November 8, 2025 • 40 mins
When someone asks, “how are you doing?” Do you smile and say “I’m fine”?
Or do you tell the truth?
You might have a thousand reasons for holding back your truth in the face of a relatively benign question like “how are you doing?” — some of which may even be justified. But I suppose a better question is: do you know what is true for you?
Are you in touch with your own truth?
Are you able to share it with at least one trusted person?
And have you considered the power and possibility of sharing your truth more broadly?
This is what I’m exploring in today's episode. No matter how impossible it might seem to tell the truth — no matter who you think it might hurt or what you worry would unravel, the old maxim is right: only really the truth can set you free.
Watch the Martha Beck + Tim Ferris conversation that was mentioned HERE!
Host: Ally Fallon // @allyfallon // allisonfallon.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write. All the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down on cold It's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back
to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm
your host. And if you can hear my little children
in the background of today's episode, it's kind of perfect
for what I want to talk about today. So we're
just gonna take what is and roll with it. I'm
not going to try to fight with reality. This is
(00:45):
something that I'm learning. It's exactly what I want to
talk about today, so it's probably perfect timing for this episode.
But if you just hear any little noises in the background,
they're in their rest time. They're supposed to be being quiet,
but we all know how kids do with being quiet,
So bear with me, roll with me. It's all gonna
make sense by the end of today's episode. The topic
that I want to talk about today is the topic
(01:06):
of honesty and integrity. This is a topic that's extremely
important to me for a couple reasons. One of the
big reasons that it's important to me is my name
Alison actually means truthful one. There are a couple of
meanings that you can find for my name if you
look up, like the meaning of the name Alison, just
like there is with most any name. But the meaning
(01:28):
that my parents saw when they chose my name was
truthful one. This was the reason that they chose the
name Alison for me is because they just really felt
like it fit me. Such a wild thing to think about,
because I think about this with my kids too, Like
I felt like my kids kind of told me their names,
and I know my parents that were existing in a
different paradigm, and that's not how they would have explained it,
(01:49):
but they did see the importance of choosing a child's name,
and when they picked my name, they just really felt like, Oh,
this is her name because this is what her life
is going to represent. I'd have to ask them to
get them to use the language that they would use,
but something along those lines, like they really put a
lot of weight on the meanings of our names, myself
and my two siblings, and they chose this name because
(02:10):
they thought the meaning really fit me. And on the
one hand, it does fit me perfectly. When I think
about who I am. In the essence of who I
am and how I move through the world, there's definitely
like a truth telling nature to me. Like I feel
like I'm a lot of times the friend in the
group or the person in the family circle, the one
person who's willing to say the thing that no one
(02:31):
else is saying. And sometimes this gets me I get
a bad rap for this, or it gets me painted
in a bad light because you know, I was just
in a situation recently that I won't give like very
specific details to to protect those who were involved, But
I was just in a situation with a mixed group
of people where there was someone who was being kind
(02:51):
of like unruly and who was just controlling the whole
situation and being really frustrating, and everyone else is just
kind of rolling with it and going along, and it
wasn't really my place to call this person out. But
I was telling my husband later after the fact, I
was like, I really, in a situation like that, have
to bite my tongue to not call out what's happening,
to not be the one like it wasn't my place
(03:14):
to do it, but it would have come quite easily
for me to be the one to say like, hey,
you know, here's what's really happening, or here's what I'm seeing,
here's what I'm noticing. It's challenging for me to not
be that person in that setting. So there is a
part of me, you know, I'm an enneagram for authenticity
is really important to me. I've always been someone who
(03:35):
has placed a high value on telling the truth, saying
what's true, speaking my truth, speaking up for myself, speaking
up for the underdog, speaking up for the person who's
you know, underrepresented or misrepresented or whatever. And on the
flip side of that coin, this has been a value
or a quality that I have had to over time,
(03:59):
really work to step into. It has not come naturally
to me on the other side of this coin. So
on the one side of the coin, it has come
naturally to me and it is very much the essence
of who I am. And on the other side of
the coin, I've struggled with this concept of telling the truth.
In fact, I earned this nickname in my younger years
among my family members because there was like a cross
(04:21):
stitch kind of piece of artwork that my mom had
had done for each of us kids that had our
name on it, and then the meaning of the name,
so it said Alison, little truthful one. And I would
often get called in my childhood little bender of the truth,
because when I was very dramatically telling a story, I
would like to sprinkle in little details that made, you know,
the story more interesting, or I would kind of stretch
(04:44):
the details to make them sound more exciting. And I've
always had that flare of drama that likes to you know,
likes to really Yeah, I don't know. My daughter's this
way too, and I love it about her, Like you
can always count on Nella to tell the story in
the most dramatic way possible, or to like over dramatize everything,
and so in a way, that's also choosing to not
(05:07):
tell the truth. So that's one of the ways that
I've had to learn how to be more precise in
my language and to be more of a truth teller,
because over time, I mean, just like the parable, you know,
the story that we tell kids about the boy who
cried Wolf. This is such a common story and it's
such a common moral that even transcends cultures. But this
(05:28):
idea that, like you, if you don't tell the truth once,
then people will have a hard time believing you the
next time. So your truth gets watered down. When you
don't tell the truth in one setting and then you're
trying to tell the truth in another setting, then oftentimes
that truth doesn't hold the power that it could have
held if you chose to be an integrity always. And
there are so many reasons that we choose not to
(05:49):
be an integrity. I look back at myself in my twenties.
I think my twenties were a time in my life
when I had the hardest time telling the truth as
soon as I left home and went to college. And
I mean, I could get and all the therapeutic reasons
for this, but basically the blanket reason is there was
so much trauma that I had not addressed, that had
(06:09):
not been articulated, that had not been I had not
been telling the truth about I didn't even know how
to tell the truth about that trauma to myself. There
was so much of that that was so messy and
convoluted that I just couldn't even find myself, Like I
didn't even know who I was, I didn't know what
I was about. I didn't even know what was going
on or who I was trying to be in the world,
and so I was just kind of feeling around in
(06:31):
the dark for years and years, for pretty much most
of my twenties. I entered into an extremely toxic marriage
at the end of my twenties and then didn't leave
that marriage until I was thirty two or thirty three.
That was in twenty fifteen. So for those ten years
from the time I was I don't know, like eighteen
or nineteen until I turned thirty, I feel like the
(06:53):
page kind of turned when I turned thirty and things
began to shift and I started to step into more
of who I really am. But for most of my
twenties I really struggled to tell the truth. I spent
a lot of time being dishonest with myself, being dishonest
with other people, telling blatant, boldfaced, outright lies for reasons
that sometimes now looking back, don't even totally make sense
(07:14):
to me. I'm like, why was I lying about that?
That doesn't make any sense. But I think the reason
was the overarching reason was there was all this trauma.
I didn't know what to do with it. I hadn't
told myself the truth about it. I hadn't integrated it,
I hadn't dealt with any of it or really healed.
And when you have that kind of trauma operating in
your life, it just messes with the circuitry of who
(07:36):
you are as a human being. But I guess the
point that I really want to make on that front
is that there are so many different reasons why we lie.
One of the reasons I think why we don't tell
the truth to ourselves or others is because we recognize
the power of the truth. Like this concept, the biblical
concept that the truth will set you free, this universal
(07:56):
concept that the truth will set you free, and I
love there's a play on that quote that I used
when I wrote Indestructible about leaving that toxic marriage. There's
a play on the quote that says the truth will
set you free, but not until it's done with you,
which I just thought was so perfect and fit exactly
what I was going through at that time. The truth.
We understand intuitively that the truth does set us free,
(08:18):
and yet it doesn't set you free until it first
completely demolishes the lie that you were living in. And
so many of us are relying on and leaning on
and grabbing onto, grasping onto that lie because that lie
feels like some sense of security or stability, and to
let go of the lie would mean an absolute crumbling
(08:39):
of everything that we've ever known, and that's freaking terrifying,
And so we just aren't ready to tell the truth
to ourselves or to others. So that's one reason why
we choose not to tell the truth, is that we
recognize that we're standing on our own lies, that those
lies that we're standing on are propping us up and
holding us up, and to take those lies away and
(09:00):
choose to tell the truth would mean that those lies
would crumble underneath of us and we would inevitably fall.
Another reason why I think we don't tell the truth
with ourselves or with others is because to tell the
truth is to be seen in our own humanity, and
so I think it's tricky to tell the truth sometimes,
even when the truth is something simple like I'm tired.
(09:20):
You know, when you think about this, you walk around
all over the place, you go to the grocery store
or wherever you go on a daily basis, work or
school or whatever, and people are like, hey, how are
you doing it and you're like, I'm good, and we
do this all day along with each other, like I'm good,
I'm great, I'm fine. Yeah, things are good. I'm busy,
you know, And it's like the truth is, the real
truth is I'm freaking exhausted. I don't know up from down.
