What if the story shaping your life feels less like a story and more like reality?

Chris Hoff is a narrative therapist, futurist, cultural architect, and founder of the California Family Institute. His work explores how the stories people live inside shape what they believe is possible—and how those stories can begin to loosen.

Chris tells me about a transformative period in his own life when he began experimenting with telling a different story about himself. That shift eventually accompanied profound changes in his life, including entering recovery, returning to school, and building an entirely different professional path.

We talk about what narrative therapy calls a problem story, why becoming conscious of one doesn’t necessarily make it disappear, and why Chris believes the goal isn’t simply to replace a “bad” story with a “good” one.

Instead, he asks: How do you want to be in relationship with this story?

We also explore his concept of defuturing—looking at the fears, relationships, identities, financial realities, cultural forces, and systems of power already shaping the futures we believe are available to us.

Chris argues that the future is never a blank slate. Before someone can move toward a different possibility, they may need to understand what is making that possibility feel unreachable in the first place.

We also talk about inherited stories, the pull of the known and familiar, the importance of community in change, and the limits of individual agency when social conditions constrain what people can actually do.

And Chris raises a provocative possibility: sometimes we don’t create a new story and then act.

Sometimes we act first, and the story changes afterward.

This conversation left me thinking about Narrative Intelligence as something more nuanced than simply “changing your story.” A story can remain present while our relationship to it changes. And our capacity to imagine another future may depend partly on making visible the forces shaping the future we currently believe is possible.

What story is shaping the future that you think is available to you?

More about Chris Hoff: https://www.drchrishoff.com/
More about Paige Williams: https://paigewilliams.co/
StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/
The 100 Stories Project: https://100storiesproject.com/

Jerry Colonna, author and founder of Reboot, joins 100 Stories for a conversation about radical self-inquiry, childhood, safety, belonging, compassion, agency, and the stories that continue shaping us long after the circumstances that created them are gone.

Jerry shares the pivotal moment when, after years of depression and increasing professional success, he chose to stay alive—and eventually stepped away from his career as an investor to begin the work that would lead him to coaching.

At the heart of Jerry’s work is a question:

“How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?”

He explains why this question is about curiosity rather than self-blame.

What are we protecting?

What need are we trying to meet?

Why do we stay in relationships, jobs, patterns, and stories that hurt us?

Jerry says many of these patterns begin in our attempts to find love, safety, and belonging. They may have helped us survive once. Years later, we may still be obeying them.

We talk about compassion as a bridge between awareness and action, the danger of leaders bringing unexamined stories into positions of power, intergenerational narratives, and what happens when we finally examine the stories that have shaped us.

And when I ask Jerry what Narrative Intelligence means to him, his answer is simple:

You are not your story.

The question I’m leaving with:

What story are you still living because it once helped keep you safe—and who might you become if you no longer had to obey it?

Content note: This episode includes discussion of depression and suicide.

More about Jerry Colonna: https://www.reboot.io/

More about Paige Williams: https://paigewilliams.co/

StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/

The 100 Stories Project: https://100storiesproject.com/

Writer, director, producer, and creative strategist Ryan Cunningham joins 100 Stories for a conversation about ADHD, identity, comedy, representation, creativity, and the stories we construct around our lives.

Ryan’s ADHD diagnosis changed the way she understood her past.

The events themselves stayed exactly where they were. What changed was the meaning she gave them.

Things she had interpreted as personal shortcomings suddenly had context. And with that context came a different relationship with herself: more kindness, more understanding, and less fighting against how her mind actually works.

We talk about meditation, directing, comedy, representation, and the moment Ryan stopped waiting for permission to lead creatively.

Then Ryan offers several ideas that push my thinking about Narrative Intelligence.

What happened and the story we construct about what happened are different things.

A useful story has to be strong enough to hold complexity.

And sometimes intelligence may require recognizing that something does not need to become a story at all.

What in your past might mean something different if you had more context now?

More about Ryan Cunningham: https://www.instagram.com/ryanecunningham

More about Paige Williams: https://paigewilliams.co/

StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/

The 100 Stories Project: https://100storiesproject.com/