Vanessa Van EdwardsScience of People, Science Of People · Behavioral Researcher, Founder, Author, Harvard Instructor

How to Unlock Who Someone Truly Is!

4 Apr 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:18

In this talk Vanessa Van Edwards outlines three prevalent self‑narratives that shape how people view themselves and act: the Hero, who frames life as a series of challenges overcome through resilience and hard work; the Healer, whose identity revolves around giving, compassion, and service‑oriented roles; and the Victim, who perceives the world as hostile, feels unlucky, and struggles to overcome hardship. She explains the core beliefs, typical behaviors, and emotional tones of each narrative, noting that many victims have genuine past hardships but lack strategies to move beyond them. Vanessa argues that recognizing the story a person tells themselves is the key to unlocking deeper, more authentic conversations, because aligning dialogue with a person’s self‑narrative creates connection and insight.

Chapters

Common self-narratives. If someone has a hero self-narrative, they describe themselves as someone who's had a lot of challenges or a lot of problems, but through hard work they were able to overcome. And people with a hero self-narrative are constantly thinking about their life in this hero framework. Heroes are often incredibly resilient. They're always overcoming things and they're very strong. On the other hand, someone with a healer self-narrative, their entire life is about giving. Everything they do is about helping others, being compassionate, being nurturing or empathetic. Often people with a healer self-narrative choose jobs that allow them to be of service. And that's because literally how they define themselves. So they feel their best when they align their self-narrative with their actions. The last most common one I want to talk about is called the victim self-narrative. So this is the hardest one. People with a victim self-narrative constantly feel they have challenges and burdens and problems, but unlike the hero, they can't overcome. So victims often feel like the world is against them. They feel unlucky. They feel that they can't overcome their challenges. And what's so hard is a lot of time victims have experienced real hardship in their life. They don't know how to overcome it. They often see themselves as unlucky, and and they become unlucky. The reason why this is important for conversation is because when we get to deep conversation, we truly know someone, we begin to identify the story they tell themselves about themselves. This is how you begin to unlock who someone truly is and how you have amazing conversations.