What's in the Report and How to Read It

Your report arrives as a set of sections, each looking at your narrative from a different angle. Some describe what your story does. Others describe what it doesn't do — or what it might be avoiding. Together, they form a portrait of your narrative architecture: how you construct meaning, handle difficulty, position yourself in your own life, and connect events to each other.

Here's a guide to what each section is, what it's based on, and how to read it without overthinking.

Your narrative type

This is the headline. You'll be classified as one of ten narrative types — things like Architect, Phoenix, Weaver, Pioneer. Each type describes a dominant pattern in how you tell your story, based on which dimensions scored highest.

A few things to know about types. They're not personality types. They're not permanent. They describe the narrative you produce right now, based on the questions you answered today. If you came back in a year after a major life change, your type might shift. That's expected, not a flaw.

The type is also not a ranking. There's no "best" type. An Architect (someone who builds deliberate cause-and-effect chains) isn't better than an Explorer (someone whose narrative is still forming). They're different patterns, each with its own strengths and blind spots.

Narrative strengths

This section identifies what your story does well — the patterns that are most present and most clearly expressed. If you consistently describe yourself as someone who makes things happen, that shows up here. If your story has a strong thread of connection and care running through it, that shows up too.

The strengths are drawn directly from your answers. Every observation references something specific you wrote. If it says you narrate with a clear sense of direction, it's because your actual words demonstrated that — not because an algorithm assigned you a "direction" score.

Narrative insights

This is the section most people find the most interesting. It's a set of specific observations about patterns in your narrative — things you might not have noticed about how you tell your story.

These might include: a tendency to describe your wins in terms of personal effort but your losses in terms of external forces. A pattern where your stories about other people are richly detailed but your stories about yourself are surprisingly thin. A habit of finding meaning in everything except the experiences that hurt most.

The observations are meant to be thought-provoking, not prescriptive. Some might resonate immediately. Others might take a few days to land. And some might just be wrong — the analysis works with limited data, and sometimes it sees a pattern that isn't really there.

Narrative tensions

Every story has contradictions. You might describe yourself as deeply independent in one answer and deeply dependent in another. You might find meaning in your hardest experiences but describe your happiest moments with surprising flatness.

This section names the most salient tension in your narrative. It's not pointing out a problem — tensions are where the interesting stuff lives. They're often the places where your story is growing, where an old narrative is bumping up against a new one that hasn't fully formed yet.

Growth prompts

You'll find one growth prompt in the free report and several more in the full version. These are reflective questions designed to push on the areas where your narrative is thinnest.

If your story is strong on personal drive but rarely mentions other people, you'll get a prompt that asks you to think about connection. If your story is rich in meaning but low on a sense of personal agency, you'll get a question about moments when you took control.

These aren't homework. They're starting points for reflection — and they're specifically targeted at the dimensions where your narrative has the most room to develop.

Premium sections

The full report (available with the premium version) adds several deeper layers.

Shadow Chapter explores what your story would look like if the dominant patterns were different — an alternate-reality version of your narrative that highlights what you might be underemphasizing or avoiding.

Coherence Style maps how you connect events in your story: whether you build strong cause-and-effect chains, whether you find recurring themes, and how you organize time. It includes your particular strength and your blind spot.

Meaning-Making Profile (full assessment only) examines how you extract understanding from experience — whether you tend toward concrete lessons or deeper self-insights, and what that means for how you process life events.

Values Map (full assessment only) distills the core values that emerge across your answers — not the values you'd list if asked, but the ones that actually show up in how you describe your choices and priorities.

Inner Compass identifies your primary source of resilience (based on your strongest narrative patterns) and your vulnerability zone (based on your weakest).

Well-Being Snapshot translates your narrative patterns into their validated psychological correlates — what the research literature says about the connection between patterns like yours and measures of life satisfaction, self-worth, and sense of meaning. This section always comes with a disclaimer: these are statistical associations, not diagnoses.

How to read the report well

Read it once, quickly, for the overall shape. Then read it again, slowly, paying attention to what surprises you. The things that feel obviously true are confirming — nice, but not particularly useful. The things that feel slightly off, or unexpectedly accurate, or uncomfortable — those are where the real value is.

Don't try to optimize your type. Don't try to "fix" your tensions. The report is a mirror, not a prescription. Use it to see yourself more clearly, and let the implications unfold on their own schedule.