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/