(09:43):
I'm really feeling depressed today. I am really struggling. I'm
actually not okay. Things are not okay, things are falling
apart in my life. The world feels really dark and
hard right now. Whatever the truth is feels like a
tricky thing to say in a passing comment with a stranger.
And I'm not necessarily saying that in a passing comment
with a stranger that you should, you know, share your deepest,
(10:06):
darkest truth. That's maybe not always the wisest thing to do,
but I do want to point out that sometimes we
choose not to tell the truth because it feels really
vulnerable to allow ourselves to be seen in all of
our humanity. When someone says, hey, how you doing, for
you to go you know what, I'm not great, Like,
I'm not doing great today. I'm really struggling. I'm having
(10:26):
a hard time. I could use a hug, I could
use a day off. You know, it's so challenging. It
takes so much courage and so much bravery to show
up in all of your humanity like that that these
are really like understandable reasons why we choose to fib
or to tell, you know, a half truth, like it's okay,
(10:47):
I'm fine, Yeah, I'm fine, no problem, I'm good, when
really you're like you could fall apart at any moment.
And then I think the third reason, third big reason
why we choose not to tell the truth is because
we're relational beings who operate in partnership with other human beings.
And I think a lot of times when we choose
(11:07):
not to tell the truth, we're doing so because we
think we're preserving those relationships. And I just want to
point out how primal and normal this is that when
you move through the world, you wanting to preserve your
first year, second tier, third year relationships, like your acquaintance relationships,
your family relationships, your friendships, your neighbors, like the ways
(11:28):
that you tell little half truths because someone goes like
what do you think of my new haircut? Or what
do you know, like do you like this shirt that
I'm wearing and you're like, yeah, it's really cute. The
ways that we tell half truths. There, that we choose
not to tell the truth as a way to preserve
those relationships is really about preserving our sense of safety
and security inside of community. Because we were designed to
(11:51):
operate in community with other people. We four centuries have
relied on operating inside of community. We've relied on each other.
We are interdependent beings. We lean on each other, and
so I think sometimes we're afraid that if we told
the truth that relationships would shatter. And I'd love to
be able to say that that's not a fair assessment
(12:11):
of the situation, and that you know, everyone should just
be able to tell the truth. But I do think
it is a fair assessment of the situation that most
relationships that we have in our lives I think are
maybe in some ways as fragile as we have deemed
them to be. That telling the truth about someone's haircut
or someone's shirt, as simple as that might seem, might
actually rock the boat in such a way where those
(12:33):
relationships wouldn't be able to survive. There's so much I
could say about that and unpack about that. I'm not
saying that's a good thing, or that it's right necessarily,
But I'm saying that we have accurately assessed that if
I choose to tell the truth in this particular situation,
that it is going to create a rift inside of
this relationship that I don't know that I'm prepared to navigate.
(12:56):
And I'll share this. It's a tiny bit of a
side note, but it really does fit here, this piece
of advice that my therapist gave me when I was
dating again after my divorce, because I was in this
toxic marriage, it was extremely tense, It was dramatic. There
was always like these big explosions. He was always mad
at me. I was always doing something wrong. So when
(13:18):
I healed after that, I spent two years healing after
my divorce, and then when I started to date again,
I realized that I was extremely fragile when it came
time to having these conversations in a relationship where there
was a disagreement. It was like, if we were dating
and things were going well, then I was fine. But
the minute that someone chose to share their truth with me,
and that truth rocked my boat, I had a really
(13:41):
hard time enduring that I had a really hard time,
like moving through those waves with someone. And my therapist
shared something with me in that setting that has proven
very helpful even outside of a romantic setting. And my
(14:03):
therapist shared something with me in that setting that has
proven very helpful even outside of a romantic setting, which
is that you have to learn how to endure what
she called cold space. So cold space in a relationship
is where what you think and what I think don't match.
The way you feel and the way I feel don't match.
(14:25):
Where you are and where I am don't match. And
I think sometimes we feel like life is fragile. Everything's fragile.
I'm feeling fragile, and so all I want is the
comfort of just knowing like I'm on the same page
with someone. We're together in this. I'm not going to
be abandoned. You're right here with me. And everybody's different.
So maybe not everybody feels that way, but I do
(14:46):
think sometimes we get in those modes where it's like,
just please be on my side beyond my team, agree
with me, feel the way that I feel, so that
I don't feel so alone. And what she was talking
about is cultivating this ability to endure cold space in
a relationship. This could be in a romantic partnership, it
could be in just a friendship where you have periods
of time that you just don't speak to this person.
(15:07):
And maybe some of that cold space is not even
because you disagree, but it's just like you know their
life is going one way and your life is going
a different way, and so you just don't connect. It's
like things are different for you, or there's geographical distance
or whatever, and so there's cold space in the relationship.
Or sometimes it's because it's like, hey, you voted one
way and I voted a different way, and I don't
(15:29):
understand why you chose to vote the way that you voted,
and so there's cold space here. It's like I'm not
gonna change my mind to come your way, and you're
not going to change your mind to come my way.
And so there's distance between the two of us. And
rather than work hard to close that distance so that
I can feel secure again, I'm going to allow there
to be some distance. And I bring this up this
(15:53):
third piece because I think it's important as it relates
to us learning how to tell the truth. We cannot
learn how to tell the truth until we can also
learn how to endure that cold space in relationships so
operating on this tension, that you might be right that
if you speak the truth to this person or in
this setting, that it's going to rock the boat, and
(16:14):
that relationship might not feel the same. And also the
relationships that really matter to you or that really could endure,
might need a little bit more of that kind of
honesty and integrity in order to build the resilience to
where they could move through the real waves of life.
(16:35):
And the reason I want to bring any of this up,
let me go back to the beginning to where this
idea even came from. This topic came back into my awareness.
It's something I've worked on, like I said, for my
whole life, and really through my twenties, I kind of
wonder like what is up with me? Like why am
I having such a hard time telling the truth. It's
something I made a commitment to in my early thirties
that I was going to start telling the truth to myself.
(16:57):
And recently an author who I love, Martha Beck, came
out with a new book. And when she came out
with her books, she did the thing that all authors
do when they come out with new books, which is
go on the podcast to her. So basically, you just
get on every big podcast and you talk about your
book on every big podcast. And so, because I love
Martha Beck, I just started listening to all of these
different episodes, and one of the episodes I listened to
(17:19):
was Martha Beck on the Tim Ferriss podcast, and she
talked about specifically, I'm so glad I listened to this episode.
I'm not a regular listener of the Tim Ferriss podcast,
but I'm really glad I listened to this episode because
one of the things that she talked about on this
episode was this integrity cleanse that she did many years ago.
And the integrity cleanse was this idea that for three
(17:40):
hundred and sixty five days she was going to choose
to speak only the truth. And if you think to yourself, well,
I'm already a really truthful person, like I mostly tell
the truth or I always tell the truth, maybe you're
even thinking that to yourself. One of the reasons that
I love this is that when you really dial this back,
when you really start to think about it, you realize
(18:01):
all of the very subtle ways that you are maybe
not telling the truth that you think you are, Like
maybe you think of yourself as a person who has
a lot of integrity, and maybe you tell the truth
when it comes to like you know, the cashier gave
you too much change, and you're always telling the truth there,
or you tell the truth like my mom is like
the ultimate truth teller. She refuses to sneak candy into
(18:22):
the movie theater. She's like such a rule follower, so
such a truth teller, and you know, she'll tell me,
like I'll tell her information and she'll be like, I'm
not going to tell your sister unless you tell me.
It's okay to tell your sister. Like my mom is
like a very you know, strict truth teller. But even
if you're someone like that who is a strict truth
teller and likes to follow the rules and always, you know,
(18:43):
like tells the truth, you think that you always tell
the truth. This is an important thing to reflect on
because maybe there are ways that you are choosing not
to tell the truth, even to yourself. This is one
of the reasons why I think writing is such a
powerful exercise to re connect you to yourself. Because one
(19:03):
of the things that happens when you pick up the
pen and you put a pen to a piece of paper,
or when you put your fingers on the keys, is
your fingers will actually move faster on the keys than
your brain can even think. And so it's almost like
it's short circuits. The thing that you would do if
you were chatting with a stranger, where you'd be like, yeah,
things are great, I'm fine, life is good. And what
(19:25):
it does is it allows you to tap into what's
going on beneath the surface. I talk about this in
the Power of Writing It Down. I talk about in
the Power of Writing It Down. The brain science behind
why writing gets us to the truth so much faster,
because writing is helping you to access what's in the subconscious,
under the conscious surface of your brain, under the things,
(19:47):
the chatter, all the stuff that you think you're thinking
about in a day. It allows you to peel back
those layers and really hear what's going on underneath. So
when you write, you access this part of your brain
that we don't I spend a lot of time thinking about.
