About Story Compass™

Story Compass™ began as something I needed for myself. I have a feeling there are other women who need the same. Here is part of my own story and the question underneath all of it: what happens when you spend a life being what you think everyone expects and then give yourself permission to come back to yourself?

Instead of playing and letting go, I scanned the faces for approval. That is my only memory of the class. A big part of me buried itself that afternoon – and stayed buried a long time.

The dream and the hedge

I became fluent in expectation and following along. I majored in economics because it sounded impressive, when English would have fit like a glove. I chose the pre-approved path, again and again.

And yet the dream would not leave. At twenty-four I finally said it out loud because it was about to burst out in some form. “I want to act,” I announced. Then I went and did it professionally, on screen and in theater, a thread still unspooling today. I remain a card-carrying SAG-AFTRA member, a membership I once dreamed about.

Here is the part, though, that tells you everything. In the very same season I claimed the dream, I applied to prestigious MBA programs. I got accepted and moved to Los Angeles to enroll full-time in business school, while studying acting at the same time, telling myself the hedge was wisdom. Then I took my newly minted MBA and dove straight into acting. 

Do you see it? I listened to my intuition and overruled it in a single breath. The safe plan won, and that pattern continued to play out. It included eleven years in management consulting, in a costume that eventually felt like a second skin because I couldn’t feel my own.

The question that persisted

What happens when you keep choosing the path that feels safe and is “what everyone else is doing,” but rails against your true self?

For me it compounded into a slow burnout that had nothing to do with being too busy and everything to do with being too far from myself. A strong intuitive nudge in 2020, during the pandemic, moved my family to the hill country just outside Atlanta. That move to Chattahoochee Hills blew the doors open on my connection to nature, intuition, other women, and a belief in the magic within us and around us.

I am still an actress. I am a storyteller. And I am, once again, giving myself permission to be fully me. This time feels different and Story Compass™ is what I built out of that permission. I built it first for myself and then for the many women I kept meeting who felt the same thing. Not as a guru with answers, but as a guide who has walked the road.

For most of my life, I was a chameleon.

From a young age I tuned into what the people around me felt, needed, and expected, and then I naturally rearranged myself to match. Call it people-pleasing, peacekeeping, or adapting. Whatever the words, it meant not really being myself. From the outside it read as easygoing, even-keeled, agreeable, and those traits carried me far. But a chameleon is always changing color to fit the room; a woman who does that for long enough loses track of her own. That was the cost. And for years it stayed nearly invisible, surfacing only as a low hum of searching, a tug-of-war between my true self and the self I performed for everyone else.

The moment I went into hiding

I was almost six, in a small theater, in the last session of an acting class I had begged to take, because a big outing to the regional “Annie” movie premiere at the Fox Theater in Atlanta sealed what I wanted to be. Asked to pretend to be an animal in front of a row of watching parents, I froze.

Dorothy Vollmer, Founder

THE GUIDE, NOT THE GURU