Voices from the field

Voices from the Field

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Keith Storace | Australia

Editor, Nourish to Flourish

Keith Storace is a registered psychologist with the Psychology Board of Australia (PsyBA) and an associate fellow with the Australasian College of Health Service Management (ACHSM). He manages a private practice at Kiku Imagination where he applies the Appreciative Dialogue (ApDi) therapy program to assist individuals move toward, strengthen and enjoy what is meaningful while dealing with the challenges they encounter along the way. Keith has been the editor of the Nourish to Flourish column for AI Practitioner since 2016.

Oona D’mello has become a familiar and valued contributor to Voices from the Field, and it is a pleasure to welcome her back once again. Since first meeting Oona at the 2019 World Appreciative Inquiry Conference in Nice, I have admired her thoughtful ability to bridge Appreciative Inquiry with broader conversations about human flourishing. In this article, Oona invites us to consider language not simply as a way of describing our experience, but as the very terrain on which our experience is shaped. Her reflections offer a compelling exploration of the words we live inside, the questions we ask, and the possibilities they create for ourselves and the systems of which we are a part.

Oona D’mello | India

Oona D’mello is an entrepreneur and educator whose work sits at the intersection of sustainability, e-learning, and human development. Co-founder and past CEO of MySustainOnline, her work has been showcased at the G20 Equity Lounge and published in AI Practitioner, Springer, and Vogue. She is certified in executive coaching and as an Appreciative Inquiry practitioner.

The Words We Live Inside

Language is not a vehicle for fulfillment. It must be recognized as the terrain.

Where Appreciative Inquiry meets human flourishing – and why the words we live inside determine the life we can imagine.

We tend to think of language as the medium through which we express what we already feel, already know, and already are. We experience an emotion – joy, a sense of purpose, perhaps, or belonging – and then we find words for it. Language, in this view, is a carrier, a delivery system for what we already know. Let’s challenge this sequence, shall we?

What if the words arrive first? Would they hold the potential to shape perception before feeling even has a chance to form?

This is not a philosophical provocation. It is what we know about how human beings work. Before we act, we narrate to others and to ourselves. The internal language we carry about our sense of self, capacity, and worth becomes the emotional reality we inhabit. The terrain of a fulfilled life is built, in no small part, from the words we live inside.

Inquiry is a generative act

David Cooperrider’s work in Appreciative Inquiry reframed the field of organizational change and the way individuals navigate it. The questions organizations asked about themselves determined what they found – and what they found determined what became possible.

Ask “what’s broken?” and you discover a deficit. Ask “what’s alive and working?” and you discover energy, possibility, the latent strengths that have been there all along, often waiting for the right question to bring them into view.

This is a foundational insight of Appreciative Inquiry: inquiry is not neutral; it is generative. Asking “what’s alive and working?” goes beyond discovery towards creating a new reality.

Let me share some further context: one of the most ancient schools in Hinduism is the Bhakti tradition, where Kabir Das, a fifteenth-century mystic, speaks of shabd – word, in English. Kabir was a weaver and poet who lived in Banaras and wrote in plain, everyday language so that ordinary people could understand him. For him, shabd was not simply something we speak. It was the living word that shapes who we become – the word comes first; what we say, to others and to ourselves, quietly builds the reality we then live in.

This is the same truth The Fulfillment Institute works with, arriving from a much older place. The Fulfillment Institute (TFI) was founded on the principle of purna (Sanskrit for wholeness). The continuous reach for wholeness or fulfillment has been designed into the Four Dimensions of Fulfillment model, which in turn has become the model through which we cultivate fulfilment across ecosystems. This lens helps us build an internal capacity for fulfilment, holding self at the core while exploring harmony in relation to: self in self, self in relationships, self in work, and self in nature.

The words we carry about ourselves, our worth, and our work become the ground beneath a life. When we change the words, we change what becomes possible. This is why the reach toward purna – wholeness – begins with the stories we tell ourselves. To choose our words with care is not a small thing. It is, in the end, how we author a self.

When a person in their relationship with themselves or in a system begins to ask different questions of their own life and ecosystem, something shifts. This shift will not come from the question “why does this keep happening to me?” Rather it lies in “when have I felt most fully alive, what was true in those moments, and what worked for me when I felt like my best self?”

This principle is at the heart of cultivating human fulfillment. This is its meeting point with language, the discovery that language, and specifically the quality of our inquiry, is not incidental to the work of flourishing. It sets the ground for the work and allows us to move beyond solving into creating. How we present ourselves is a feature of the language we use. There is a particular moment that makes this real: the moment we introduce ourselves.

Watch what happens in a room when someone is asked to speak about who they are and what they do. Some people expand – they inhabit their words, they claim their story with quiet authority. Others contract – they qualify, they diminish, they rush past themselves as if their presence requires an explanation.

These are not personality differences. They are acts of language.

The way we introduce ourselves, describe our work, and tell our story are choices. And like all choices, they can be made consciously, from strength, from vision, from a place of genuine self-authorship. To speak ourselves into the room with clarity and care is not performance – it’s the opportunity to set the ground on which we build, heal, nurture, and repair.

Dialogue as a key dimension of fulfillment

The Fulfillment Institute’s Four Dimensions of Fulfillment (self, work, relationships, and nature) are not experienced in isolation. They emerge in conversation. How we engage others. How we listen. How we ask. And most importantly, how we speak to ourselves.

The dimension of self is shaped by the stories we tell about who we are – often, to ourselves. The dimension of relationships is shaped by the quality of our listening, the questions we bring, and the way we show up in dialogue. Even our relationship to nature – to community, to purpose, to the world beyond ourselves – is mediated by the words we use to locate ourselves within it.

Language is not one tool among many in the pursuit of fulfillment. It is the architecture of a fulfilled life.

Lastly, the lenses through which possibility is perceived

Appreciative Inquiry gives us a practice. Human fulfilment gives us the capacity, which, if leveraged, can help us build fulfilling lives. Language gives us the medium in which both can be realized.

The words we choose are the lenses through which possibility is perceived – or closed off.

To ask better questions of ourselves and of each other.

To listen to our internal narration with curiosity rather than compliance.

To step into the act of introduction, description, and dialogue, with the awareness that we are not simply reporting a self – we are, in an essential sense, authoring one.

This is what it means to recognize language not as a vehicle for fulfillment, but as its terrain. Not the path to the destination, but as the ground beneath our feet.

And the ground, it turns out, is far more responsive than we ever thought.