We don't spend a lot of time accessing. We spend
most of our days in our conscious mind, very little
(20:08):
of our days in our unconscious mind. And yet what's
going on in the unconscious mind is responsible for virtually
every single decision and action that you make. And so
maybe you think you're being honest because you're telling the
truth as far as you know consciously, but there are
actually things that you're hiding, even from yourself, and until
(20:30):
you're honest with yourself about those things, you couldn't possibly
be honest with anyone else. And at least the way
that I find this works is you are honest with
yourself first, and then you sit in utter terror that
you have to be honest with even one other person,
Like first person maybe you're honest with is like your
therapist or your partner or your best friend or something
someone who feels really really safe to you. And then
slowly but surely you have to start to be honest
(20:51):
with other people about it. And I was just telling
my husband the other day, I feel like I've done
the thing, like I spent all of my thirties doing
the thing where I learned how to be honest with myself,
like radical honesty. And this is what Martha Becka was
talking about, like spending three hundred and sixty five days
just going like every time I open my mouth, I'm
going to choose to tell the truth. I'm going to
tell the truth to myself, no matter what it costs me.
(21:14):
And she tells the story of how her life fell
apart because of that integrity cleanse, and I would say
the same is true with me. Like all of the
lies that I was standing on that I thought were
making me feel safe and secure, crumbled underneath of me,
and then what I was left with was the truth
of myself, dealing with the truth of myself. And then slowly,
(21:34):
over time, I've had to learn how to share that
truth of myself with others. And I think that is
maybe the threshold that I'm standing at now is having
learned how to tell the truth with myself, how do
I learn how to share the truth with others. This
(21:56):
is one of the things that I love about the
practice of writing, is that right is an extremely effective
and fast way to get you to tell the truth
to yourself first. Writing, like I talk about in the
Power of Writing It Down, is a proven way to
get out of your conscious thought and into your unconscious thought.
(22:17):
And when you think about it, we spend most of
our day in our conscious thought. We spend very little
of our time in our unconscious thought, and yet our
unconscious mind is driving most of the decisions that we
make in a day. It's driving most of our behavior,
it's most of our patterning, it's most of how we
present ourselves to the world and how we move through
the world. And so if you're not aware of what's
(22:39):
going on in your unconscious mind, you might think of
yourself as a pretty honest person, someone who stands in
your own integrity, but you just might not even recognize
or realize, like this is like me in my twenties,
that you're just not even being honest with yourself. And
so you might actually be sharing what you think are truths,
but you're sharing from dishonest place because you just don't
(23:01):
even know that you're being dishonest with yourself. So this
is one of the things that I love about the
practice of writing, is that it will bring you back
into integrity with yourself so quickly. There's an exercise that
I've given on the podcast before that is one of
my favorite exercises to give to anyone who is new
to this practice, and it's so simple that you can
do it in just five minutes a day if you
(23:22):
wanted to. So I'll give it to you here, the
idea is that you sit down with a blank piece
of paper, or you sit down at the blinking cursor
at your screen, however you choose to do your writing practice,
and you write at the top of the piece of
paper ten things that are true for me today. And
the ten things that you write down can be anything.
It could just literally be like, I'm sitting in my
living room. You know, my two kids are upstairs, they're
(23:44):
in rest time. The sun is streaming in through the windows.
Today is the day after daylight saving time. It feels
later than it is. You know, whatever these statements are
can be relatively simple. In fact, starting simple is good
because it helps you kind of like get into the
groove of things. But over time, what you'll find is
that you will admit truth to yourself that you didn't
(24:05):
even know we're true. And everyone who's done this exercise
has had that experience where you write something down on
the paper and then you go like, WHOA, I didn't
even know I felt that way, or I didn't even
know why I thought that, or I didn't even know
that that was true for me, But that actually is
really my truth. And the other beautiful thing about this
exercise is that what is true in one moment doesn't
(24:28):
have to stay true forever. And I always tell people
that because I think that's one of our fears as
it relates to telling the truth, that we're worried if
we speak the truth out loud again, like this could
shatter the current reality that I'm living in if I
share my truth whatever is true for me right now,
but what's true for you right now doesn't have to
stay true. Like you could say something like I'm miserable,
(24:49):
I hate this, like I hate you know, my current
set of circumstances or whatever. Just because you say that
or admit that to yourself doesn't mean that that is
going to be your truth forever. In fact, these truths
that we put on paper are actually passing truths. And
I was just reading something in a book this week.
I was reading another Pima Chondron book, and there's this
(25:11):
Buddhist concept that I'd have to look into more deeply
to really fully understand it or explain it. But basically,
the idea is that there are essential truths and then
there are also passing truths. And most of what we
write down in this exercise, the ten things that are
true for me today. Most of these truths are passing truths.
They are truths that are true right now but are
actually not wholly true forever. Like a truth that's wholly
(25:34):
true forever is that you're loved, like you're totally held,
everything's okay. Those are truths that are like big, big
truths that are true forever and ever, and nothing that
you ever do or say could could get you out
of those truths. But these passing truths are not any
less true. In fact, it's so helpful and important to
be able to admit these truths to ourselves so that
(25:54):
we can move through them and move on to the
next truth. Pretending like the truth is true is not
an effective way to get the truth to move through.
But when you can admit what's true and not make
it quite so meaningful, or not make it quite so heavy,
or not make it you know, the end all be all,
not cling to it like it's your security, it's your stability,
(26:17):
then those truths can actually become extremely effective for getting
you out of ruts. And I wrote about this and Indestructible.
It's this idea that the truth will set you free,
but not until it's done with you. So yes, telling
the truth might cause some things to crumble underneath of you,
but what remains under those passing truths is actually a
(26:38):
much more solid truth. And this is where the title
indestructible came from. The title actually came from a John
Steinbeck quote where he says, I suppose a loving woman.
I suppose a woman is stronger than a man, particularly
a woman with love in her heart. I suppose a
loving woman is indestructible. And the concept that I really
wanted to get across there is that when you can
(26:58):
speak your truth and you can be in your own essence,
when you can be in the fullness of who you are,
then you are indestructible. You are absolutely immovable. And these
passing through this move in and out, they come and go.
They're worth saying, they're worth admitting to yourself, they're worth
feeling all the way through. But they are not the
(27:20):
whole truth of who you are. They do not dictate
who you are or you're worth in this world. They
are not the security in the stability that you're standing on.
And if you make them the security and the stability
that you're standing on, then you will feel always like
you're standing on shaky ground. Which this is an interesting
play on words here because one of the things that
I learned a few years ago, many years ago, actually
(27:42):
in my thirties, when I was doing a deep dive
on this topic, was I started to do some research
into the etymology of the word integrity, and the word
integrity is actually a word that was originally used in architecture.
The idea of a building being in integrity was the
concepts that this building would be able to stand up
(28:04):
under the pressure of environmental chaos. So if a storm
came in, if an earthquake came in, a building in
integrity would be the building that could stand. And this
metaphor lays perfectly over what I'm talking about here and
is exactly it gets at exactly what I want to say,
which is that when you can learn to be in
integrity with yourself, when you can first tell yourself the truth,
(28:27):
and then you can tell someone close to you the truth,
and then you can tell a relative stranger the truth
or aquaintance the truth. When you can speak the truth
when someone you hardly know says how are you doing,
and you're like, you know what, I've been better or
I'm not doing that great or I could really use
a hug today or whatever. When you can learn to
tell the truth in every single situation, then you are
(28:51):
going to stand in integrity, meaning you'll be indestructible, meaning
that these passing truths will move in and out of
your space. You'll experience that, but they are not going
to shake the foundation of who you really are, because
you're no longer standing on shaky ground. And I think
for me, listening to this episode of Martha Beck talking
with Tim Ferriss about her Integrity Clans, it just reinspired
(29:12):
me to come back to this topic that I've spent
so much time thinking about. I've invested so much of
my own energy and personal growth here, and I'm so
proud of how far I've come. When I look back
at myself at like nineteen years old or twenty one
years old or whatever, hiding these parts of my life
because I was ashamed and refusing to tell the truth
to myself about what was really going on, you know,
(29:33):
kind of blocking out these parts of my life because
I didn't want to look at what was really true.
The truth was so hard to see, it was so
hard to explain. It didn't make sense with the story
that I've been telling myself. It was shattering the reality
that I was living in. When I look back at
that version of myself, I have such grace and compassion
for her. And I'm also so proud of how far
I've come. I'm so proud of the work that I've done.
(29:55):
I'm so proud of the grounds that I stand on now.
