Inspired by the educational challenge of pinning down what makes an effective speech pathologist, this presentation will draw together important threads to reveal some of the true heroes of our profession. Central here are the theories that underpin our practice. Theories of how language and communication work, of what makes our interventions work, of how we can make the most difference through our choices in therapy, and of what makes us and our clients tick. What are the critical ingredients of an effective speech pathologist, of an effective therapy, of an effective therapeutic alliance, and how might these help us decide where to go next? How might telling stories, or offering an opinion, exemplify these questions for us as clinicians? Discourse-level interventions are relatively new on the scene in some areas of clinical practice, particularly acquired language disorders, while have long been a mainstay, even bedrock, of child language interventions that have revolved around the bedtime story or aimed to bridge the oral-literate divide through the development of narratives. This presentation will weave its own narrative around discourse-level interventions, highlighting how these approaches tap into lexical theories, sentence processing theories, discourse organisation, and the cognitive underpinnings of language, and how viewing this multi-layering of language in context may hold some of the answers to questions around generalisation, impact and making the greatest difference. The remaining heroes rest in what we do with our knowledge, how we reflect, how we integrate, and what we question.