Peter de Kuster’s The Hero’s Journey: What Story Are You Living?
A Transformational Private Tour & Immersive Journey Experience in Paris
Introduction
Step onto the timeless path of mastery and transformation with Peter de Kuster’s The Hero’s Journey: What Story Are You Living? This bespoke Paris experience invites you to discover and transform the narrative shaping your life, awakening your inner hero and inspiring your pursuit of excellence. The journey blends powerful storytelling, mythic insight, and contemporary coaching—set in the heart of Paris, a city forever marked by reinvention, vision, and story.
Choose between a half-day private tour, a full-day immersive exploration, or a multi-day transformational journey. Each option is designed to ignite your imagination and real-world impact, drawing deep lessons from the lives and places that have shaped Parisian and global culture.
The Essence of The Hero’s Journey—In Paris
Rooted in enduring narrative tradition, The Hero’s Journey maps the adventure, challenge, transformation, and return of the hero. Peter de Kuster adapts this archetype into a living Parisian experience, taking you through both real and imagined journeys: from fiction and biography to the lived stories of icons like Philippe Starck.
As you walk in the footsteps of visionaries—like Starck, who revolutionized design with imagination and courage—your own journey comes into sharper focus, giving meaning to your leadership, creativity, and capacity for renewal.
Who This Journey Is For
This enriched Paris tour is ideal for:
- Entrepreneurs, executives, and professionals drawn to leadership and personal transformation
- Individuals eager to meet challenges as opportunities for meaningful change
- Innovators and creators yearning to align purpose and impact
- Anyone who craves to rediscover authenticity through myth, story, and the lessons of Parisian icons
The program is inclusive, inviting participants from all backgrounds to add to the rich, shared narrative of heroism.
The Power of Fiction, Biography, and Paris Icons
Every meaningful story is an invitation to transformation. In Paris, legendary fiction is woven into every stone (think Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), while lives like those of Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, and Hemingway fill the Left Bank with echoes of courage and reinvention. Your tour will include personal and coaching-based connections to spaces and tales associated with these and other pivotal figures.
The Modern Hero: Philippe Starck in Focus
A special inspiration is Philippe Starck, born in Paris. Starck, one of the world’s most prolific and influential designers, embodies the Parisian tradition of boundary-breaking innovation and playful creativity. His early work redefining the Paris nightclub scene, his commission to redesign the Elysée Palace, and his iconic products and public works—like the Café Costes—are milestones of modern storytelling. Starck’s journey teaches how to blend art, commerce, and personal vision, proving that the true hero’s path is never linear but always inventive.
Tour & Journey Options
Half-Day Private Tour: Commence Your Quest
4–5 hours
A focused introduction to your heroic narrative, weaving coaching, mythic storytelling, and on-site reflection in locations pivotal to Paris’s—and your—story of challenge and victory.
Price: From € 995 excluding VAT
Sample highlights:
- Personal coaching session with Peter
- Visits to 2–3 symbolic Paris sites, such as Café de Flore or Café Costes (Philippe Starck’s legendary creation)
- Mapping of your current narrative arc in correlation with heroes like Victor Hugo or Starck
- Quiet reflection in storied parks or courtyards
Full-Day Private Tour: Embody the Hero
7–8 hours
Immersive narrative transformation, including walks through legendary Paris venues, interactive coaching modules, creativity rituals, and personal storytelling labs inspired by the innovation of figures like Starck.
Price: From € 1.595 excluding VAT
Sample highlights:
- In-depth narrative diagnostics and hero mapping
- Exploration of creative sites—Starck’s design works, the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, and Left Bank salons
- Journaling and guided visualization in creative venues
- VIP gathering in a Parisian design space associated with Starck or other cultural legends
Multi-Day Immersive Journey: Complete Your Hero’s Transformation
3–5 days
Immerse yourself fully, integrating lessons from Paris’s greatest stories, Starck’s life, and your own. Combine creative group sessions, personal visioning, urban explorations, and exclusive access to cultural leaders.
Price: Starting at €3.450 excluding VAT tailored to depth/needs
Your Guide: Peter de Kuster
Peter’s world-class background in storytelling, business, and coaching weaves Paris’s heroic heritage with your personal quest. Whether you’re drawing lessons from a Starck design, a Hemingway haunt, or the fictional odyssey of Valjean, Peter helps you unlock purpose, resilience, and creative power.
Why The Hero’s Journey—Paris?