In fact, I was saying too my husband the other
morning that I'm coming up on the ten year anniversary
of leaving that toxic marriage. I was talking about November nineteenth,
twenty fifteen, was the day that everything exploded and fell apart,
and was a day that required me to step into
(30:17):
even more of my truth. It required me to look
even closer at the truth of what was going on
in my life, what was going on in my relationship,
how I really felt, what I really wanted, what I
was craving. And I was in a place in my
life at that point, like on November eighteenth of twenty fifteen,
where I was just not there yet. I wasn't really
willing to admit to myself how I really felt, which
(30:39):
was I was miserable. I hated being in that marriage.
There were so many parts of my life that I
didn't like. Things were not going the way that I
wanted them to go. I didn't like the relationship that
I was in, I didn't want what I was building,
and I didn't know how to admit any of that
to myself. I didn't know how to speak the truth
out loud. I felt a friend of the entire earth
(31:02):
underneath of me collapsing. And when the when the ground
underneath of me did begin to crumble, when I started
to speak the truth, those two things happened at the
same exact time. In fact, I've told parts of this
story before, but I just think it's so perfect and
pertinent that I started going to yoga in September of
twenty fifteen, and there's no accident that I became strong
(31:23):
enough to tell my truth on November nineteenth of twenty fifteen.
So it's almost exactly ten years ago coming up here
in just a couple of weeks, almost exactly ten years
ago that I took that leap to tell the truth
to myself, to tell the truth to this person who
I was married to, to tell the truth to people
in my friend group, and to finally say, like I
don't want to do this anymore. I need to find
(31:45):
a new way forward. This is no longer working for me,
and my life shifted dramatically, like so dramatically that I
don't even recognize the life that life compared to the
life that I'm in today, and every good thing that
I enjoy about my life today, my solid partnership that
I'm in, my loving husband, my family, my two beautiful, healthy,
wonderful beloved children who are loud and you know, upstairs
(32:10):
making all their noise whatever. Like this family life that
I begged for and prayed for and waited for for
so long long is only made possible by the fact
that I learned to tell the truth back then. And
when I first started telling the truth back then, it
felt like I was It felt like death. It felt
like everything was dying, everything's falling apart. Everything I wanted
is you know, even further away from me now than
(32:31):
it was before. And now I'm like this solid foundation
that I have built my life on, this life of
integrity that I have now, I have because I was
willing to tell the truth to myself back then, and
to tell the truth to a few close people. And
right now I feel like the threshold that I'm standing
at And I don't know if you can relate to
this at all, but I feel like the threshold that
I'm standing at is that I've learned how to tell
(32:52):
the truth to myself. The practice of writing has taught
me that I've learned how to tell the truth to myself.
I am in integrity with myself. I've learned how to
tell the truth to a few close friends. And I
think I'm standing at a threshold where I feel that
I'm being invited to tell the truth in a broader sense.
And I really am fting the invitation to tell the truth.
(33:16):
I guess to strangers. I don't know. I do it
here on the podcast, I do it some on Instagram.
But when I tell you that, like posting publicly about
how I really feel about certain topics makes me feel
like I'm gonna die, Like I'm gonna lose my reputation.
People are gonna hate me, I'm going to have all
these critics. Everyone's gonna come at me. And you know,
(33:40):
I'm not saying that's real. I'm saying that's how I feel.
What I feel is going to happen to the point where,
like when I watch other people on Instagram, like either
influencers or authors or whatever, speak their truth and get
the inevitable pileon that happens. I cringe even watching it
happen to other people. And yet I know that's the
threshold that I'm standing at. I know what it's. I
(34:01):
know that this is what I'm being invited into. It's
the next level of integrity. Is like, let me just
give one simple example. I have deconstructed the faith of
my childhood in my own life. I feel in utter
integrity in that realm of my life. I have talked
about that deconstruction with people who are close to me.
I've talked about it even here on the podcast some
(34:22):
but I have hesitated to share that experience, or those insights,
or my own personal truth beyond that close proximity, because
I have feared what does that mean for me? What
am I going to lose? What's going to crumble underneath
of me? When I live that deeply into integrity? And
(34:42):
so that's just where I am personally. I don't know
where this conversation lands for you, but I know that
I want to be the type of person who even
when things get chaotic, even when the storm comes, even
when there's tornadoes or chaos, or you know, unexpected things
happen or accidents, or like my teacher is Sarah, My
yoga teacher used to always say, like, be the kind
(35:03):
of person who other people want to call in case
of emergency. Like be the type of person who in
an emergency can keep a cool head, who knows what
to do, who has your feet on the ground. And
I want to be that type of person. I want
to be the type of person who other people call
on in case of emergency. And I think this is
(35:23):
the invitation to me right now, is am I willing
to step out in integrity and to speak my truth
beyond just my small little group. I think there's some wisdom,
like wherever you are on this journey, there's some wisdom
to telling the truth in a small setting first, Because
if you think of it like planting a tree, like
we planted this Japanese maple in our front yard. We've
(35:44):
done this a couple of times. Now. The deer love
the Japanese maple. We've planted the Japanese maple a couple
of times, and when it's just a little sapling, the
deer come and they just rip the Japanese mapele to
shreds and like Japanese maples. I mean talk about being
forty two, and this is like conversations that you have
when you're in the second half of your life. But
Japanese maples are beautiful, and they're also like not cheap
(36:06):
plants to plant, They're not cheap to buy. And we've
planted a Japanese maple in the front yard and the
deer come and rip it to shreds. And you realize
that when you have a sapling like that, when you
plant a small tree, you have to kind of surround
it with some protection for a while so that it
can just get its roots in and it can just
grow enough to be able to withstand mother nature, you know,
(36:26):
withstand the deer that are coming to eat it, or
whatever the storms that come and go inevitably. And the
same is true for your truth telling and your integrity.
I think there's wisdom in planting that small sapling first
and giving yourself some space. This is what I've done
with my deconstruction journey is I didn't want to muddy
the waters by talking about it while it was happening
(36:48):
on Instagram, at least like publicly, I didn't really share
what I was going through while I was going through it,
because I just needed space to make these decisions for
myself and to learn to hear the sound of my
own voice, and to really trust and know that what
I was experiencing was true and an integrity for me.
And then it's only when that plant gets deep enough
(37:10):
roots and when you feel that it's really grounded and
rooted enough that you can take the protection off and
it can you can begin to share in a broader way.
So wherever you are on this journey, whether you're telling
the truth to yourself for the first time, or whether
you're telling the truth to one trusted other, I love
this idea of one trusted other. It doesn't have to
be like you don't have to like tell the scariest
person in your life this truth. You don't have to
(37:33):
call the person who you dislike the most and be like,
this is my truth. You know. This is a small
side note, but worth closing on this idea that I
think we get confused in our culture about the concept
of telling the truth, because telling the truth really isn't
this concept of like I'm going to just give it
to you straight and I don't care how you feel.
Usually you know when you're telling the truth because it
(37:55):
makes you feel more vulnerable than it makes the other
person feel. So take that in for a second. Usually
you know when you're telling the truth because it makes
you feel more vulnerable than it makes the other person feel.
If what you're saying to another person, if it doesn't
make you feel vulnerable and you think it's going to
hurt them, it's probably not what I mean when I
(38:15):
say truth. So, in other words, like not And Martha
Beck shares this in that episode with Tim Ferris too,
which is really worth going to listen to. She says, like,
not every opinion needs to come out of your mouth
telling the truth. Being an integrity doesn't mean that you
share every single opinion that you have. Sometimes if you're
asked a direct question, you need to give a direct answer.
(38:37):
But usually telling the truth is more like, hey, I
need a little space from you for a while. You
know that's something that may hurt the other person, but
is really more about you sharing what's going on with you.
And if it doesn't make you feel vulnerable at all,
but you think it's going to hurt their feelings, it's
probably not what I mean when I'm saying truth, so
(39:00):
so the truth. Telling the truth is going to make
you feel like, holy how I'm terrified. How am I
going to be perceived when I say this? This is
my truth, this is what's true for me. But I
don't know, you know, is this going to change the
way that people think about me? Like if I tell
people that I'm tired, are they going to stop thinking
that I'm invincible? You know? Like if I tell people
(39:20):
that I'm not doing well, people are going to stop
thinking that I'm perfect and that I have my life together.
Telling your truth will feel vulnerable. It will feel like exposing.
It might feel like it shakes up a relationship in
your life. It might feel like it shakes up a
seemingly solid ground that you were standing on. And yet
(39:41):
it also makes space for you to step into the
integrity of who you really are. I hope there's something
here in today's episode that resonated for you. I hope
you'll go listen to the conversation between Tim Ferris and
Martha Beck. I hope you'll try out the ten things
that are true for me today writing exercise. Tell your
ten truths to yourself every day and watch how these
(40:01):
truths morph over time. I hope that you'll identify where
you are in this process, whether you really need to
tell the truth to yourself, whether you need to tell
the truth to one trusted other, or whether it's time
to tell the truth on a broader scale. And as always,
I'm sending you big love and I will see you here.
