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/

Former spy, author, and speaker Meegan Kriley-Mackay joins 100 Stories to explore human intelligence, Narrative Intelligence, artificial intelligence, soft interrogation, and what she calls the “human program.”

Meegan’s premise is that every person enters life inside a program they did not choose—family, culture, experiences, beliefs, expectations, and ways of interpreting the world.

Her model of human intelligence begins when we become aware of that program, question it, imagine beyond it, make choices, and learn to connect differently.

That creates a fascinating problem for this project.

Those ideas closely resemble the five capacities I’m exploring in Narrative Intelligence: Recognition, Discernment, Flexibility, Agency, and Enactment.

So Meegan and I spend part of this conversation asking whether Narrative Intelligence is its own capacity, a dimension of human intelligence, or whether we are approaching similar territory with different language.

We also talk about her path into intelligence work, interrogation training, active listening, open-ended questions, and what AI makes newly urgent about understanding human judgment and human capacity.

I leave this conversation with more questions than answers—which is exactly what this project is for.

What part of the program you inherited have you never stopped to question?

More about Meegan Kriley-Mackay: https://www.softinterrogator.com/

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

StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/

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

Strategist and qualitative researcher Farrah Bostic joins 100 Stories for a conversation about listening, human judgment, data, artificial intelligence, persuasion, and everything that can disappear when we reduce human experience to a transcript.

Farrah listens to people for a living.

For more than two decades, she has worked inside qualitative research, sitting with people in their homes and communities and helping organizations understand not simply what people say, but what those experiences might actually mean.

One of the clearest examples comes from a research project where the transcript suggested people were uncertain about an idea.

The room told another story.

People were smiling, laughing, touching the materials, and interacting with each other. Farrah told the client that reading the transcript alone would lead them toward the wrong conclusion.

That opens a much larger question:

How much of meaning exists outside language?

We talk about body language, emotion, environment, culture, power, status, and the interpretation the researcher brings into every listening experience.

Farrah also challenges the idea that data is neutral.

Every questionnaire begins with a question. Every question reflects some assumption about what matters. And every research project begins with at least a tentative story about what the researcher expects to find.

Narrative enters before the first answer is ever collected.

Then we turn to AI.

Farrah uses AI tools in her research and finds them useful for searching and summarizing large volumes of material. But she argues that they tend to privilege consensus over outliers and can miss the emotional, embodied, historical, and relational context that gives an experience its deeper meaning.

That matters because the unusual answer may be the beginning of something new.

We also explore cultural stories about generations, why narratives can survive evidence that contradicts them, and what separates data-driven decision-making from human judgment.

Near the end, Farrah offers a simple warning about stories:

We can get stuck in them.

A story can have been true and still not be the only story available to us now.

The question I’m leaving with:

What disappears when we confuse the words someone said with the meaning of their experience?

More about Farrah Bostic: https://thedifferenceengine.co/

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

StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/

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

Writer and entrepreneur Rachel Catherine Allen joins 100 Stories for a conversation about inherited narratives, family estrangement, religious identity, writing, personal agency, forgiveness, and how language shapes the stories we live by.

Rachel is the author of 23 books and founder of Bolt from the Blue Copywriting. She grew up in a deeply conservative religious family with a clear story about who she was supposed to become. Writing became one of the first places she could question that story and imagine another life.

She started journaling when she was nine. Years later, going no contact with her family forced her to rebuild her understanding of herself from the ground up.

Rachel describes a period when she had lost confidence in her own perception of reality and decided to begin with one thing she could trust: knowing when something hurt. From there came other questions. What feels safe? What makes me happy? Who do I want to become?

We talk about how inherited stories become identity, why seeing other people live differently can expand what feels possible, how words create worlds, and what it means to understand someone else’s narrative without giving that narrative authority over your life.

Rachel also talks about becoming many different versions of herself over time and why identity does not have to be a fixed destination.

The question I’m leaving with:

What story were you handed, and what are you doing with it now?

More about Rachel Catherine Allen: https://www.boltfromthebluecopywriting.com/

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

StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/

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

Stanford professor Dr. Jo Boaler joins 100 Stories for a conversation about growth mindset, identity, public narrative, mathematical ability, struggle, and the stories we develop about intelligence.

Jo has spent years studying what happens when people internalize ideas like “I’m bad at math,” “I’m gifted,” or “I’m smart.”

Then she found herself inside a public story she did not create.

After her work in math education became nationally controversial, Jo received thousands of abusive messages and death threats and watched a version of herself circulate through media and social media that she did not recognize as her own.

We talk about what happens to your sense of identity when other people gain the power to define you publicly, how Jo protected her own understanding of who she was, and what she learned about struggle, creativity, courage, and the space between what happens to us and the meaning we make from it.

This conversation also changed the Narrative Intelligence Project.

I asked Jo whether Narrative Intelligence should be reduced to a single score. Her answer helped me see how easily a number can become another fixed story about a person.

So in this episode, I made a decision: the overall Narrative Quotient score is going away.

The question I’m leaving with:

When someone else tells a powerful story about who you are, how do you decide what belongs to you?

More about Jo Boaler: https://www.youcubed.org/

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

StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/

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

Actor, writer, leadership consultant, and author Pam Sherman joins 100 Stories for a conversation about identity, leadership, authenticity, personal narrative, and what she calls the “believability gap” — the distance between who we think we are, how we believe we’re showing up, and how other people actually experience us.

Pam spent years moving between law, acting, writing, and leadership work. Her own story raises a question that sits at the center of Narrative Intelligence: what happens when the identity you have been living no longer fits?

We talk about the stories we inherit about success, work, and who we are supposed to become; what it takes to behave differently when an old story is still present; and why insight alone rarely creates change.

Pam also challenges one of our culture’s favorite ideas: authenticity.

Knowing yourself matters. So does listening, empathy, relationship, and paying attention to the impact you have on other people.

That tension led us into a bigger question for the Narrative Intelligence Project: Is emotional intelligence part of the foundation for Narrative Intelligence? And what happens when someone understands their story but still struggles to act differently?

The question I’m leaving with:

How different is the person you believe yourself to be from the person other people actually experience?

More about Pam Sherman: https://www.thepamsherman.com/my-story

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

StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/

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