How to Know When Someone is Telling Their Truth
By Darla LeDoux, Founder of Sourced™ and Author of the books Shift The Field and Retreat and Grow Rich

I want to start by sharing a little story. Those of you who have taken any of my retreat programs know that it’s always great, to begin with, a story. Everybody’s arriving; you can get settled; you can get relaxed into the space, get connected. And I thought, well, what’s the story? What’s the story today? And I immediately thought, Well, why not tell the story about why I wrote this book.

And as I was thinking about the story of why I wrote this book, I realized that it’s many years in the making. Retreat and Grow Rich was my first book. I had been teaching the curriculum for a long time, and I knew I wanted to write something that would be easy (because I know it so well), I knew it works, and I knew it would make a difference for people.

When I sat down to think, what is the story about why I wrote this book? It is a story called how I became a fanatic about Truth. At the heart of my book is the Anatomy of a Transformation and at the heart of that is Truth. 

It’s the stage where your client receives Truth.

In 1999, I was working as an engineer at Procter and Gamble. Things were going well. I was in my twenties. I felt really cool. I had this big job, and I loved it. Then I was selected to be trained as a coach. There were twenty of us who were selected for this training. I was a Senior Engineer at the time.

In this training, we were learning to help facilitate good working relationships. If two people started working together, and they had what they called ‘social distance’, we would sit down and meet with them and help them to identify if there were any judgments they had about each other, and we had to be aware of our judgments.

We did an exercise that was called The Fishbowl. In the Fishbowl, there are twenty of us in a circle of chairs. One by one, we went into the center of the circle. We had to tell our story about our judgments about gender, race, sexual orientation, and age. Everybody outside the circle would give you thumbs up if they thought you were telling the Truth or a thumbs down if they did not.

I want you to imagine that here I am. I’m 20-something. I have a pretty strong armor in life. I am right. I am smart. I have a good job. I’m a badass, and nobody fuck with me. Right? That’s what was in my head at the time. It was where I was. And I was nice and sweet. I love people, and they loved me. You know, all of the things. 

But I was so hurt in my heart of hearts that I never wanted anybody to look within and see my Truth. I had this idea of what it took for me to be okay in life. That was how I was going about life.

The night before I knew it was my turn to be in the center of the circle I landed myself in the emergency room.  My body literally started breaking down because I was so terrified to be in front of people and speak my Truth.

I didn’t want to see the things that were true and I definitely didn’t want to speak about it. So I ended up in the emergency room. But I made it. I sat in The Fishbowl and I told my story. I shared things that I had never even realized were affecting me. Because up until that point, my opinion was, I was fine.

Here’s what I learned in that experience. It’s what I often have referred to as a punch-in-the-gut moment. 

What I learned is: we can tell when someone’s telling the Truth. When we’re really present, and we’re paying attention, everybody on the outside would give a thumbs up or a thumbs down. If people weren’t telling the Truth, they had to kind of dig deeper, and they had to go back to their story and really look at what was it that really happened in that moment. 

It was like I discovered water or air! I’m looking around at people like, ‘why are you not so excited? Why isn’t anybody telling us this? That if we align with our Truth, everything works!

I could suddenly see this everywhere! I could see the way we were conditioning our kids to be a particular way, as opposed to tuning in and learning and trusting their own Truth. All of a sudden, I could see it everywhere.

So I’m curious. I’d love to hear a little bit from people down below, who has had an experience like this?

Webinars for Transformation
By Darla LeDoux, Founder of Sourced™ and Author of the books Shift The Field and Retreat and Grow Rich

Have you ever been told you should do a webinar and you couldn’t figure out how the beautiful transformational work you love to do translates to this masculine, sterile structure? You probably pictured a PowerPoint slides strategy that kind of makes you want to cringe?

It’s a little bit different than what you might get if you’ve ever downloaded a free slide deck. I’ve actually seen them called pitch deck templates, which is so not feminine and so doesn’t feel Sourced. 

 You’ve tried to fit your work into these beautiful little bullet points and reverse engineering your offer and all of those things. And it just hasn’t felt right.

