Visionary Archetypes for Worldbuilding
Four Visionary Archetypes for times of Change
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We must invent never-before-seen maps and methods to navigate our never-before-seen circumstances and courageously accept a destination we can only partially understand. Bill Plotkin, Journey of Soul Initiation A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries
We Need New Maps
We need new maps, new tools, and new pathways for navigating worldbuilding in this here polycrisis we find ourselves in.
Frankly, we don't know what kind of economy we'll be sitting in a year from now. We don't know what will come of Western culture, or how we will all be asked to relate to our work in a world this uncertain.
Even now, many of us are skeptical of our own ambitions in this paradigm.
According to Vanessa De Oliveira, author of Hospicing Modernity, this is probably a good sign.
We are skeptical of our endless craving for more “stuff” and “status” in a world that creates these two things from slave labor, genocide, and war. We are questioning how much we are really willing to spend on raising our status and increasing our perceived value where more expensive stuff = more respectable status.
And with a little bit of critical thinking, many of us are discovering that real status is not about how much someone is able to afford, but how intact we can remain with our inner-selves, the Earth, and others in our quest to stay human in a changing world.
Rent is Still Due at the End of the Known World
If you are someone who feels “called” to build a vision in the Western World and you know that that calling is coming from somewhere deep inside yourself, you are also asking big questions about what it looks like to survive doing it. How do you earn enough to stay afloat as the economy shifts and tightens around us? How do you build sustainably when the ground beneath us is shifting?
Turns out, rent is still due at the end of a world. And so are payments for our Student loan debt. Turns out that taxes still have to be paid to the United States Government even though we all know that the taxes we pay are funding enslavement and genocide.
How do we reconfigure? What is the prayer? Who do we need to become to move through these experiences together without losing our humanity and soul? How do we keep moving, creating and building in the face of so much culture change, moral expense, and death?
I don’t have the answer to these questions.
I think that these are inquiries that we need to turn to ceremony for. We need spaces of shared prayer and listening and quiet. We need ashrams, covens, dojos, zendos, sanctuaries and caves to hold these questions together and pray.
I don’t believe that the answer will come as one large prophetic vision from one person.
I believe it will come through fragments of dreamtime, shards of many people listening and receiving insight and vision from the belly of the Earth. It will come from spending time as individuals together, remembering who we are. It will come as a million different conversations that move through us as a multi-faceted dream of the Earth.
We Each Hold Shards of the Future’s Mosaic
I believe that from this belly of shards of fragmented dreams, griefs, and poems may emerge a mosaic. A shared psychic image of longing and belonging. A movement toward something else.
My little shard of this mosaic is full of visionariness. It’s full of worldbuilding and creative process and musings on what the anima mundi / the mother / the goddess might be trying to show us. Your little shard might be pointing you to something else.
What is your little shard of the future’s mosaic? What does your shard look like? Feel like? Sound like? Taste like? How does it want to make magic and meaning on the Earth through you?
When you have a sense of that shard and all it wants to offer through you into the bigger picture, the Earth’s future, I have a Worldbuilding map to offer that might support you to orient to what to do with that shard and how to walk with it and nurture it to life with grace, sweetness, and grit.
This Worldbuilding map is called the Visionary Archetypes—four worldbuilding archetypes for bringing life-affirming vision into form.
The visionary archetypes serve as a map for helping us to navigate where we are in the journey of vision development and to feel resourced to cross thresholds in the process of bringing our vision to life.
Who the Visionary Archetypes are For
The Visionary Archetypes are for you if…
Your notes app is filled to the brim with ideas and half-baked plans but you’re not entirely sure where to begin or which ideas are viable yet.
You've been pushing hard to build but the data (revenue / margins / exhaustion) is showing you that it's time for a much different approach and you’re not totally sure what steps to take next.
You’re overwhelmed by the potential of what you’re building but you’re feeling some trepidation on taking the necessary steps to make things sustainable. You’re feeling afraid of change and of inviting new teammates in.
You’re ready to serve, lead, and share your ideas to a wider audience, but you feel you lack the structure, discipline and systems to sustain the work.
You know you need to support, but you’re afraid to ask for help.
