Five Metaphors, One Story: What Happened When a Communications Strategist Built Her Own Signature Story

Skye Christensen sent me her first draft and wrote, “I’m struggling with the Active section. It needs to be honed around one metaphor and I have like five.”

Five metaphors. One story. That’s the exact moment a blueprint becomes the only thing that moves you forward.

A Signature Story blueprint is the structural container that holds your story together across every stage, page, and platform that matters. It’s not a script. It’s not a branding exercise. It’s the architecture underneath your story that decides what stays, what goes, and what makes people stop and listen. Most leaders skip straight to rehearsing or polishing. The blueprint is the step they never knew they were missing.

When Skye says “the Active section,” she’s talking about one of five letters in the B.R.A.V.E. Framework™: Bold, Resilient, Active, Vibrant, Expressive. Each letter builds a different layer of your Signature Story. Active is where the metaphor lives, and it’s where Skye got stuck.

Here’s how we got there.

The Moment She Said the Bold, True Thing Out Loud

Skye and I sat down over Zoom for a Fully Yourself on Any Stage session, one of the guided exercises I use to turn raw material into a Signature Story. Within the first few minutes, she said the bold, true thing, out loud.

“Most of my clients are focused on the wrong things.” She said it fast, like it was obvious. Then she kept going: “They’re drowning in the details.”

Skye is a communications strategist who has spent her career helping organizations develop engaging brands and mission-driven narratives. She’s also someone with undiagnosed dyslexia who spent decades doing what she called performing “neuro-normalness.” She described a visceral memory of trying to keep up with someone in a Google Doc, the exhaustion of looking like she could do it the way everyone else did.

Then she said her dyslexia is “a little bit of a superpower.”

I pushed back. “It’s not a little bit of a superpower. It IS a superpower.” Her brain cuts through the noise that everyone else gets lost in. She sees what others don’t. That’s why her clients’ communications get better.

But there was a cost. As a comms professional, the expectation was to perform excellence at every turn. Skye called that excellence “a prison.” She’d been boxed in by the very standard she’d been hired to meet.

Halfway through our session, I noticed she was talking faster, leaning forward, talking with her hands more. That’s the body telling the truth before the mind catches up. And the truth was that Skye had all the raw material for her Signature Story. She’d excavated it. She’d diagnosed where it was breaking down. What she didn’t have yet was the container.

Five Metaphors, One Story

After our session, Skye went home and drafted her Signature Story using the Fully Yourself on Any Stage worksheet. She came back with a draft that had too much of everything. Five metaphors competing for the same space. A dance metaphor (she’s a ballet-turned-contemporary dancer). An ecosystem metaphor. A construction metaphor. All of them pointing at something real. But none held her multitudes.

I read her draft and proposed the dance metaphor. I could see the image: a ballerina in an arabesque inside a glass cage. The soloist trapped by the very performance that made her excellent. It felt perfect to me.

Skye read it and pushed back. “Although I love the physical and tangible elements of the dance metaphor, I feel like it pulls me out of the work I’m doing. Dance feels like something else for me personally.”

She was right.

And that exchange was proof the blueprint was working.

What Happens When You Push Back on the Coach

A blueprint isn’t a first draft. It’s not the coach handing you a metaphor and you nodding along. It’s the structural container that decides what stays and what goes. You try a metaphor on. You feel it in your body. You know when it holds and when it doesn’t.

Skye chose the garden metaphor: an ecosystem, where soil, water, and sun have the greatest impact and everything else follows. It illustrates her superpower, which is pulling clients out of the minutiae to focus on the elements that make an impact. She wrote the “metaphor made that clearer and truer.”

Choosing the right metaphor isn’t abstract. Stanford researchers found that swapping one metaphor — describing crime as a “beast” versus a “virus” — changed how people responded to the same information by 20 percentage points. The metaphor moved the room more than political affiliation did. And almost nobody noticed it was the metaphor doing the work (Thibodeau & Boroditsky, PLoS ONE, 2011).

That’s what a blueprint does. It takes the raw material you’ve excavated and the diagnostic patterns you’ve named, and builds the architecture that holds them. Without it, you keep rewriting your story every time someone asks what you do. With it, the story stays consistent across the keynote, the podcast, the LinkedIn post, and the board meeting, because the structure underneath is doing the work.

The One-Question Blueprint Test

Take one thing you say about yourself all the time: your elevator pitch, your LinkedIn headline, your answer to “what do you do?” Write it down. Then ask: does this sound like the best version of me that shows up in a room, or the version that disappears between the Green Room and the mic?

If it’s the second one, circle the word or phrase that doesn’t belong to you. That’s where the blueprint starts.

Skye put it this way:

Frequently Asked Questions

Build Your Own Blueprint

The Fully Yourself on Any Stage worksheet walks you through your story, one B.R.A.V.E.™ letter at a time. It’s the same guided exercise Skye used to get from five metaphors to one Signature Story.

If you want me in the room while you do it, let’s talk about a Narrative Architecture Spotlight session.