100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project

Why is understanding what needs to change so often not enough to actually change?

In this episode of 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project, Paige Williams speaks with Courtney Townley about transformation, self-leadership, behavior change, identity, and what she has learned from coaching thousands of women.

Courtney’s own transformation began after becoming a mother. Although people around her praised how quickly she had lost the baby weight, she was struggling internally—with identity, relationships, and what health actually meant. At the same time, she was watching clients transform physically and then gradually return to their old behaviors.

It forced her to confront a larger question:

What if knowing the right thing to do—or even achieving the desired outcome—isn’t enough to create lasting change?

In this conversation, Paige and Courtney explore:

• Why recognizing a story does not automatically change behavior
• Courtney’s “shit moment”—when we can no longer avoid what we see
• The difference between awareness and radical ownership
• Why meaningful transformation requires practice
• How new behavior can create evidence for a new story
• Why people repeatedly fall back into old patterns
• The difference between discipline and devotion
• Courtney’s idea of “consistent self-honoring”
• Why realignment may matter more than perfect consistency
• How to know when you need to recommit—and when you have simply outgrown the goal
• Self-trust, boundaries, capacity, and the power of the pause
• What caring for aging parents can teach us about changing ourselves instead of trying to control others

One of the central ideas emerging from this conversation for Narrative Intelligence is that transformation may not move neatly from new story → new behavior.

Sometimes it may work in the other direction too:

We act differently. We create new evidence. And eventually, we become capable of believing a different story about ourselves.

Courtney defines Narrative Intelligence as recognizing your own authorship: becoming conscious of the story you are living and deciding whether it is actually yours to keep writing.

Courtney Townley: https://graceandgrit.com/

What’s your NQ? Take the Narrative Quotient assessment at StoryKeys.co.

Subscribe to 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project and follow along as Paige Williams learns from 100 people about one central question: How malleable are the stories we live by, and what does it take to change one?

In this episode of 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project, Paige Williams speaks with Julie Fogh, co-founder of Vital Voice Training, about the stories carried not only in our words, but in our voices, bodies, breath, silence, and the ways we have learned to communicate in order to belong or stay safe.

Julie traces her own journey from a deeply shy child in the Pacific Northwest to acting, voice work, and eventually helping others expand beyond the communication habits they have inherited. She challenges the idea that each of us has one singular “authentic voice.” Instead, she sees authenticity as access to greater range, choice, expression, and more of who we already are.

Julie also shares the story of leaving her life in New York after reaching a breaking point. For years she interpreted that moment as failure. Over time, the story changed. What once looked like collapse began to look like recognition that the life she had built no longer fit who she was.

The conversation explores the stories workplaces tell about confidence, charisma, introversion, and leadership; why silence is not necessarily a problem to be fixed; the difference between protective communication habits and limitation; and what happens when we begin using our voices without waiting to become perfect.

One of Julie’s most important contributions to Narrative Intelligence comes in her definition: stories are the connective tissue between events. Narrative Intelligence, she suggests, is becoming aware of the meaning we have placed between those events and recognizing that the connective tissue may be more flexible than we think.

And Julie is still inside one of her own unfolding stories. She is writing about her mother, their relationship, loss, and the things she has not yet said publicly. We do not yet know how telling that story will change her. That unfinishedness is part of the inquiry too.

Take the Narrative Quotient assessment and join the inquiry at StoryKeys.co.

Learn more about Julie's work and company here: https://www.vitalvoicetraining.com/

What changes when someone feels genuinely heard?

Thaler Pekar has spent more than three decades helping leaders and organizations uncover the stories shaping their cultures, decisions, and relationships. In this conversation, she and Paige explore why Narrative Intelligence is not simply the ability to tell a compelling story. It is also the capacity to ask for stories, listen for what is missing, remain open to contradiction, and recognize the larger narrative landscape surrounding us.

Through stories of civic action, a near-drowning, organizational myths, and gathering 178 oral histories for Atlantic Philanthropies, Thaler reveals how people make meaning after an experience and how being heard can transform both individuals and institutions.

They also explore why leaders must understand the stories already circulating before introducing a new strategy, the ethics of holding another person’s story, and Thaler’s powerful definition of story as “input and output, process and product.”

This episode asks us to become more curious, courageous listeners and to make room for the messy, unfinished, and wonderfully squiggly nature of human meaning.

Learn more about Thaler Pekar and her work:
https://thalerpekar.com/

Discover your story archetypes, hidden patterns, and Narrative Quotient at StoryKeys:
https://storykeys.co/

In this episode of 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project, Paige Williams speaks with dancer, filmmaker, educator, and movement practitioner Quentin Robinson about the stories carried through the body, the cultural history embedded in hip hop, and the ways movement can reveal what language alone cannot.

Quentin shares how dance helped him move across dangerous neighborhood boundaries, created unexpected connection between people divided by history and conflict, and gave emotion a form when words were not enough.

At the center of the conversation is the story of a student who had been labeled difficult and disengaged. Through a writing and movement exercise, the student revealed circumstances his teacher had never understood. When he reached the word compassion, he stopped. He knew the word, but he could not find a gesture for it. That moment changed the teacher’s story about who the student was.

Paige and Quentin also explore the history and commercialization of hip hop, why movement must be understood within its cultural context, and how the stories attached to bodies shape recognition, opportunity, and power.

Quentin’s contribution to Narrative Intelligence is clear: stories do not live only in language. They also live in movement, memory, culture, and lived experience. Movement can create new evidence, change how a person is seen, and make another story possible.

