In this season finale, Harris, Kate and Michael reflect on STORY 2025, and the transformative experience of storytelling events, emphasizing the importance of environment and creativity in engaging audiences. The discussion highlights how changes in format and atmosphere can lead to moments of awe and wonder, creating lasting impressions on attendees.

In their reflective conversation, they cover topics like:

• The experience of storytelling can be profoundly transformative.
• Environment plays a crucial role in shaping audience engagement.
• Creativity in format can lead to unexpected and delightful experiences.
• Moments of awe can significantly enhance the storytelling experience.
• Collaboration with creative individuals can elevate the overall atmosphere.
• The impact of storytelling is often felt through shared community experiences.
• Visual elements can create a sense of wonder and engagement.
• Tweaking traditional formats can lead to innovative storytelling.
• Audience reactions can be a powerful indicator of success.
• Creating memorable experiences requires attention to detail and creativity.

Get on the STORY 2025 waitlist by visiting: https://story2026.com
Learn more about Istoria by visiting: https://istoria.com

In this episode of the Story OS Podcast, hosts Michael McRay and Harris III discuss the importance of leadership within the family unit, emphasizing the need for intentionality and proactive engagement. They explore how family dynamics can mirror organizational leadership, the role of children in shaping family vision, and the integration of work and family life. The conversation also touches on the American dream and its implications for modern family structures, ultimately advocating for a more unified approach to leadership that includes all family members. In this conversation, we cover some key takeaways such as:

• Leadership starts at home and is essential for family dynamics.
• Intentionality is key in maintaining healthy family relationships.
• Children can provide valuable insights and wisdom in family decisions.
• Proactive leadership in families can lead to better outcomes.
• Integrating work and family life is more effective than balancing them.
• Storytelling is a powerful tool in leadership and family engagement.
• Vision casting helps families align on shared goals and values.
• The American dream may not serve modern family needs effectively.
• Including children in decision-making fosters a sense of belonging.
• Leadership and creativity are intertwined, driving positive change.

Coming Up Soon

• Living Room Leadership Summit - November 13 (virtual event from 10am-5pm EST, with a special family session at 8pm EST)
• Register today at livingroomleadershipsummit.com !

Resources Mentioned

• Get Living Room Leadership by Brittany and Geoff Anderson (available now!)

Tune in this week as Michael McRay welcomes Brittany and Geoff Anderson, co-authors of brand new book Living Room Leadership and founders of Renala, for a conversation about why world-changing leadership begins at home. The Andersons share their powerful story of a marriage that nearly ended in 2019 during Geoff's time as an Air Force One pilot, and how coaching - not traditional therapy - helped them challenge the stories they were telling themselves and rebuild their relationship. Rather than letting that fracture define their future, they discovered that family is the most vital leadership training ground and created a coaching program that helps families co-create vision, values, and rhythms using research-backed tools and playful practices. Their approach focuses on the entire family system - not just individuals or couples. Renala helps parents and children understand their unique strengths, build shared mission and vision statements, and practice saying yes to each other. In this episode, they also discuss:

• Why 98% of children test as creative geniuses but only 2% of adults retain that genius
• How understanding that weaknesses are often just overused strengths can transform family dynamics and build compassion for each other
• Why play activates up to 80% of the brain compared to just 15% for talking alone
• How creating a family mission and vision statement provides the same clarity and direction that thrives in business and military environments

Coming Up Soon

• Living Room Leadership Summit - November 13 (virtual event from 10am-5pm EST, with a special family session at 8pm EST)
• Register today at livingroomleadershipsummit.com !

Resources Mentioned

• Get Living Room Leadership by Brittany and Geoff Anderson (available now!)
• Renala 
• Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment

In this week's episode, Michael McRay sets the table for next week's conversation with Brittany and Geoff Anderson, authors of Living Room Leadership. After his divorce, Michael crafted a framed set of commitments that define how he and his son show up together. This episode explores the radical but simple claim that world-changing leadership begins at home, and that the tools we treat as normal at work - vision, mission, values - matter even more in our living rooms. Michael introduces key themes from next week's conversation: moving from deficit to strength-based family culture, understanding families as systems rather than just individuals, and reclaiming play as a leadership technology that accelerates learning and disarms defensiveness. In this episode, Michael also shares:

• How to shift from organizing family life around what's wrong to organizing around what's already strong
• Why individual growth isn't enough if the family system doesn't change with you
• How excavating your story requires gentle patience, slowly uncovering what pain and shame have buried beneath the surface
• Why the person you are at home is the person you are
• 
  

Coming Up Soon

• Join us for next week's episode as Brittany and Geoff Anderson talk on their new book, Living Room Leadership
• Order Living Room Leadership for yourself - available now!

