The Maya Angelou
Framework
Lived Authority & Poetic Courage
Maya Angelou shaped how their era thought about itself through distinctive voice and observational rigour. Maya Angelou's intellectual method, captured in this framework as mental models, decision heuristics, and the signature questions they would ask.
The lived authority & poetic courage framework distils Maya Angelou's documented approach into a .md skill file you can load into Claude, ChatGPT, or any LLM in seconds.
Where most AI personas generate generic output, this framework is grounded in real documented work: interviews, writing, published frameworks, and the specific decisions Maya Angelou made when it mattered. Use it for decision-making, writing, strategy, or any situation where you want your AI to think with Maya Angelou's distinctive patterns rather than a default model voice.
A glimpse of Maya Angelou's thinking.
Authority comes not from titles or permissions, but from the courage to speak what you have lived and survived. Your scars are credentials. The deepest power emerges when you transform your most painful experiences into bridges that help others cross their own dark waters.
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Five specific models, each named and explained with concrete examples, unlocked with purchase.
"What story am I afraid to tell, and who needs to hear it?"
4 more questions in Maya Angelou's voice are unlocked with purchase.
Full list of anti-patterns unlocked with purchase.
The full framework adds: detailed explanations of all five mental models with real-world examples, the decision heuristics Maya Angelou actually used, remaining signature questions, the complete list of anti-patterns, a copy-paste activation prompt, and a worked example.
Unlocked the moment you purchase. ~2,000 words total. Delivered as a Claude Skill and plain .md within 60 seconds of checkout.
- ✦Core philosophy: 2–3 sentences grounded in Maya Angelou's documented worldview
- ✦Five signature mental models: each named, with concrete examples from their work
- ✦Decision heuristics: the concrete rules they actually used
- ✦Signature questions: five questions that sound like Maya Angelou, not a generic MBA
- ✦What they would NOT do: the anti-patterns this framework rejects
- ✦Copy-paste activation prompt: drop straight into Claude or ChatGPT
- ✦Worked example: the framework applied to a realistic scenario
- →maya-angelou.zip: a native Claude Skill. Upload to Settings → Skills in Claude, or unzip to
~/.claude/skills/ - →maya-angelou-framework.md: plain markdown. Works in ChatGPT Custom GPTs, Gemini, Claude Projects, agent system prompts, anywhere
What it does with a real question.
A founder is deciding whether to take a large but difficult client.
Take the client only if you can stay yourself inside the contract. A large, difficult client is rarely a pure money question. It is a question of what the relationship will ask you to become. Some difficulty is just friction: demanding timelines, hard personalities, high standards. That can sharpen a company, and a founder who has survived hard rooms before knows how to hold one. Other difficulty is erosion: the client wants you to soften your judgment, stay quiet about problems, or treat your team as disposable. That kind costs more than any invoice pays back.
Here is my position. The size of the check is persuasive and the difficulty is information. Read the difficulty carefully. If they are hard because they care about the outcome, lean in. If they are hard because they need someone to absorb their disorder without ever naming it, walk away, however large the number.
Ask whether you can tell this client the truth about their own project and survive the telling. A client who punishes honesty will eventually demand that you perform a smaller, more agreeable version of your company. Authority in business works like authority anywhere: it depends on being able to say what you actually see.
Your next move: request a paid discovery phase of two to four weeks. Watch how they handle your first uncomfortable truth. Their response will tell you what the full engagement will cost you.
The full framework carries five models, decision heuristics, signature questions and a worked example.
Written by claude-sonnet-5-5 with this framework loaded, 2026-10-11. Checked automatically for length and for copied framework text.
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Works as a Claude Skill (.zip) and as a plain .md for ChatGPT, Gemini & every LLM
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Inspired by the documented thinking of Maya Angelou. A mental-model toolkit, not a literal representation. Delivered as a .md file compatible with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and any LLM.