Take the Narrative Quotient assessment at StoryKeys.co, and subscribe to 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project wherever you listen to podcasts.

In this episode of 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project, Paige Williams speaks with filmmaker, writer, actor, producer, and social worker Joseph Grady about sobriety, adoption, cultural separation, belonging, and reclaiming the parts of a story that were once missing.

Joseph was born Blackfeet and adopted as a child into a white Irish Catholic family during an era of Indigenous child removal and assimilation. He grew up loved, but disconnected from the language, family, culture, and community he came from. Years later, through education, relationships, and the making of his documentary Return to the Blanket, he began filling in those missing pieces.

Joseph also shares the moment that ended nearly eighteen years of alcoholism, the sense of purpose that followed, and why he now sees his life not as a story he would erase, but as one he has learned to integrate.

His contribution to Narrative Intelligence is powerful: reclaiming a story does not require rejecting everything that came before it. It can mean holding complexity, making room for multiple identities, and practicing cultural humility by recognizing how much we still have to learn.

Take the Narrative Quotient assessment at StoryKeys.co, and subscribe to 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can follow Joseph at https://www.instagram.com/joseph.grady.792

In this episode of 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project, Paige Williams speaks with Ann Shoket, CEO and owner of The Li.st and founder of Ten Minutes to Togetherness, about ambition, belonging, community, and the stories that shape what we believe is possible.

Ann reflects on the evolution of her career, from building an early digital publication out of a tiny Lower East Side apartment, to becoming editor in chief of Seventeen, writing The Big Life, and eventually acquiring The Li.st.

Together, Paige and Ann explore why success is not a solo sport, how community expands the futures we can imagine, and why listening to other people’s stories can challenge and revise our own. Ann also shares how her understanding of imposter syndrome changed after listening to people whose experiences of professional spaces differed from hers.

Her contribution to Narrative Intelligence is especially clear: it is not only about the stories we tell, but also the stories we listen to, follow, and believe.

Learn more about Ann at theli.st and 10minutestotogetherness.com.

Take the Narrative Quotient assessment at StoryKeys.co, and subscribe to 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project wherever you listen to podcasts.

Social worker, systems-change leader, and Imagination Factory co-founder Matt Anderson joins 100 Stories for a conversation about foster care, storytelling, professional identity, values fatigue, systems change, and what happens when your work no longer reflects what you believe.

Early in Matt’s career, he was helping young people prepare to age out of foster care when one of them, Cody, stopped him with a question:

“Do you even know my story?”

Matt realized he didn’t.

He sat down and listened, and that conversation changed the direction of his life.

Cody wanted people to understand what growing up in foster care had actually been like. He believed his story mattered and wanted to make a movie about it.

That idea eventually became From Place to Place, the documentary Matt and I made together about young people aging out of foster care.

Years later, Matt faced another major turning point.

He had spent much of his professional life trying to reform the child welfare system. Eventually, he began to see a widening gap between his values and the work he was doing.

He calls that experience “values fatigue.”

We talk about what happens when a professional identity stops fitting, why Matt left a major job without knowing exactly what came next, and how he rebuilt his work around a clearer understanding of who he wanted to be.

We also explore curiosity, humility, courage, inherited stories, systems change, and Matt’s belief that our lives can change one sentence at a time.

One sentence changed his life:

“Do you even know my story?”

The question I’m leaving with:

What sentence has entered your life that you might need to take more seriously?

More about Matt Anderson: https://www.imgnfactory.org/

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

StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/

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

What if your exhaustion is not a personal failing?

Sleep educator and patient advocate Lindsay Scola lived with symptoms of narcolepsy for 19 years before receiving a diagnosis. During that time, she hid naps in public bathrooms, pushed herself to keep pace with high-performing colleagues, and believed needing sleep meant she was less capable.

In this conversation, Lindsay and I explore the cultural stories that teach us to treat sleep as lazy, inconvenient, or something we can postpone until the work is finished.

We talk about:

• The shame Lindsay carried before her narcolepsy diagnosis
• Why receiving the right language changed how she understood herself
• Common warning signs of sleep apnea and other sleep disorders
• The relationship between sleep, creativity, memory, health, and agency
• Why midlife, hormones, and ADHD can change how women experience sleep
• The problem with rigid sleep routines and obsessive sleep tracking
• Why telling her story became part of Lindsay’s purpose
• What it means to rewrite our relationship with rest

Sleep is not what gets in the way of our lives. It is one of the things making our lives possible.

This conversation is part of 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project, an exploration of how the stories we inherit and repeat shape our identities, choices, relationships, health, and capacity to change.

Connect with Lindsay: https://www.lindsayscola.com/

Watch the TED Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8ykomUh6-Y

In the first episode of 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project, Paige Williams speaks with conceptual multimedia artist Eyoälha Baker about joy, Indigenous identity, cultural memory, healing, and the stories we learn to live by.

Eyoälha shares how her Jump for Joy project changed the way she experienced other people, how a journey marked by repeated eagle sightings deepened her trust, and how she learned to recognize and change the belief that she was not intelligent. She also explores the power of names, language, nature, creativity, and cultural perspective, including what Indigenous and oral knowledge may reveal about the limits of AI.

Together, Paige and Eyoälha ask: How do stories become identity? What does it actually take to change one? And what might Narrative Intelligence require of us?

100 Stories explores one central question:
How malleable are the stories we live by, and what does it take to change one?