Next week I wan to write your story podcast. Thanks
(40:21):
for listening.
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write. All the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down on cold It's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back
to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm
your host. And if you can hear my little children
in the background of today's episode, it's kind of perfect
for what I want to talk about today. So we're
just gonna take what is and roll with it. I'm
not going to try to fight with reality. This is
(00:45):
something that I'm learning. It's exactly what I want to
talk about today, so it's probably perfect timing for this episode.
But if you just hear any little noises in the background,
they're in their rest time. They're supposed to be being quiet,
but we all know how kids do with being quiet,
So bear with me, roll with me. It's all gonna
make sense by the end of today's episode. The topic
that I want to talk about today is the topic
(01:06):
of honesty and integrity. This is a topic that's extremely
important to me for a couple reasons. One of the
big reasons that it's important to me is my name
Alison actually means truthful one. There are a couple of
meanings that you can find for my name if you
look up, like the meaning of the name Alison, just
like there is with most any name. But the meaning
(01:28):
that my parents saw when they chose my name was
truthful one. This was the reason that they chose the
name Alison for me is because they just really felt
like it fit me. Such a wild thing to think about,
because I think about this with my kids too, Like
I felt like my kids kind of told me their names,
and I know my parents that were existing in a
different paradigm, and that's not how they would have explained it,
(01:49):
but they did see the importance of choosing a child's name,
and when they picked my name, they just really felt like, Oh,
this is her name because this is what her life
is going to represent. I'd have to ask them to
get them to use the language that they would use,
but something along those lines, like they really put a
lot of weight on the meanings of our names, myself
and my two siblings, and they chose this name because
(02:10):
they thought the meaning really fit me. And on the
one hand, it does fit me perfectly. When I think
about who I am. In the essence of who I
am and how I move through the world, there's definitely
like a truth telling nature to me. Like I feel
like I'm a lot of times the friend in the
group or the person in the family circle, the one
person who's willing to say the thing that no one
(02:31):
else is saying. And sometimes this gets me I get
a bad rap for this, or it gets me painted
in a bad light because you know, I was just
in a situation recently that I won't give like very
specific details to to protect those who were involved, But
I was just in a situation with a mixed group
of people where there was someone who was being kind
(02:51):
of like unruly and who was just controlling the whole
situation and being really frustrating, and everyone else is just
kind of rolling with it and going along, and it
wasn't really my place to call this person out. But
I was telling my husband later after the fact, I
was like, I really, in a situation like that, have
to bite my tongue to not call out what's happening,
to not be the one like it wasn't my place
(03:14):
to do it, but it would have come quite easily
for me to be the one to say like, hey,
you know, here's what's really happening, or here's what I'm seeing,
here's what I'm noticing. It's challenging for me to not
be that person in that setting. So there is a
part of me, you know, I'm an enneagram for authenticity
is really important to me. I've always been someone who
(03:35):
has placed a high value on telling the truth, saying
what's true, speaking my truth, speaking up for myself, speaking
up for the underdog, speaking up for the person who's
you know, underrepresented or misrepresented or whatever. And on the
flip side of that coin, this has been a value
or a quality that I have had to over time,
(03:59):
really work to step into. It has not come naturally
to me on the other side of this coin. So
on the one side of the coin, it has come
naturally to me and it is very much the essence
of who I am. And on the other side of
the coin, I've struggled with this concept of telling the truth.
In fact, I earned this nickname in my younger years
among my family members because there was like a cross
(04:21):
stitch kind of piece of artwork that my mom had
had done for each of us kids that had our
name on it, and then the meaning of the name,
so it said Alison, little truthful one. And I would
often get called in my childhood little bender of the truth,
because when I was very dramatically telling a story, I
would like to sprinkle in little details that made, you know,
the story more interesting, or I would kind of stretch
(04:44):
the details to make them sound more exciting. And I've
always had that flare of drama that likes to you know,
likes to really Yeah, I don't know. My daughter's this
way too, and I love it about her, Like you
can always count on Nella to tell the story in
the most dramatic way possible, or to like over dramatize everything,
and so in a way, that's also choosing to not
(05:07):
tell the truth. So that's one of the ways that
I've had to learn how to be more precise in
my language and to be more of a truth teller,
because over time, I mean, just like the parable, you know,
the story that we tell kids about the boy who
cried Wolf. This is such a common story and it's
such a common moral that even transcends cultures. But this
(05:28):
idea that, like you, if you don't tell the truth once,
then people will have a hard time believing you the
next time. So your truth gets watered down. When you
don't tell the truth in one setting and then you're
trying to tell the truth in another setting, then oftentimes
that truth doesn't hold the power that it could have
held if you chose to be an integrity always. And
there are so many reasons that we choose not to
(05:49):
be an integrity. I look back at myself in my twenties.
I think my twenties were a time in my life
when I had the hardest time telling the truth as
soon as I left home and went to college. And
I mean, I could get and all the therapeutic reasons
for this, but basically the blanket reason is there was
so much trauma that I had not addressed, that had
(06:09):
not been articulated, that had not been I had not
been telling the truth about I didn't even know how
to tell the truth about that trauma to myself. There
was so much of that that was so messy and
convoluted that I just couldn't even find myself, Like I
didn't even know who I was, I didn't know what
I was about. I didn't even know what was going
on or who I was trying to be in the world,
and so I was just kind of feeling around in
(06:31):
the dark for years and years, for pretty much most
of my twenties. I entered into an extremely toxic marriage
at the end of my twenties and then didn't leave
that marriage until I was thirty two or thirty three.
That was in twenty fifteen. So for those ten years
from the time I was I don't know, like eighteen
or nineteen until I turned thirty, I feel like the
(06:53):
page kind of turned when I turned thirty and things
began to shift and I started to step into more
of who I really am. But for most of my
twenties I really struggled to tell the truth. I spent
a lot of time being dishonest with myself, being dishonest
with other people, telling blatant, boldfaced, outright lies for reasons
that sometimes now looking back, don't even totally make sense
(07:14):
to me. I'm like, why was I lying about that?
That doesn't make any sense. But I think the reason
was the overarching reason was there was all this trauma.
I didn't know what to do with it. I hadn't
told myself the truth about it. I hadn't integrated it,
I hadn't dealt with any of it or really healed.
And when you have that kind of trauma operating in
your life, it just messes with the circuitry of who
(07:36):
you are as a human being. But I guess the
point that I really want to make on that front
is that there are so many different reasons why we lie.
One of the reasons I think why we don't tell
the truth to ourselves or others is because we recognize
the power of the truth. Like this concept, the biblical
concept that the truth will set you free, this universal
(07:56):
concept that the truth will set you free, and I
love there's a play on that quote that I used
when I wrote Indestructible about leaving that toxic marriage. There's
a play on the quote that says the truth will
set you free, but not until it's done with you,
which I just thought was so perfect and fit exactly
what I was going through at that time. The truth.
We understand intuitively that the truth does set us free,
(08:18):
and yet it doesn't set you free until it first
completely demolishes the lie that you were living in. And
so many of us are relying on and leaning on
and grabbing onto, grasping onto that lie because that lie
feels like some sense of security or stability, and to
let go of the lie would mean an absolute crumbling
(08:39):
of everything that we've ever known, and that's freaking terrifying,
And so we just aren't ready to tell the truth
to ourselves or to others. So that's one reason why
we choose not to tell the truth, is that we
recognize that we're standing on our own lies, that those
lies that we're standing on are propping us up and
holding us up, and to take those lies away and
(09:00):
choose to tell the truth would mean that those lies
would crumble underneath of us and we would inevitably fall.
Another reason why I think we don't tell the truth
with ourselves or with others is because to tell the
truth is to be seen in our own humanity, and
so I think it's tricky to tell the truth sometimes,
even when the truth is something simple like I'm tired.
(09:20):
You know, when you think about this, you walk around
all over the place, you go to the grocery store
or wherever you go on a daily basis, work or
school or whatever, and people are like, hey, how are
you doing it and you're like, I'm good, and we
do this all day along with each other, like I'm good,
I'm great, I'm fine. Yeah, things are good. I'm busy,
you know, And it's like the truth is, the real
truth is I'm freaking exhausted. I don't know up from down.
(09:43):
I'm really feeling depressed today. I am really struggling. I'm
actually not okay. Things are not okay, things are falling
apart in my life. The world feels really dark and
hard right now. Whatever the truth is feels like a
tricky thing to say in a passing comment with a stranger.
