself
The journey is not always fun (consider nursing a parent through decades of dementia or battling years of chronic fatigue), yet no quest tale is composed of unending drudgery. Rather, the companions alternate through periods of difficulty and respite, there are times when you're battling a monster and there are times when the sun comes out and you rest. Regardless of how your journey unfolds, the quest plot is active. On a quest, things are always happening. You’ll think you’ve got it figured out and then another obstacle will arise. Thousands of years of collective narrative provide the following advice:

• Rest when you can.
• Take comfort in your friends.
• Allow others to help you through the rough spots.
• There is no better place for you to be than right here in the thick of it; escaping to some tranquil existence will not work.
• This quest will allow you to know yourself and share yourself more fully with the world.
  

Ignoring this advice leads to certain trouble. My personal journey was almost undone by my determination to do it alone. I remember getting calls at work that Austin had run away from school, or that he had been found unconscious in the driveway after huffing gas. I remember battling fatigue, self-pity, and feelings of inadequacy as I trained feng shui students, while running a store and writing books. In each case, I was forced to learn how to accept help from others. My support systems included my acupuncturist, my qi gong instructor, therapists and male role models for Austin, a few close female friends, and the restorative beauty of dozens of local canyon trails. Identifying any of the above advice that you may be ignoring will help smooth an already difficult journey.

The final ordeal
You knew it was coming. Throughout the journey you knew you’d reach the point where your friends would have to retreat and you would face a final ordeal on your own. St. John of the Cross called this “the dark night of the soul,” Jung referred to it as the “defeat of the ego.” Whatever name you give it, it’s the darkest, scariest place you’ll ever be. It’s when you look for hope and find it gone. It’s when old ways of seeing the world have crumbled to dust and you have no replacements. It’s when you can’t imagine how things could ever possibly be right again. But, it’s also when those peculiar strengths, insights, and gifts you’ve developed along the way are exactly what you need to endure and—finally—pull out of this dark abyss.

I won’t beleaguer you with details of my dark night, but I will share how unprepared I was for how long it could last. In my case, I spent almost two years in what felt like death. Perhaps if I’d read my classics or the Bible more thoroughly, I would have realized that Odysseus still has 12 out of 24 books to go in the Odyssey when he reaches his goal destination, and that Moses and the Israelites would spend 40 years in the desert after they escape the slavery of Egypt. The final ordeal, the one the hero/heroine must face alone, can take as long as the entire rest of the journey.

And there’s another piece that’s worth sharing here. Besides being lengthy, this portion of the tale is when the hero/heroine is required, not only to show self-reliance and independence from friends, but also to realign with a more universal “source.” In Jung’s terms, this is when the ego (“self” with a lowercase “s”) realizes that it’s not the ruler after all, and that true strength is to be found in connecting and aligning the ego’s abilities with what Jung referred to as “Self” with a capital “S.”

I’ve found it matters little what people call this universal source. What really makes a difference is whether they feel their lives are aligned with it. Alignment with source is an individual matter, yet it always requires two pieces:
(1) You must know what your strengths and gifts are and have mastered their use
(2) You must connect to your source to best use those strengths and gifts

As for me, my gifts were that I was determined, that I could piece together meaningful patterns in seeming randomness, and that my immersion in nature would keep me in touch with my source. I also found that years of study and an energetic practice would be required for me to overcome my ego’s fragile self esteem and my tendency to belittle others in my own defense. As for Austin, he is finding his own way, and I’ve become a supportive companion on his quest. As for you, I’d love to hear where you’re at on your journey.

A word on anticipating the call
As difficult as the quest journey is, it can be just as difficult to not feel called. After all, being “called” provides a unifying focus to our lives. It gives us a destination, as well as the motivation and means to reach that destination. Because a sense of anticipation and “being called” is found in many story types, we will look in detail at this situation in an upcoming post titled “Anticipating the call.” Look for this post after the individual posts on the seven story types.