- Experience the narrative of Paris, fiction and biography, through powerful immersion
- Connect your personal journey to the reinvention, mastery, and playfulness of figures like Philippe Starck
- Align your story with real-world leadership, creative, and visionary practices
- Join a select community transforming the archetypal journey into lived excellence
Why Choose this Private Tour Format?
- Deeply personalized coaching tuned to your unique story and timing.
- Cultural immersion in Paris’s iconic narratives as catalysts for your transformation.
- Integration of powerful storytelling methods with pragmatic leadership and financial strategies.
Extended Engagement Opportunities
- Company Tours: Group experiences for firms engaging teams with the power of storytelling.
- Licensing Program: Train as an advisor or coach to deliver Peter de Kuster’s program independently.
Begin Your Parisian Hero’s Journey
Ask, What story am I destined to live?
Step into Paris, embodying tradition and innovation, inspired by Starck’s spirit and the city’s infinite tales.
The Hero’s Journey with Peter de Kuster is your gateway to authentic leadership and creative distinction.
About Peter de Kuster
Peter de Kuster is the founder of The Heroine’s Journey & Hero’s Journey project, a storytelling firm which helps creative professionals to create careers and lives based on whatever story is most integral to their lives and careers (values, traits, skills and experiences). Peter’s approach combines in-depth storytelling and marketing expertise, and for over 20 years clients have found it effective with a wide range of creative business issues.
Peter is writer of the series The Heroine’s Journey and Hero’s Journey books, he has an MBA in Marketing, MBA in Financial Economics and graduated at university in Sociology and Communication Sciences.
Here is an introduction to this seminar:
HOW AND WHY WE LIVE STORIES
We are storytelling creatures. Listen to people talking in a restaurant, at the water cooler or at a party and you will quickly find that the majority of what they say is in the form of stories. We connect by telling each other stories. We can better understand ourselves by recognizing and exploring our life narratives. Your life story is the tale that your repeatedly tell yourself about who you are, what you want, what you can and cannot do. Before the second year of life, we are sensitive to the tone of stories lived around us, and we have already begun collecting thousands of images that resonate emotionally with us in some important way. At first the plots are inconsistent and illogical – much as our dreams continue to be. By elementary school , we follow particular rules about the beginning, middle and ending of stories, so they begin to make sense. By adolescence, we tell ourselves consistent stories about our lives that define who we are, how we came to be that way, and where we are headed. We see events that we can recount as vignettes of our central life narrative.
Although there are as many variations of life stories as there are individuals, people tend to crete narratives according to a finite number of templates. There are a very small number of general narrative forms in the world’s literature, movies, art. The same is true of characters and the roles they play. How can this be?
In the first part of the twentieth century, the psychiatrist Carl Jung recognized the universality of characters and situations. Just as there are certain musical tones that sound resonant across cultures, there are similarly a universal set of roles, situations and themes that are recognizable by everyone. These universal templates are called archetypes, which is derived from the Greek archetypos, meaning ‘molded first as a model’ (Merriam Webster 2002). Jung, and many other after him, saw that these stories which recur in literature and art are the same narratives we as humans live. For example we all recognize the love story whether we encounter it in a movie, an opera , or a novel. And when we fall in love, we experience for ourselves what that story is about. When we are in a loving relationship, we not only learn major life lessons (in this case about intimacy, sensuality, pleasure, and commitment) but we also feel a sense of connection to all the other people who have ever loved deeply. While each love is different, there is a deep pattern that transcends these differences. When we understand the stories and recognize their universality, we can connect with each other at deeper and more conscious levels, using the archetypal stories as the foundation.
This may be especially true of the sacred myths of cultures, which are particularly archetypal, as they express in metaphor people’s actual experiences. These stories do not necessarily have to be taken literally. Rather, the concrete outward actions symbolize inner experiences. We read the story of an outward journey and something resonates in our inward journey.
This is why people talk about ‘life journeys’, even if they have never outwardly left the town where they grew up. People connect immediately to a journey story from another culture finding resonance with the characters and the form and the phases of the journey, even if the particular details are not familiar. Such stories influence people for good or ill. Archetypal stories can provide breakthroughs in insight and move people toward harmony and success, but such stories are equally able to tempt people toward less productive, even destructive behaviors. Either way, an understanding of the archetypal narrative can enhance insight or enable people to break free of destructive patterns.