Michael McRay welcomes listeners into a different kind of episode - a celebration of his fifth book, The Wild Way: Navigating the Space Between the Old Story and the New, releasing today. Tune in for an intimate invitation into the heart of a project years in the making, born from more than a decade of coaching conversations, story facilitation, and personal notes from the dark forest. Michael reads from the opening pages of the book, sharing the concept of the wild twin - the exiled, instinctual part of ourselves that knows the way into the woods, the part we sent away for being too much, too loud, too alive. In this episode, Michael also shares:

• The inspiration behind the title The Wild Way
• How the book's dispatches function as reports from someone who's been in the thick of it, and found paths through
• What the "worthy if wanted" narrative is and how it keeps us chasing validation by tying our worth to whether others choose us
• Why your story needs patience while carefully uncovering truths buried beneath pain and shame

Resources Mentioned

• Michael's new book The Wild Way: Navigating the Space Between the Old Story and the New is available now! Get your copy today! 

This week, Michael McRay and Harris III gather for a raw, timely conversation about what it means to treat story as sacred in a world that has reduced it to formulas and frameworks. Reflecting on last week's interview with Kaitlin Curtice and her new book Everything is a Story, they explore why their conference is simply called "STORY" - a deliberate choice to reclaim storytelling from the creative class and awaken everyone to their inherent creativity and narrative power. The conversation confronts the cultural moment we're living in: a world where rage has replaced nuance, where social media algorithms feed us dopamine hits of outrage, and where we've lost the ability to sit at tables with people who think differently. In this episode, they also discuss:

• Why we must resist the urge to "master" storytelling and instead, approach it with the humility and care we would give any sacred thing
• How single stories strip away nuance and dehumanize, while wise stories hold paradox and complexity
• Why leaders must audit their vocabulary and choose words carefully to avoid weaponizing language
• Why choosing narrative agency over apathy is how we stop the descent of disagreement to demonization

Coming Up: 

• Michael's new book The Wild Way: Navigating the Space Between the Old Story and the New is available October 21st - order now for over $500 in pre-order bonuses!

Resources Mentioned:

• Kaitlin Curtice's new book Everything is a Story
• The Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This week, Michael McRay welcomes award-winning author and poet Kaitlin Curtice to celebrate the launch of her new book, Everything is a Story. Curtice, an enrolled citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, explores how narrative drives all human behavior and shapes our identities, beliefs, and relationships. The conversation weaves through Indigenous wisdom, spirituality, and the profound recognition that stories aren't just things we tell - they are living beings that we participate with and that fundamentally shape how we experience the world. Curtice shares her journey through health challenges leading up to the book launch, the vulnerability of putting creative work into the world, and why she chose the metaphor of an oak tree's life cycle to structure her exploration of storytelling. In this episode, they also discuss:

• How oral storytelling traditions differ from written narratives and why stories should be understood as living beings with their own essence
• Why Curtice categorizes stories as liminal, loving, or lethal, and how to recognize which stories we're living
• How linear versus cyclical storytelling reflects different worldviews, particularly between Western and Indigenous approaches to narrative
• Why the practice of "mastering" storytelling misses the point—we need humility and care in our relationship with stories, not dominance

Resources Mentioned:

• Get Kaitlin Curtice's new book Everything is a Story
• Join The Circle
• Preorder Michael McRay's new book The Wild Way

Michael McRay prepares listeners for his upcoming conversation with Kaitlin Curtice, award-winning author and Potawatomi Nation citizen, whose new book Everything is a Story explores how stories root in our bodies, beliefs, and behaviors. Michael reflects on Kaitlin's framework of stories as lethal, loving, or liminal - categories that he argues aren't separate buckets but overlapping truths within the same narrative. Michael demonstrates how a single story can simultaneously hold hope and futility, love and obedience, connection and violence. Michael challenges the notion that we lose stories we didn't choose, examining how narratives handed down through family, church, and culture take root before we even recognize them as stories. He introduces the parable of the man building a house in a field who trapped insects inside by adding windows - a metaphor for how stories get locked into our forming brains during childhood and require intentional work to shift. In this episode, he also discusses:

• How Kaitlin's book structure mirrors a tree's growth cycle from seed to mature tree to seed again, reflecting story's circular nature
• Why the transformative work of story requires spiritual slowness and presence rather than rushing toward resolution
• How narrative intelligence means holding complexity and recognizing stories aren't tidy but textured, tangled, and true in layers

Coming Up:

• Tune in for Michael's conversation with Kaitlin Curtice next week
• LOW TICKET ALERT - less than 25 tickets available! STORY 2025 - October 9th and 10th in Nashville, TN at the Schermerhorn (use code PODCAST100 for $100 your ticket!)
• Michael's book The Wild Way: Navigating the Space Between the Old Story and the New releasing in October - preorder today!
• Becoming Restoried

