Are you a Pattern Whisperer, Ritual Alchemist, or Inner Storyteller?
- alicepailhes
- Jun 22
- 5 min read
Welcome to the WonderMaker Scale: A new psychological tool to explore how we use story, symbol, and ritual to navigate life.
Over the past year, I’ve been quietly working on something that weaves together many threads from my life — psychology, belief, imagination, ritual, and meaning-making. The result is The WonderMaker Scale.
But if I’m being honest, the real origin goes back much further. I’ve always carried two parts of myself that felt, for a long time, at odds. One part of me is deeply rational. I trained as a scientist. I love research, evidence, and the clarity of well-designed experiments. But another part of me has always been drawn to things that live outside the lab: symbolic gestures, emotionally charged rituals, the quiet intuition that something feels right before it can be explained. For years, I felt the tension between those two identities. Was I too skeptical to embrace the mystical? Too dreamy to be truly scientific?
Eventually, I stopped fighting it.
I came to understand that both sides are and can be part of my world, and are completely valid. That we can value empirical truth and still find strength in the small symbolic acts that steady us: a ritual before a challenge, a phrase whispered to shift our mindset, or a coincidence we choose to let guide us, not because it's objectively true, but because it works or help us. That meaning doesn’t always need to be proven to be powerful. I don’t consider myself someone with strong “magical thinking” tendencies, but I do love playing with symbolic ideas, especially when they support wellbeing, clarity, or creative performance. That gentle flexibility — between logic and metaphor, story and structure — has, I think, become one of my greatest strengths. And that’s exactly what the WonderMaker Scale is designed to explore.
It asks: Why do some people naturally turn to signs, stories, or rituals to guide their choices and regulate their emotions, while others prefer realism, logic, and direct action? Can we measure this inner tendency in a way that’s meaningful, non-judgmental, and maybe even empowering?
The WonderMaker Scale is my attempt to answer that, and to give others a mirror to explore how they make meaning, in their own way.
A quick overview of the scale
The WonderMaker Scale was developed over several months and tested with hundreds of participants across different backgrounds. It measures four core levels of “WonderMaking” — from low to very high — based on how likely you are to engage with metaphor, ritual, or personal symbolism as a form of inner navigation.
It’s about how you process the world internally, whether you naturally find meaning in patterns, turn experiences into personal stories, or anchor your emotions through small, symbolic actions.
There are also three symbolic styles people tend to favor:
🌀 The Pattern Whisperer – spotting subtle signs, synchronicities, or intuitive alignments
🔥 The Ritual Alchemist – using repeated actions to ground and shift emotional states
📖 The Inner Storyteller – finding growth through personal narrative and metaphor
Your result combines both your level and your style, resulting in a unique profile like The Curious Synthesizer, The Intuitive Connector, or The Grounded Storyteller . And yes, even people who don’t resonate with symbolic thinking at all can still get a meaningful reflection. That was important to me.
The psychology behind it
While the scale sounds poetic, it’s rooted in real psychological science. It draws on research in:
Openness to experience
Magical thinking and intuitive belief systems
Narrative identity theory
Emotion regulation through ritual
Self-priming and symbolic cognition
I wanted to make something that felt personal, reflective, and gently transformative , like holding up a mirror and catching a glimpse of how your mind wants to work.
How it was created (and validated)
Here’s a peek behind the curtain:
I wrote an initial pool of over 60 items based on literature in psychological research.
Participants answered questions like:“I sometimes act as if the universe is on my side.”“I create small rituals to help mark transitions.”“I often describe my life as a story with chapters, turning points, and lessons.”
Using psychometric analysis, I refined the scale to identify key patterns and discard weak or redundant items.
From this data, I built a validated short version — a more accessible tool that still captures the richness of the full experience.
This couldn’t have happened without the participants who offered their time, insight, and curiosity. Many also left their email to receive a personal summary and have received a 2 page PDF with details on their profile such as the one below.
How this can be useful — For you, and for others
In a world that often privileges logic, speed, and external productivity, I believe we need tools that help us slow down and reflect. Tools that validate the symbolic, the intuitive, the meaningful.
Whether you’re someone who reads signs in nature, lights a candle before working, or simply reinterprets setbacks as part of a bigger story — you are, in your own way, a WonderMaker.
And if you’re not? That’s okay too. Grounded thinking is just as powerful. This isn’t about ranking people. It’s about recognizing and honoring our different internal languages.
The WonderMaker Scale doesn’t just describe you. It gives you tools for reflection, growth, and even performance.
Whether you're a Grounded Storyteller or a Ritual Alchemist, your profile offers clues about:
How you find meaning in life’s challenges
What kind of habits and rituals support your emotional resilience
How you process transitions, decisions, and turning points
For individuals: It’s a mirror. You’ll recognize parts of yourself, and maybe discover new ways to intentionally use narrative, ritual, or symbolic cues in everyday life.
For coaches and facilitators: It’s a fresh lens on personality. These profiles can guide how you work with clients, helping you tailor strategies that align with their natural psychological tendencies.
For leaders and teams: Rituals and symbolic actions can be powerful tools for creating culture, navigating change, and sustaining well-being. This scale can offer a grounded way to explore the human, meaning-making side of high performance.
What’s Next?
I’ve just launched the next phase of the project:
Sharing profile summaries in illustrated PDF form
Gathering feedback from participants
Running new studies on how WonderMaking affects things like creative performance, emotional resilience, and even placebo responses
And slowly building out Alice’s WonderLab — a research-meets-magic space for experimental psychology, imagination, and symbolic thinking
If you'd like to:
I believe psychology should feel personal, creative, and alive. The WonderMaker Scale is one piece of that vision — a bridge between science and story, between data and meaning.
Thank you for reading and for being curious!
With magic (and science!),
Alice
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