And I'm not necessarily saying that in a passing comment
with a stranger that you should, you know, share your deepest,
(10:06):
darkest truth. That's maybe not always the wisest thing to do,
but I do want to point out that sometimes we
choose not to tell the truth because it feels really
vulnerable to allow ourselves to be seen in all of
our humanity. When someone says, hey, how you doing, for
you to go you know what, I'm not great, Like,
I'm not doing great today. I'm really struggling. I'm having
(10:26):
a hard time. I could use a hug, I could
use a day off. You know, it's so challenging. It
takes so much courage and so much bravery to show
up in all of your humanity like that that these
are really like understandable reasons why we choose to fib
or to tell, you know, a half truth, like it's okay,
(10:47):
I'm fine, Yeah, I'm fine, no problem, I'm good, when
really you're like you could fall apart at any moment.
And then I think the third reason, third big reason
why we choose not to tell the truth is because
we're relational beings who operate in partnership with other human beings.
And I think a lot of times when we choose
(11:07):
not to tell the truth, we're doing so because we
think we're preserving those relationships. And I just want to
point out how primal and normal this is that when
you move through the world, you wanting to preserve your
first year, second tier, third year relationships, like your acquaintance relationships,
your family relationships, your friendships, your neighbors, like the ways
(11:28):
that you tell little half truths because someone goes like
what do you think of my new haircut? Or what
do you know, like do you like this shirt that
I'm wearing and you're like, yeah, it's really cute. The
ways that we tell half truths. There, that we choose
not to tell the truth as a way to preserve
those relationships is really about preserving our sense of safety
and security inside of community. Because we were designed to
(11:51):
operate in community with other people. We four centuries have
relied on operating inside of community. We've relied on each other.
We are interdependent beings. We lean on each other, and
so I think sometimes we're afraid that if we told
the truth that relationships would shatter. And I'd love to
be able to say that that's not a fair assessment
(12:11):
of the situation, and that you know, everyone should just
be able to tell the truth. But I do think
it is a fair assessment of the situation that most
relationships that we have in our lives I think are
maybe in some ways as fragile as we have deemed
them to be. That telling the truth about someone's haircut
or someone's shirt, as simple as that might seem, might
actually rock the boat in such a way where those
(12:33):
relationships wouldn't be able to survive. There's so much I
could say about that and unpack about that. I'm not
saying that's a good thing, or that it's right necessarily,
But I'm saying that we have accurately assessed that if
I choose to tell the truth in this particular situation,
that it is going to create a rift inside of
this relationship that I don't know that I'm prepared to navigate.
(12:56):
And I'll share this. It's a tiny bit of a
side note, but it really does fit here, this piece
of advice that my therapist gave me when I was
dating again after my divorce, because I was in this
toxic marriage, it was extremely tense, It was dramatic. There
was always like these big explosions. He was always mad
at me. I was always doing something wrong. So when
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I healed after that, I spent two years healing after
my divorce, and then when I started to date again,
I realized that I was extremely fragile when it came
time to having these conversations in a relationship where there
was a disagreement. It was like, if we were dating
and things were going well, then I was fine. But
the minute that someone chose to share their truth with me,
and that truth rocked my boat, I had a really
(13:41):
hard time enduring that I had a really hard time,
like moving through those waves with someone. And my therapist
shared something with me in that setting that has proven
very helpful even outside of a romantic setting. And my
(14:03):
therapist shared something with me in that setting that has
proven very helpful even outside of a romantic setting, which
is that you have to learn how to endure what
she called cold space. So cold space in a relationship
is where what you think and what I think don't match.
The way you feel and the way I feel don't match.
(14:25):
Where you are and where I am don't match. And
I think sometimes we feel like life is fragile. Everything's fragile.
I'm feeling fragile, and so all I want is the
comfort of just knowing like I'm on the same page
with someone. We're together in this. I'm not going to
be abandoned. You're right here with me. And everybody's different.
So maybe not everybody feels that way, but I do
(14:46):
think sometimes we get in those modes where it's like,
just please be on my side beyond my team, agree
with me, feel the way that I feel, so that
I don't feel so alone. And what she was talking
about is cultivating this ability to endure cold space in
a relationship. This could be in a romantic partnership, it
could be in just a friendship where you have periods
of time that you just don't speak to this person.
(15:07):
And maybe some of that cold space is not even
because you disagree, but it's just like you know their
life is going one way and your life is going
a different way, and so you just don't connect. It's
like things are different for you, or there's geographical distance
or whatever, and so there's cold space in the relationship.
Or sometimes it's because it's like, hey, you voted one
way and I voted a different way, and I don't
(15:29):
understand why you chose to vote the way that you voted,
and so there's cold space here. It's like I'm not
gonna change my mind to come your way, and you're
not going to change your mind to come my way.
And so there's distance between the two of us. And
rather than work hard to close that distance so that
I can feel secure again, I'm going to allow there
to be some distance. And I bring this up this
(15:53):
third piece because I think it's important as it relates
to us learning how to tell the truth. We cannot
learn how to tell the truth until we can also
learn how to endure that cold space in relationships so
operating on this tension, that you might be right that
if you speak the truth to this person or in
this setting, that it's going to rock the boat, and
(16:14):
that relationship might not feel the same. And also the
relationships that really matter to you or that really could endure,
might need a little bit more of that kind of
honesty and integrity in order to build the resilience to
where they could move through the real waves of life.
(16:35):
And the reason I want to bring any of this up,
let me go back to the beginning to where this
idea even came from. This topic came back into my awareness.
It's something I've worked on, like I said, for my
whole life, and really through my twenties, I kind of
wonder like what is up with me? Like why am
I having such a hard time telling the truth. It's
something I made a commitment to in my early thirties
that I was going to start telling the truth to myself.
(16:57):
And recently an author who I love, Martha Beck, came
out with a new book. And when she came out
with her books, she did the thing that all authors
do when they come out with new books, which is
go on the podcast to her. So basically, you just
get on every big podcast and you talk about your
book on every big podcast. And so, because I love
Martha Beck, I just started listening to all of these
different episodes, and one of the episodes I listened to
(17:19):
was Martha Beck on the Tim Ferriss podcast, and she
talked about specifically, I'm so glad I listened to this episode.
I'm not a regular listener of the Tim Ferriss podcast,
but I'm really glad I listened to this episode because
one of the things that she talked about on this
episode was this integrity cleanse that she did many years ago.
And the integrity cleanse was this idea that for three
(17:40):
hundred and sixty five days she was going to choose
to speak only the truth. And if you think to yourself, well,
I'm already a really truthful person, like I mostly tell
the truth or I always tell the truth, maybe you're
even thinking that to yourself. One of the reasons that
I love this is that when you really dial this back,
when you really start to think about it, you realize
(18:01):
all of the very subtle ways that you are maybe
not telling the truth that you think you are, Like
maybe you think of yourself as a person who has
a lot of integrity, and maybe you tell the truth
when it comes to like you know, the cashier gave
you too much change, and you're always telling the truth there,
or you tell the truth like my mom is like
the ultimate truth teller. She refuses to sneak candy into
(18:22):
the movie theater. She's like such a rule follower, so
such a truth teller, and you know, she'll tell me,
like I'll tell her information and she'll be like, I'm
not going to tell your sister unless you tell me.
It's okay to tell your sister. Like my mom is
like a very you know, strict truth teller. But even
if you're someone like that who is a strict truth
teller and likes to follow the rules and always, you know,
(18:43):
like tells the truth, you think that you always tell
the truth. This is an important thing to reflect on
because maybe there are ways that you are choosing not
to tell the truth, even to yourself. This is one
of the reasons why I think writing is such a
powerful exercise to re connect you to yourself. Because one
(19:03):
of the things that happens when you pick up the
pen and you put a pen to a piece of paper,
or when you put your fingers on the keys, is
your fingers will actually move faster on the keys than
your brain can even think. And so it's almost like
it's short circuits. The thing that you would do if
you were chatting with a stranger, where you'd be like, yeah,
things are great, I'm fine, life is good. And what
(19:25):
it does is it allows you to tap into what's
going on beneath the surface. I talk about this in
the Power of Writing It Down. I talk about in
the Power of Writing It Down. The brain science behind
why writing gets us to the truth so much faster,
because writing is helping you to access what's in the subconscious,
under the conscious surface of your brain, under the things,
(19:47):
the chatter, all the stuff that you think you're thinking
about in a day. It allows you to peel back
those layers and really hear what's going on underneath. So
when you write, you access this part of your brain
that we don't I spend a lot of time thinking about.