You feel tacky trying to build a business and share your offerings in a world on fire.
The people who typically find their way into our world of work here in Storywork Studio are often those who are creating healing spaces, building soul-level vision and bridging the divides between spirit and matter in their work. They are typically wild-hearted intuitive creators, seasoned practitioners, and entrepreneurs.
They are spirit-led founders who are not necessarily looking for the next big strategy that’s going to take their startup into unicorn status, but are looking for a culture of entrepreneurship to align to that is regenerative, relational, focused on living systems, and interested in the healing of the planet.
They are the kinds of visionary leaders who are not fully sold on the business world’s language or the dominant paradigm’s compulsory need for optimization, scaling, and conversion funnels.
Instead, they are more interested in nurturing the kind of vision that is human scale and connected to a pulse.
They are building businesses, projects, and organizations that have a living, breathing nervous system and soul. They want to build vision in ways that are reciprocal and life-affirming rather than draining of their energetic resources as they feel forced to keep up with the modern world. They want slower, sweeter, more curious, more intuitive ways of vision development.
They are looking for more honest, soft-footed maps that are attuned and sensitized to how change is taking shape in culture and that point them back to their own inner-knowing and sovereign intelligence as well.
If any of this sounds like you or what you are looking for, welcome. The visionary archetypes offer an ensouled kind of map for people like you and me who know it’s time to build in different ways.
The Four Visionary Archetypes
Before we can go deeper, we have to first orient around the idea that the Visionary Archetypes are not a personality test.
And to see them that way would do a great disservice to your vision. They are a system of archetypal energies that demarcate the seasons of vision that we all go through.
Each of the archetypes aligns with a season.
The Dreamer Archetype aligns with the Spring Season where vision is budding but we’re not entirely sure what it will all become just yet.
The Risktaker Archetype archetype aligns with the Summer Season where we need quite a bit of courage to put ourselves out there and allow ourselves to be visible doing the work.
The Magician Archetype aligns with the Autumn Season where we’re making sense of where we have been and what has been created and developing deeper systems and infrastructure to hold right-fit scale and grow within the vision’s development.
The Weaver Archetype aligns with the Winter Season where all of the vision “doing” is slowed down and you as a founder are thinking about the longer term impact of the work.
While the Visionary Archetypes are delivered in a quiz format that gives you a “result” at the end of it, they won’t give you a fixed type to carry around in your back pocket that defines who you are in a static kind of way. It’s not a replacement for the Myers-Briggs, Strengths Finders, or your astrology or the enneagram. It’s not another list of personality traits or another box to try to fit yourself inside of.
What the Visionary Archetypes offer is something more alive than that.
They are a seasons-based map that helps to illuminate what this particular chapter of your work is asking of you, what threshold you are crossing as a founder, and what is needed in order for your vision to root and grow.
You will cycle through all four archetypes again and again and again. And each time you move through the spiral of visionary process, you will have had more wisdom, experience, and lessons learned under your belt. You’ll have more insight and data to offer your vision because you’ve been through that cycle before.
Inside of Storywork Studio, we hold this framework as a four-directional arc and a living wheel that mirrors the intelligence of the seasons and the four directions. This model was built upon the panculture wisdom of the four directions medicine wheel as I learned it through School of Lost Borders and Bill Plotkin.
Working with the visionary archetypes is like seeing your vision as a spiralic process. As you mature and grow as a leader, creator, or founder, you gain wisdom from experience and you approach each threshold with more information and understanding that you had in times before.
Which Visionary Archetype are You?
Take the quiz to find out.
The Season of the Dreamer Archetype
In the season of the Dreamer, you may feel like you have an endless well of ideas and that it’s hard to choose which one you’d like to start building on first. You might feel a boldness when it comes to the impact you want to create, but shyness when it comes to actually building the foundations of your projects. The season of the Dreamer Archetype is not necessarily about building a brand or locking in on a highly-structured marketing plan. The season of the Dreamer is about finding your voice and exploring the courage to become visible in your work.
In the season of the Dreamer, you are often asking: How do I find the courage to step toward my dream? How do I share what I see in a world that’s moving so fast?
