Cheri Williams spent much of her career inside child welfare believing she was helping save children.

Then she began questioning the story the system was telling — and her own role inside it.

In this conversation, Cheri talks about the moment that forced her to reconsider more than twenty years of work, why institutions can become attached to narratives that preserve their own power, and what happens when the people living a story are not the people authorized to define it.

We explore saviorism, lived experience, power, fear, compliance, imagination, and why systems can become so invested in the stories they already believe that alternative futures become difficult to imagine.

Cheri also offers a powerful definition of Narrative Intelligence: “careful stewardship” of the stories we tell ourselves, believe, and tell about other people.

And she ends somewhere important:

“I’m filled with hope.”

Because when people begin telling new stories, they find one another. Community forms. And what once seemed impossible can begin to become real.

Check out Imagination Factory's work: https://www.imgnfactory.org/

Teneia Sanders spent years building the life she thought she wanted: music, touring, travel, stages, and the identity of being an artist.

Then she got close enough to the dream to realize something unsettling:

It looked right. It didn’t feel right.

In this conversation, Teneia and I talk about growing up in Mississippi, divorce, creativity, belonging, moving to Spain, and what happens when the identity you worked so hard to build starts becoming too small for who you are becoming.

We also talk about tarot as a storytelling tool—and have a live moment where we interpret the same card in completely different ways. That opened up a question at the heart of Narrative Intelligence:

How much of what we believe comes from what happened—and how much comes from the meaning we learned to assign to it?

This episode is about laying down an old dream without calling it failure, learning to ask better questions, and making room for a life that feels more like home.

What if changing your story sometimes means changing the room?

Architect Angie Lipski has spent 30 years thinking about how the places we inhabit shape the way we feel, move, connect, remember, and live. In this conversation, we explore the possibility that our environments don’t simply contain our lives—they may continually reinforce certain ways of being.

Angie takes us inside the design of a Montana ranch, back to the sensory landscape of her grandmother’s home, and into the small rituals that make up ordinary life: morning light, coffee, thresholds, gathering places, and the spaces where we retreat.

We also explore a question at the heart of Narrative Intelligence: Can a new environment help us begin living toward a new identity before we fully know who we are becoming?

This episode expands the inquiry beyond the stories in our heads to the settings in which those stories are lived.

Connect with Angie: https://thesensorystudiolipski.com/