I am often asked: which competence should I start with? People hope to hear — with the main one. But narrative intelligence has no main competence. It has an order.
Five competences — analytical, creative, dramaturgical, transformational, integrative — are not a menu you order from by taste. They are a cycle. Each one stands on the one before it, like a floor on a floor.
You cannot transform meaning without being able to create it. You cannot embody what has not yet been transformed. You can analyse endlessly — and not move an inch, because the analysis never turned into making something new. You can invent with enthusiasm — and hold on to nothing, because what you invented was never given dramaturgy, never built into real life.
I know this not from theory. For a long time I thought I lacked resolve. What I lacked was a floor. I was trying to act while skipping the step where things are given meaning. And the action would not hold.
Look at yourself without indulgence: which floor did you stop on? Someone who thinks a lot and does little is usually not lazy. He simply has not finished building.
Where to start? At the place where your staircase breaks off.