You might find yourself:
With an overflowing notebook of ideas with no clear path forward
Mistaking inspiration for momentum, but feel frozen when it comes to actual steps
Craving structure, ritual, or mentorship to help shape what’s inside of you
Sometimes rejecting all guidance because you need to trust your own instincts first
Wondering if you know “enough” to begin and constant seeking more information
You feel like you have to choose between stepping into the unknown or staying where it feels safe
In order for the Dreamer Archetype to crossover into the season of the Risktaker Archetype, they have to metabolize fear and choose at least one idea to focus and build upon.
The Season of the Risktaker Archetype
In the season of the Risktaker, there is a particular kind of vulnerability that comes with owning what you’re here to do before you feel fully ready. You know that if you wait for the “full-readiness” to land, you’ll never get out there and fully risk in the ways that are required to build something sustainable and real. The season of the Risktaker is for sharing shitty first drafts, market-testing, experimenting, discovering what the shape of your work actually is by finding out what it is not. Your body craves stability, monthly recurring revenue, and higher baselines of ease in the work, but you know that foundations need to be set for that first.
The season of the Risktaker is not about having it all figured out. It is about learning to trust yourself in the process of building in public. It’s about learning how to stay rooted through the uncertainty and learning to back yourself in the visionary process.
In the season of the Risktaker, you are often asking: Am I doing this right? Will people leave if I get bolder? How do I make my work sustainable?
You might find yourself:
Finding the courage to sharing your work before it feels fully ready, because you know waiting for perfection is its own kind of hiding
Wondering if you’re on the right path, even as you keep moving forward
Afraid of losing people—clients, followers, community—as your voice gets clearer, cleaner, and more defined
Craving monthly recurring revenue and a higher baseline of ease, but knowing the foundations need to be set first.
Afraid to lose your soul as you show up to your business, and asking what it looks like to keep your essence intact through the building process
Wondering constantly if you’re “doing it right” and not quite sure who to trust for support
The Season of the Magician Archetype
In the season of the Magician, you are deepening into skills of foresight and leadership by building systems and structures that can hold the bigger picture of your vision. You see that potential of your vision in not necessarily in how many ideas you can generate but in how the ideas that you know “work” are organized, scaled, and sustained. This is the season for noticing what’s working, what’s not, and how to transform raw insights into consistent experiences that feel irresistible to your people.
In the season of the Magician you are asking: What kinds of systems and people are a right-fit support to the vision’s expansion? What needs to be codified, scaled, clarified? What’s working, and how do we multiply it without losing the soul?
You might find yourself:
Feeling perfectionist and afraid of being iterative about how you build.
Struggling to let yourself be truly witnessed and resourced by a community, preferring to play lone wolf rather than risk being hurt, taken advantage of or having your body of work stolen from
Holding back your insight because it feels arrogant to fully own the power of your unique methodology, frameworks, and experiences
Ready to define and potentially codify how people experience transformation in the work they do with you through methodology development and maps.
Wanting to create systems that help you work smarter, hire the right people, stay in integrity, and regulate monthly revenue flows
Needing to get clear on your needs before entering into new support relationships, whether that’s a new hire, a coach, a board of advisors, or a peer-group
The Season of the Weaver Archetype
In the season of the Weaver Archetype, you know that your vision is so much bigger than you and that it has the power to impact culture in ways beyond your imagining. You’re thinking about how your vision contributes to the culture in scale and how that work requires you to deepen in integrity, understand its wider impact, and allow the work to be held by forces much greater than you.
The Weaver asks: How might I step back, walk the perimeter, and behold my vision through fresh perspectives? What is this work in relationship to the world?
How to Find Yourself on the Wheel
Locating yourself in the archetypes isn’t about labeling yourself with a fixed personality tag. It’s an act of honest orientation and a moment of pausing to ask, where am I actually? What season am I in?
Start with this question → What is the state of your vision right now?
Is it still tender and unformed? Still living mostly in your phone notes or your notebook? You’re likely in the season of the Dreamer.
Is it in the world but still finding its ground and container? Are you sharing new ideas and trying to find the courage to share consistently? You’re likely in the season of the Risktaker.