Tune in as Michael McRay and Harris III explore the complex relationship between emotions and storytelling, diving into whether we're primarily emotional beings who tell stories, or story beings who experience emotions. Harris shares how his childhood survival mechanism of entertaining others to manage their emotional states shaped his career path, while Michael reflects on his "emotions epiphany" through Karla McLaren's work. They challenge the common phrase "story follows state," arguing instead for a circular relationship where stories create emotional states and emotional states influence the stories we tell ourselves. Their conversation examines how both emotions and imagination remain active throughout our lives, even when redirected toward anxiety and catastrophizing rather than creative expression. In this episode, they also discuss:

• How the Irish language recognizes emotions as temporary states ("there is sadness on me") rather than permanent identities ("I am sad")
• Why understanding emotions as intelligent messengers rather than problems to solve transforms our relationship with difficult feelings
• How worry represents a misuse of imagination
• Why anxious people possess valuable scenario-planning superpowers for creative problem-solving

Coming Up Soon

• LOW TICKET ALERT! STORY 2025 - October 9th and 10th in Nashville, TN at the Schermerhorn (use code PODCAST100 for $100 your ticket!)
• Experiential Narrative Practice certification training - October 6th-8th
• Conversation with Kaitlin Curtice
• Michael's book "The Wild Way: Navigating the Space Between the Old Story and the New" releasing in October

Resources Mentioned

• Karla McLaren
• Don't Believe Everything You Think
• Enjoying these conversations? Join The Circle!

Join Michael McRay as he continues his conversation with emotional researcher Karla McLaren, diving deeper into how emotions serve as guides rather than problems to solve. Karla explains that when emotions feel overwhelming, it's often about our lack of skills to work with them rather than the intensity itself. She reframes depression as an intelligent system that removes energy to redirect us from destructive paths. Their conversation reveals how toxic positivity isolates those experiencing intense emotions, while slightly depressed people often see reality more clearly than eternally optimistic ones. Karla introduces "narrative completion"—how witnessing recovery and resolution is essential for healing, from trauma workers to personal relationships. In this episode, they also discuss:

• How to distinguish healthy internal shame from toxic external shaming messages
• Why intense emotions often indicate disconnection from parts of ourselves that need healing
• How narrative completion helps heal trauma and unfinished emotional business
• Why we're drawn to serial stories during times of cultural uncertainty

Coming Up Soon

• LOW TICKET ALERT! STORY 2025 - October 9th and 10th in Nashville, TN at the Schermerhorn (use code PODCAST100 for $100 your ticket!)
• Experiential Narrative Practice certification training - October 6th-8th
• Michael's book "The Wild Way: Navigating the Space Between the Old Story and the New" releasing in October

Resources Mentioned

• Karla McLaren
• Embracing Anxiety, The Art of Empathy and The Language of Emotions
• Empathy Academy
• Enjoying these conversations? Join The Circle!

If you or your loved one is experiencing suicidal ideation, please contact a mental health professional as soon as possible and seek help. You are not alone. If you are experiencing a mental health, suicide, or substance use crisis, or any other emotional distress, call or text 988 or chat online at 988lifeline.org/chat. 

Michael McRay welcomes Karla McLaren, award-winning author and emotional researcher whose work has fundamentally reshaped how many understand inner life and emotional intelligence. Karla shares how her journey into emotions began not as academic pursuit but as survival. When severe childhood abuse left her with intense emotions that no one around her would acknowledge or discuss, Karla was forced to decode the language of emotions on her own. This conversation challenges fundamental assumptions about emotions, particularly the myth of "positive" versus "negative" feelings. They explore how gender stereotypes allow men anger but punish them for it, while women can express sadness but face consequences for that too. The discussion reveals how most people can instantly recall emotion-shaming messages but struggle to remember any emotion-welcoming ones, highlighting our culture's fundamental discomfort with feelings. In this episode, they also discuss:

• How Karla learned to study emotions like a language, observing patterns across humans and animals to understand what triggers each emotion and how beings respond
• Why the categories of "positive" and "negative" emotions miss the point
• The critical distinction between healthy shame that arises internally to maintain our values versus toxic shame imposed from outside that creates impossible standards
• How anxiety combines with panic in "panxiety" during high-stress situations

Coming Up Soon

• Part two with Karla McLaren, researcher and author of "The Art of Empathy" and "The Language of Emotions"
• STORY 2025 - October 9th and 10th in Nashville, TN at the Schermerhorn (use code PODCAST100 for $100 your ticket)
• Experiential Narrative Practice certification training - October 6th-8th
• Michael's book "The Wild Way: Navigating the Space Between the Old Story and the New" releasing in October

Resources Mentioned

• Karla McLaren
• Embracing Anxiety, The Art of Empathy and The Language of Emotions
• Empathy Academy
• Enjoying these conversations? Join The Circle!