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?