Is your vision established but calling for refinement? Is it wanting more structure, a new hire, clarity, or systems that can hold more weight and process? You’re likely in the season of the Magician.
Is your vision asking you to lead at a level that exceeds your current capacity? Is it asking you to think bigger picture? Hire more team members? And consider a wider impact? You’re likely in the season of the Weaver.
Sometimes, you may also find yourself in-between archetypes where one foot is still firmly in the season of the Risktaker while the other is pressing toward the Magician. That in-between place is a threshold: a liminal place where the old identity / season has loosened but the new one hasn’t solidified yet.
Underneath the practical map of the Visionary Archetypes is the understanding that entrepreneurship is an initiatory process with many thresholds to cross. Each archetypal season that you move through offers us a rite of passage.
When we can see it this way, it adds more meaning to the hardship, fear, and trials that come with building. It makes it more meaningful to overcome those hurdles and make it through to the other side. You are not just building a business. You are becoming someone who can carry a vision across time, across seasons, across the full arc of a life’s work.
Take the Quiz
Our comprehensive quiz will help you identify your archetypal season through a series of scenario-based questions that reveal how this phase of your process is asking you to approach:
Generating and developing ideas
Taking action on your visions
Building structure and systems
Creating community and legacy
The quiz takes about 5 minutes and gives you detailed results that include:
Your archetype with a personalized description
Specific next steps based on your type
Resources tailored to your archetype’s needs
Whether you're just starting to explore your visionary potential or you've been building for years, understanding your archetypal season will give you clarity on how to move forward in alignment.
Go Deeper — Join me for a 3-hour workshop on Friday, April 24th.
Let’s go deeper and nerd out on the Visionary Archetypes on April 24th in my new 3-hour workshop, Worldbuilding with the Archetypes.
Worldbuilding with the Archetypes is a live 3-hour workshop for learning how to work with the visionary archetypes to bring life-affirming vision into form.
Join us to learn how to:
Locate yourself and your visionary process in the seasons.
Clarify next steps based on which archetypal season you’re in.
Ground and focus your worldbuilding process in times of change.
In this 2-hour deep dive, we’ll explore:
→ The shadow and sub-personalities of each Archetype, illuminating exactly where you are getting stuck in holding patterns and what is truly needed to cross thresholds and graduate into new seasons of vision.
→ The way to find revenue and anchor cashflow in each season of the Visionary Archetypes, dissolving the myth that you can only earn once everything is fully established and polished.
→ Practical ways to work with the Visionary Archetypes to structure workflow and map business planning by the seasons.
A replay will be made available for download for those who cannot make it live.
Use ‘ARCHETYPE’ to receive 25% off until April 17th.
About Your Host
As a Memphis-born, Appalachian-cured storyteller, story doula, and eco-somatic depth guide; Dajé Alōh supports seekers, lovers, crafters, and kin in finding and singing the deep song of their lives. She does this in several domains: entrepreneurship, creative rites of passage, and musings on mythopoesis, culturework, and leadership.
She is the founder of Storywork Studio: An Institute of Visionary Praxis and the Midwives Studio: A Ritual Design and Concept Studio.
Learn more here.
About the Podcast
Soft, Earthen Futures is a podcast about imagining and crafting a more whole world. We explore what it means to stand at the threshold between what has been and what is trying to emerge, tending to that in-between space, listening for what the earth is dreaming through us, and giving those visions form. This show is for wild-hearted creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries.
About Storywork Studio
We create spaces for wild-hearted visionaries to breathe through the tensions of the creative process. We offer workshops, live incubators, and audio media that gets to the heart of what visionaries are really exploring in the edges, swells, and challenges of developing soul-aligned visionary work.
Storywork Studio is the teaching studio of storyteller and eco-somatic depth guide, Dajé Alōh, and house for her body of work.
An astounding take on what so many of use feel in our souls! I feel like your article, itself, is definitely a map! Thank you 🙏🏽
“We must invent never-before-seen maps and methods to navigate our never-before-seen circumstances and courageously accept a destination we can only partially understand.”
Whoa. Magnificent. 🎷