The people
behind the story.

Someone kept showing up.

Dennis was ten when his father died. His mother was left caring for a family of six children, five still at home. In his account, she has always been his hero.

He remembers years when she went without new clothes or shoes for herself. Those details tell us something about the cost of her care. They are not a test of whether another parent loves enough.

This is one root of Hero Me: the importance of an ordinary person in someone else’s life. Not a celebrity, a title or a performance. Someone whose attention mattered.

Your own story may be different. You do not owe a difficult relationship gratitude or renewed contact. A friend, a mentor, another caregiver—or someone who helped for just a moment—can belong in the story too.

The plan was not the whole picture.

Another root came from Dennis’s working life. Before becoming a business coach, he ran a software company. He understood logic, numbers and selling. He could picture what he wanted to build.

But people he had hired started leaving. He realized that being persuasive for a short conversation did not make him a good person to work for. New projects were arriving before the old ones were finished. His imagined future was taking up room that the people beside him needed.

Asking how other businesses worked also showed him that familiar tasks and lived experience were not the same as a tidy description of a process. He needed to listen, not only explain.

A question he finally stopped to hear.

After reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Dennis decided to ask how someone was doing before handing them another project.

The first employee was ill. They had come to work to finish an important project he had already forgotten assigning. He was standing there with a new one.

“How are you doing?”

In Dennis’s recollection, listening to the answer made something visible that his urgency had hidden. He sent the person home and took responsibility for working out what to do.

Then he went to a second cubicle. That person’s twelve-year-old son was in hospital. They had come in because Dennis had called yesterday’s task an emergency. Again, he told them to go and took the work back.

He was left holding projects he had imagined were simply getting done. He could now see some of what his demands had cost other people.

The useful part is not a rule that you must take everything on. It is the pause, the real answer and the chance to change your action because of what you learned. That can matter in a friendship or a family, not only at work.

Learning to question his own picture.

Dennis kept reading. These books are influences he names, with the lessons he took from them. They are not endorsements of Hero Me or proof of an app’s effects.

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: listening instead of waiting for your turn to speak.
• First, Break All the Rules: letting systems serve people, not the other way around.
• Leadership and Self-Deception: noticing the need to be seen a certain way, and treating people as people rather than objects in your plan.
• Leadership Is an Art, by Max De Pree: understanding leadership as care for others.
• Good to Great: finding examples that helped restore his faith in business and leaders who were not consumed by themselves.

He describes having the capacity to care but filling his mind with engineering and plans. The books helped him question what he was making room to notice.

The story pattern came later.

Years later, the hero’s journey gave Dennis language for connecting these experiences. Something interrupts the familiar picture. A person faces a challenge, finds help and learns something they can carry forward.

He did not invent that pattern. Hero Me uses it as a working map for noticing what matters, not a requirement to turn every difficulty into a lesson or fit every life into one plot.

Dennis’s account explains why he built the project. It is not itself scientific evidence, and research on a framework is not proof that this app will produce a particular outcome. Read what the research studied, and what it did not.

Other people are not a self-improvement project.

Dennis sometimes writes the orientation as A → C → B: A is where you are, B is a change you care about, and C is the person whose experience you make room for.

It is an invitation to pay attention, not a transaction: help somebody and receive a better self in return. Another person gets to have their own wants, limits and understanding of what would help.

This is the service orientation behind Hero Me. A useful response may be listening, apologizing, sharing responsibility, setting a boundary or receiving help. Goals, reflection and looking after yourself still belong.

You do not have to be a parent. You do not need to rescue anyone. Your own life matters alongside the people in it.

Why keep coming back to the conversation?

Dennis does not describe this as something he solved once and never needed to revisit. He wanted help noticing when his own imagined picture was crowding out the actual people again.

That wish helped shape both Harmonic Way and Hero Me. The former approaches it through work and leadership; Hero Me makes room for your own life, friendships and family relationships. Both use the same service, not a separate B account or history.

Wayfinder is the coaching role. The model is the actor. Relevant conversation records and a structured understanding of your story inform the conversation. Dennis calls this your IB—Instantaneous Being: software assembled for the moment, not a person or a conscious being.

Keeping the role and history distinct from the model supports continuity as models improve. It does not promise perfect recall, flawless understanding or identical responses. You can question and correct the understanding.

The conversation does not replace the people in your life, therapy or emergency support. It is a way to return to what happened, what matters and what you might choose next.