We don't spend a lot of time accessing. We spend
most of our days in our conscious mind, very little
(20:08):
of our days in our unconscious mind. And yet what's
going on in the unconscious mind is responsible for virtually
every single decision and action that you make. And so
maybe you think you're being honest because you're telling the
truth as far as you know consciously, but there are
actually things that you're hiding, even from yourself, and until
(20:30):
you're honest with yourself about those things, you couldn't possibly
be honest with anyone else. And at least the way
that I find this works is you are honest with
yourself first, and then you sit in utter terror that
you have to be honest with even one other person,
Like first person maybe you're honest with is like your
therapist or your partner or your best friend or something
someone who feels really really safe to you. And then
slowly but surely you have to start to be honest
(20:51):
with other people about it. And I was just telling
my husband the other day, I feel like I've done
the thing, like I spent all of my thirties doing
the thing where I learned how to be honest with myself,
like radical honesty. And this is what Martha Becka was
talking about, like spending three hundred and sixty five days
just going like every time I open my mouth, I'm
going to choose to tell the truth. I'm going to
tell the truth to myself, no matter what it costs me.
(21:14):
And she tells the story of how her life fell
apart because of that integrity cleanse, and I would say
the same is true with me. Like all of the
lies that I was standing on that I thought were
making me feel safe and secure, crumbled underneath of me,
and then what I was left with was the truth
of myself, dealing with the truth of myself. And then slowly,
(21:34):
over time, I've had to learn how to share that
truth of myself with others. And I think that is
maybe the threshold that I'm standing at now is having
learned how to tell the truth with myself, how do
I learn how to share the truth with others. This
(21:56):
is one of the things that I love about the
practice of writing, is that right is an extremely effective
and fast way to get you to tell the truth
to yourself first. Writing, like I talk about in the
Power of Writing It Down, is a proven way to
get out of your conscious thought and into your unconscious thought.
(22:17):
And when you think about it, we spend most of
our day in our conscious thought. We spend very little
of our time in our unconscious thought, and yet our
unconscious mind is driving most of the decisions that we
make in a day. It's driving most of our behavior,
it's most of our patterning, it's most of how we
present ourselves to the world and how we move through
the world. And so if you're not aware of what's
(22:39):
going on in your unconscious mind, you might think of
yourself as a pretty honest person, someone who stands in
your own integrity, but you just might not even recognize
or realize, like this is like me in my twenties,
that you're just not even being honest with yourself. And
so you might actually be sharing what you think are truths,
but you're sharing from dishonest place because you just don't
(23:01):
even know that you're being dishonest with yourself. So this
is one of the things that I love about the
practice of writing, is that it will bring you back
into integrity with yourself so quickly. There's an exercise that
I've given on the podcast before that is one of
my favorite exercises to give to anyone who is new
to this practice, and it's so simple that you can
do it in just five minutes a day if you
(23:22):
wanted to. So I'll give it to you here, the
idea is that you sit down with a blank piece
of paper, or you sit down at the blinking cursor
at your screen, however you choose to do your writing practice,
and you write at the top of the piece of
paper ten things that are true for me today. And
the ten things that you write down can be anything.
It could just literally be like, I'm sitting in my
living room. You know, my two kids are upstairs, they're
(23:44):
in rest time. The sun is streaming in through the windows.
Today is the day after daylight saving time. It feels
later than it is. You know, whatever these statements are
can be relatively simple. In fact, starting simple is good
because it helps you kind of like get into the
groove of things. But over time, what you'll find is
that you will admit truth to yourself that you didn't
(24:05):
even know we're true. And everyone who's done this exercise
has had that experience where you write something down on
the paper and then you go like, WHOA, I didn't
even know I felt that way, or I didn't even
know why I thought that, or I didn't even know
that that was true for me, But that actually is
really my truth. And the other beautiful thing about this
exercise is that what is true in one moment doesn't
(24:28):
have to stay true forever. And I always tell people
that because I think that's one of our fears as
it relates to telling the truth, that we're worried if
we speak the truth out loud again, like this could
shatter the current reality that I'm living in if I
share my truth whatever is true for me right now,
but what's true for you right now doesn't have to
stay true. Like you could say something like I'm miserable,
(24:49):
I hate this, like I hate you know, my current
set of circumstances or whatever. Just because you say that
or admit that to yourself doesn't mean that that is
going to be your truth forever. In fact, these truths
that we put on paper are actually passing truths. And
I was just reading something in a book this week.
I was reading another Pima Chondron book, and there's this
(25:11):
Buddhist concept that I'd have to look into more deeply
to really fully understand it or explain it. But basically,
the idea is that there are essential truths and then
there are also passing truths. And most of what we
write down in this exercise, the ten things that are
true for me today. Most of these truths are passing truths.
They are truths that are true right now but are
actually not wholly true forever. Like a truth that's wholly
(25:34):
true forever is that you're loved, like you're totally held,
everything's okay. Those are truths that are like big, big
truths that are true forever and ever, and nothing that
you ever do or say could could get you out
of those truths. But these passing truths are not any
less true. In fact, it's so helpful and important to
be able to admit these truths to ourselves so that
(25:54):
we can move through them and move on to the
next truth. Pretending like the truth is true is not
an effective way to get the truth to move through.
But when you can admit what's true and not make
it quite so meaningful, or not make it quite so heavy,
or not make it you know, the end all be all,
not cling to it like it's your security, it's your stability,
(26:17):
then those truths can actually become extremely effective for getting
you out of ruts. And I wrote about this and Indestructible.
It's this idea that the truth will set you free,
but not until it's done with you. So yes, telling
the truth might cause some things to crumble underneath of you,
but what remains under those passing truths is actually a
(26:38):
much more solid truth. And this is where the title
indestructible came from. The title actually came from a John
Steinbeck quote where he says, I suppose a loving woman.
I suppose a woman is stronger than a man, particularly
a woman with love in her heart. I suppose a
loving woman is indestructible. And the concept that I really
wanted to get across there is that when you can
(26:58):
speak your truth and you can be in your own essence,
when you can be in the fullness of who you are,
then you are indestructible. You are absolutely immovable. And these
passing through this move in and out, they come and go.
They're worth saying, they're worth admitting to yourself, they're worth
feeling all the way through. But they are not the
(27:20):
whole truth of who you are. They do not dictate
who you are or you're worth in this world. They
are not the security in the stability that you're standing on.
And if you make them the security and the stability
that you're standing on, then you will feel always like
you're standing on shaky ground. Which this is an interesting
play on words here because one of the things that
I learned a few years ago, many years ago, actually
(27:42):
in my thirties, when I was doing a deep dive
on this topic, was I started to do some research
into the etymology of the word integrity, and the word
integrity is actually a word that was originally used in architecture.
The idea of a building being in integrity was the
concepts that this building would be able to stand up
(28:04):
under the pressure of environmental chaos. So if a storm
came in, if an earthquake came in, a building in
integrity would be the building that could stand. And this
metaphor lays perfectly over what I'm talking about here and
is exactly it gets at exactly what I want to say,
which is that when you can learn to be in
integrity with yourself, when you can first tell yourself the truth,
(28:27):
and then you can tell someone close to you the truth,
and then you can tell a relative stranger the truth
or aquaintance the truth. When you can speak the truth
when someone you hardly know says how are you doing,
and you're like, you know what, I've been better or
I'm not doing that great or I could really use
a hug today or whatever. When you can learn to
tell the truth in every single situation, then you are
(28:51):
going to stand in integrity, meaning you'll be indestructible, meaning
that these passing truths will move in and out of
your space. You'll experience that, but they are not going
to shake the foundation of who you really are, because
you're no longer standing on shaky ground. And I think
for me, listening to this episode of Martha Beck talking
with Tim Ferriss about her Integrity Clans, it just reinspired
(29:12):
me to come back to this topic that I've spent
so much time thinking about. I've invested so much of
my own energy and personal growth here, and I'm so
proud of how far I've come. When I look back
at myself at like nineteen years old or twenty one
years old or whatever, hiding these parts of my life
because I was ashamed and refusing to tell the truth
to myself about what was really going on, you know,
(29:33):
kind of blocking out these parts of my life because
I didn't want to look at what was really true.
The truth was so hard to see, it was so
hard to explain. It didn't make sense with the story
that I've been telling myself. It was shattering the reality
that I was living in. When I look back at
that version of myself, I have such grace and compassion
for her. And I'm also so proud of how far
I've come. I'm so proud of the work that I've done.
(29:55):
I'm so proud of the grounds that I stand on now.
In fact, I was saying too my husband the other
morning that I'm coming up on the ten year anniversary
of leaving that toxic marriage. I was talking about November nineteenth,
twenty fifteen, was the day that everything exploded and fell apart,
and was a day that required me to step into
(30:17):
even more of my truth. It required me to look
even closer at the truth of what was going on
in my life, what was going on in my relationship,
how I really felt, what I really wanted, what I
was craving. And I was in a place in my
life at that point, like on November eighteenth of twenty fifteen,
where I was just not there yet. I wasn't really
willing to admit to myself how I really felt, which
(30:39):
was I was miserable. I hated being in that marriage.