The archetypal stories described in this seminar are those associated with the heroine’s journey, which is a model for the individuation process (the process of finding yourself and connecting to your depth and your full potential). They are named by the primary character in each story: Dreamer, Independent, Warrior, Caregiver, Explorer, Lover, Outlaw, Creator, Master, Magician, Sage and Jester.
Living the Stories in Everyday Life: Stages and Situations
When we are living a particular story, we tend to see the world from its vantage point. What we notice in the world and what actions we think make sense grow naturally from that story. For example when someone who is living a Warrior story is having a difficult time with another person she may react in a strong and challenging way, defending her own position. If this person were living a Caregiver story, however, she might instead show concern for what was causing the other person to be difficult, seeking to understand and reassure. When we develop narrative intelligence, we are able to see why we react the way we do and understand the different assumptions and behaviors of others.
There are a host of characters and situations from which these stories are drawn. Such characters have come to be known as archetypes, and they define basic stories, although for each person the details will be unique. These archetypes can be looked at as guides that help us know when we are on our best path and taking the most appropriate action. Your results from the Heroine’s Journey questionnaire help you identify these characters as a way to make sense out of the stories you are living, which allows you to create a richer and more satisfying life.
Many people recognize over time that there is one story that provides the central meaning and purpose of their lives. In addition, other stories are lived out at different times and places. If you think about it, you may notice that different stages of life have offered you new situations, new scenery, new people to be with, even the unfolding of a new storyline. You can see such situations as a stage set, with costumes and supporting characters that seem to pull you into a story line (the plot to be lived out). Such settings have immense power.
Certain life stages typically place us in situations that invite us into specific narratives. For example: if you had a very happy childhood, you likely lived the story of the Dreamer (Innocence). Others were caring for you, and you simply had to trust their wisdom, experiment, and learn what to do to succeed. Living this story provided you with a baseline sense of trust and optimism about life. Living this story provided you with a baseline sense of trust and optimism about life. If, on the other hand, your childhood was difficult you may have lived an Orphan story. This does not mean that you were literally orphaned (although it could). Rather it means that the adults in your life were too distracted, unskilled or wounded to care for you properly (physically, emotionally or intellectually). In this case, you may have experienced a story that had as theme the challenge of coping in a situation of minor or major deprivation or wounding. Likely this would provide a baseline approach to life that was more cautious and realistic, even pessimistic. Or you might have lived both stories – either sequentially (if your life situation changed) or the same time (if your experience with the caregivers in your life was mixed).
As you grew older; you may have become less dependent upon your parents and other authority figures, wanting to explore your own identity and the world outside. You might even have become somewhat oppositional, especially in your adolescent years. You might think of this as living an Explorer story; which exemplifies the gifts of independence and identiy. At roughly this same time in life, you may have become interested in romance; and so you began living out a Lovers’ story; developing the gifts of intimacy and sensuality. This may have led to marriage and children in which case you suddenly needed to live the story of the Caregiver, demonstrating the ability to nurture and even sacrifice for others.
The list of stories we may live at different stages of our lives can go on and on. The major point here is that success in life is often determined by how well we live out these stories, for it is in the living thtat we develop in mature, responsible, moral and successful adults.
So many people today talk about the need for character – in public officials, in the heads of corporations, and in the young. However character cannot be formed by simply enjoining people to act appropiately. We all know from making New Year’s resolutions that simply deciding to do or not do something is not enough to guarantee success. Becoming good, moral and successful requires knowledge of how to develop the inner qualities that make it easy to do so. Every life situation carries within it a call to live a story that offers experiences that can make us great – or, conversely, bring out what is petty, small or harmful within us. It is much easier to avoid the slippery slope of life’s negative temptations and traps when we can recognize the positive potential within situations.
The stories identified in this seminar link everyday life twith the great, mythic stories that inform what it means to be human. Many people, however, sleepwalk through stories that emerge naturally in certain life stages and life situations and consequently they lack a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. At worst, living in this unconscious way decreases their ability to gain the gifts associated from living the great stories; leaves them feeling alone with their problems, and decreases their ability to become the kind of mature and wise people capable of making a positive difference to their families, friends, community and field of work. When people lack the ability to know what story they are living, they may fail to develop the qualities required to take adult responsibility for the state of their families, communities and the larger world.
When we recognize that we are living a unique personal story, as well as one of the universal great narratives , our lives can be filled with meaning, purpose and dignity. At the same time, we feel less lonely because we can see that we share commonality with all the people in all times and places, who have lived through the challenges of that story.
The Hero's Journey 