I’ve been soliciting all of you to send me your own CHART stories. A few weeks ago, someone sent me one. I’m going to share Jenny’s story (I have permission and encouragement to use her name) with you because it is a clear, real-world example of the CHART framework — and because it’s still unfolding, which makes it even more interesting.
Here’s what she wrote:
My dad died. Six months later, I got laid off from the customer experience leadership role in an industry I’d spent 20 years in. Then I spent the next two years trying to find a new job, getting rejected hundreds of times, questioning everything, and feeling like I had completely lost myself.
Somewhere in the middle of that mess, I saw a junky little table sitting out for the trash. It looked how I felt. So naturally, with zero experience, I dragged it home and I taught myself how to fix it up. Then I found another piece. Then another. Somewhere between the sanding, painting, swearing, and talking to furniture like it was alive, San Diego Furniture Flipper was born.
I’ll come back to this story. But first, let me explain why it hit me the way it did.
CHART is a framework I developed for understanding how stories actually inspire people. I’m not talking about the polished highlight reel or the very clean, “I had a vision and I executed it” version. I’m talking about the real stuff. CHART stands for Courage, Hardship, Authenticity, Resilience, and Transformation and the reason it works is that these five elements aren’t a formula, they’re what’s already present in every story that has ever made you lean forward.
Let’s walk through each one using Jenny’’s story.
Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the decision to take the next step while fear is fully present. Jenny dragged that table home and she had no woodworking experience, no business plan, no guaranteed outcome. She just did a thing, albeit a small, weird, slightly desperate thing. That is what courage actually looks like most of the time, it’s not these trumpet-blaring, defining moment, it’s a dragged table.
Hardship is where most of us rush. We want to get to the good part. But the two years of rejection, the grief sitting right underneath the job loss, the identity crisis that comes when your title disappears — that is not the low point of the story. It is the weight that makes everything that follows mean something. Without the full accounting of what it cost, transformation is just a pivot. With it, it’s a lifeline.
Authenticity is the element that decides whether a story lands or bounces off. “It looked how I felt” — that one line. That is the interior version of the story, not the curated version, not the LinkedIn announcement version. That is what it actually felt like to be Jenny on that sidewalk in that moment. When you let people into the specific reality of your experience, they stop being observers and start being witnesses. That’s the difference.
Resilience is not cheerfulness under pressure. It is not pretending the hard thing isn’t hard. It is the decision, made quietly and without fanfare, to keep going anyway. In this story, resilience looks like dragging home a second piece of furniture. And then a third. Not because anyone was watching or because there was a plan, but because it gave something back when everything else was taking.
Transformation here is still unfolding, and Jenny said as much. She’s got a full-time job that pays the bills and a furniture business being built on the side. The entrepreneurial identity that was buried for years because “real work had to come first” is now showing up at the workbench. That is transformation which is less of a destination she arrived at all at once, but a self being reclaimed, piece by piece.
Here is what I want you to sit with: Jenny did not set out to inspire anyone. She was just trying to survive a very hard stretch. But the story she told — specific, honest, still-in-progress — is exactly the kind that changes things for the person reading it.
That is what CHART is really about. We’re not necessarily learning to tell better stories, but getting more comfortable sharing the real ones.