There were so many parts of my life that I
didn't like. Things were not going the way that I
wanted them to go. I didn't like the relationship that
I was in, I didn't want what I was building,
and I didn't know how to admit any of that
to myself. I didn't know how to speak the truth
out loud. I felt a friend of the entire earth
(31:02):
underneath of me collapsing. And when the when the ground
underneath of me did begin to crumble, when I started
to speak the truth, those two things happened at the
same exact time. In fact, I've told parts of this
story before, but I just think it's so perfect and
pertinent that I started going to yoga in September of
twenty fifteen, and there's no accident that I became strong
(31:23):
enough to tell my truth on November nineteenth of twenty fifteen.
So it's almost exactly ten years ago coming up here
in just a couple of weeks, almost exactly ten years
ago that I took that leap to tell the truth
to myself, to tell the truth to this person who
I was married to, to tell the truth to people
in my friend group, and to finally say, like I
don't want to do this anymore. I need to find
(31:45):
a new way forward. This is no longer working for me,
and my life shifted dramatically, like so dramatically that I
don't even recognize the life that life compared to the
life that I'm in today, and every good thing that
I enjoy about my life today, my solid partnership that
I'm in, my loving husband, my family, my two beautiful, healthy,
wonderful beloved children who are loud and you know, upstairs
(32:10):
making all their noise whatever. Like this family life that
I begged for and prayed for and waited for for
so long long is only made possible by the fact
that I learned to tell the truth back then. And
when I first started telling the truth back then, it
felt like I was It felt like death. It felt
like everything was dying, everything's falling apart. Everything I wanted
is you know, even further away from me now than
(32:31):
it was before. And now I'm like this solid foundation
that I have built my life on, this life of
integrity that I have now, I have because I was
willing to tell the truth to myself back then, and
to tell the truth to a few close people. And
right now I feel like the threshold that I'm standing
at And I don't know if you can relate to
this at all, but I feel like the threshold that
I'm standing at is that I've learned how to tell
(32:52):
the truth to myself. The practice of writing has taught
me that I've learned how to tell the truth to myself.
I am in integrity with myself. I've learned how to
tell the truth to a few close friends. And I
think I'm standing at a threshold where I feel that
I'm being invited to tell the truth in a broader sense.
And I really am fting the invitation to tell the truth.
(33:16):
I guess to strangers. I don't know. I do it
here on the podcast, I do it some on Instagram.
But when I tell you that, like posting publicly about
how I really feel about certain topics makes me feel
like I'm gonna die, Like I'm gonna lose my reputation.
People are gonna hate me, I'm going to have all
these critics. Everyone's gonna come at me. And you know,
(33:40):
I'm not saying that's real. I'm saying that's how I feel.
What I feel is going to happen to the point where,
like when I watch other people on Instagram, like either
influencers or authors or whatever, speak their truth and get
the inevitable pileon that happens. I cringe even watching it
happen to other people. And yet I know that's the
threshold that I'm standing at. I know what it's. I
(34:01):
know that this is what I'm being invited into. It's
the next level of integrity. Is like, let me just
give one simple example. I have deconstructed the faith of
my childhood in my own life. I feel in utter
integrity in that realm of my life. I have talked
about that deconstruction with people who are close to me.
I've talked about it even here on the podcast some
(34:22):
but I have hesitated to share that experience, or those insights,
or my own personal truth beyond that close proximity, because
I have feared what does that mean for me? What
am I going to lose? What's going to crumble underneath
of me? When I live that deeply into integrity? And
(34:42):
so that's just where I am personally. I don't know
where this conversation lands for you, but I know that
I want to be the type of person who even
when things get chaotic, even when the storm comes, even
when there's tornadoes or chaos, or you know, unexpected things
happen or accidents, or like my teacher is Sarah, My
yoga teacher used to always say, like, be the kind
(35:03):
of person who other people want to call in case
of emergency. Like be the type of person who in
an emergency can keep a cool head, who knows what
to do, who has your feet on the ground. And
I want to be that type of person. I want
to be the type of person who other people call
on in case of emergency. And I think this is
(35:23):
the invitation to me right now, is am I willing
to step out in integrity and to speak my truth
beyond just my small little group. I think there's some wisdom,
like wherever you are on this journey, there's some wisdom
to telling the truth in a small setting first, Because
if you think of it like planting a tree, like
we planted this Japanese maple in our front yard. We've
(35:44):
done this a couple of times. Now. The deer love
the Japanese maple. We've planted the Japanese maple a couple
of times, and when it's just a little sapling, the
deer come and they just rip the Japanese mapele to
shreds and like Japanese maples. I mean talk about being
forty two, and this is like conversations that you have
when you're in the second half of your life. But
Japanese maples are beautiful, and they're also like not cheap
(36:06):
plants to plant, They're not cheap to buy. And we've
planted a Japanese maple in the front yard and the
deer come and rip it to shreds. And you realize
that when you have a sapling like that, when you
plant a small tree, you have to kind of surround
it with some protection for a while so that it
can just get its roots in and it can just
grow enough to be able to withstand mother nature, you know,
(36:26):
withstand the deer that are coming to eat it, or
whatever the storms that come and go inevitably. And the
same is true for your truth telling and your integrity.
I think there's wisdom in planting that small sapling first
and giving yourself some space. This is what I've done
with my deconstruction journey is I didn't want to muddy
the waters by talking about it while it was happening
(36:48):
on Instagram, at least like publicly, I didn't really share
what I was going through while I was going through it,
because I just needed space to make these decisions for
myself and to learn to hear the sound of my
own voice, and to really trust and know that what
I was experiencing was true and an integrity for me.
And then it's only when that plant gets deep enough
(37:10):
roots and when you feel that it's really grounded and
rooted enough that you can take the protection off and
it can you can begin to share in a broader way.
So wherever you are on this journey, whether you're telling
the truth to yourself for the first time, or whether
you're telling the truth to one trusted other, I love
this idea of one trusted other. It doesn't have to
be like you don't have to like tell the scariest
person in your life this truth. You don't have to
(37:33):
call the person who you dislike the most and be like,
this is my truth. You know. This is a small
side note, but worth closing on this idea that I
think we get confused in our culture about the concept
of telling the truth, because telling the truth really isn't
this concept of like I'm going to just give it
to you straight and I don't care how you feel.
Usually you know when you're telling the truth because it
(37:55):
makes you feel more vulnerable than it makes the other
person feel. So take that in for a second. Usually
you know when you're telling the truth because it makes
you feel more vulnerable than it makes the other person feel.
If what you're saying to another person, if it doesn't
make you feel vulnerable and you think it's going to
hurt them, it's probably not what I mean when I
(38:15):
say truth. So, in other words, like not And Martha
Beck shares this in that episode with Tim Ferris too,
which is really worth going to listen to. She says, like,
not every opinion needs to come out of your mouth
telling the truth. Being an integrity doesn't mean that you
share every single opinion that you have. Sometimes if you're
asked a direct question, you need to give a direct answer.
(38:37):
But usually telling the truth is more like, hey, I
need a little space from you for a while. You
know that's something that may hurt the other person, but
is really more about you sharing what's going on with you.
And if it doesn't make you feel vulnerable at all,
but you think it's going to hurt their feelings, it's
probably not what I mean when I'm saying truth, so
(39:00):
so the truth. Telling the truth is going to make
you feel like, holy how I'm terrified. How am I
going to be perceived when I say this? This is
my truth, this is what's true for me. But I
don't know, you know, is this going to change the
way that people think about me? Like if I tell
people that I'm tired, are they going to stop thinking
that I'm invincible? You know? Like if I tell people
(39:20):
that I'm not doing well, people are going to stop
thinking that I'm perfect and that I have my life together.
Telling your truth will feel vulnerable. It will feel like exposing.
It might feel like it shakes up a relationship in
your life. It might feel like it shakes up a
seemingly solid ground that you were standing on. And yet
(39:41):
it also makes space for you to step into the
integrity of who you really are. I hope there's something
here in today's episode that resonated for you. I hope
you'll go listen to the conversation between Tim Ferris and
Martha Beck. I hope you'll try out the ten things
that are true for me today writing exercise. Tell your
ten truths to yourself every day and watch how these
(40:01):
truths morph over time. I hope that you'll identify where
you are in this process, whether you really need to
tell the truth to yourself, whether you need to tell
the truth to one trusted other, or whether it's time
to tell the truth on a broader scale. And as always,
I'm sending you big love and I will see you here.
Next week I wan to write your story podcast. Thanks
(40:21):
for listening.
Feeling Things with Amy & Kat News
Host
Amy Brown
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com