Now, here’s what I want you to know. I have done traditional webinars. I totally understand them, I may do them again, at some point, because there are times where it’s just really perfect. What you’re offering has a clear structure and/or framework. There are a few steps that you’re selling and you are able to highlight them in the webinar. You give little snippets of the WHAT, but not the HOW, and THEN you offer the how at the end for your program.

That is a great use of a webinar. Sometimes you might use the points of your webinar to paint a picture of the problem the client has, and then, of course, your offer helps to solve it. That can be really great as well. When you love transformation, and you want to help your client, you want to invite your client into a journey of deep inner work. Sometimes it feels like those bullet points just don’t quite fit the bill.

I worked with a client on this recently, where we looked at what is it? What is the program she wants to offer? You want to get really clear about where you’re leading people. Use your magic to tune in to this program or this offer to get a sense of what it is and how it wants to show up. I’ll have my clients tune into the energy of it.

If you haven’t taken the Sourced Magic Quiz, you can take it here.

Maybe your magic is going to give you a word or an expression or a theme about the offer that you’re actually making. You want to ask yourself, How do I help someone in an hour, in a webinar, to become committed to doing the work available in this program? What do they need to know be aware of or be present to in order to say yes to the program?

That’s the first piece. Then you want to tune in, and ask your soul and ask your expertise,  “How do I help my client get to the place that they need to be to say yes to the program?” 

YOU are an expert at the work you do and what you’re offering in this program. Let it be a creative process. I have a past client who used to say, “love up your marketing.” Give yourself creative space. 

If you’re a Sensation Magician, maybe you dance and you feel it. It comes through you physically – to know what you want them to experience. Then you have to figure out how to translate that.

If you are an Expansion Magician, maybe you journal and you say, ‘Gosh, if there were no limits, what would I want them to know? If there were no limits to that, how would I want them to know this? If there were no limits, what would I want them to do?” 

If you’re Recognition Magician and you get a lot of visuals, you might do a visualization to say ‘show me how to help them become aware of what they need to become aware of to say yes to this program.’ 

A lot of times when our clients do this, what comes forward is some kind of experience they want their client to have. We work with a lot of retreat leaders. They love experiences. So it could be a visualization or an activity or a journal exercise. Sometimes it’s actually a physical thing like doing something with magazines or painting – something very creative and experiential.

It’s the experience that’s going to help them discover if they really want to solve this problem. How important is it to them to solve this problem? That’s what you’re having them discover in this webinar.

So now, your webinar does not look like four bullet points and a stodgy slide deck – it is now an experience. That’s great. 

Now is the important part. How do you create the context for that experience? And how do you debrief that experience? You want them really looking at what is going on in their life, in their business, in their sex life, and their health. What is really going on now that they want this experience, have them get really real about it, encourage people to share about it, and let it get vulnerable.

By the way, even before this, you’re creating the context of your own experience with this thing so YOU’RE getting vulnerable so THEY can get vulnerable before you even have the experience. If you’re not doing this, then the experience is just an exercise that’s going to be interesting for them. But it’s not going to have the impact you are looking for.

You want to then debrief the experience. You’ve got to debrief it so they can get a lot of juice out of what they just experienced and they get to experience that having your eye on what they’re experiencing. That adds value. That support of your coaching, your magic, adds value to what they could have figured out on their own. It’s this piece that you’re bringing in your container that’s so important. It also helps them feel safe in the community if you’re offering something that’s a group program.

You’re here to help them get clear about their commitment to doing the work. And then to get clear about their commitment to doing the work with YOU. And that is the purpose of this thing that we might call a webinar, that doesn’t have to have slides. It doesn’t have to have five bullet points and an offer in a structured way. Then you need to spend 10 to 15 minutes on your offer.

You need to be really confident and excited and happy about your offer. And that’s a whole other video. But I hope this is helpful. 

This is where you want to get Sourced. You want to be able to tune in to your own inner- knowing of who your client is, what it is that they need, and what the actual awareness is they need to have in order to take the next step.