The Ground Truth Process: Name Your Work to Lead with Intention and Conviction
If letting yourself be seen was easy, you’d have done it. If naming yourself was easy, you’d have done it. And that’s what this little book is for. It’s to offer you a process to find a name for what is already true of you.
It’s a process of looking at your stories and the words you wrap around them. A process for talking through moments when you felt like yourself, revealing you as yourself, feeling in flow, with or without making the world a better place.
It’s in these stories that your words will emerge and a name can be created.
This is called the Ground Truth. It’s the language that names you to yourself. It makes visible the line that holds it all together.
The Ground Truth process is for you if:
You know what you have to say but can’t find the words to say it.
You know what you do and why it matters, but you can’t figure out how to make that clear in words that you feel confident in.
You panic when someone asks you what you do.
You’ve longed for words that communicate the full breadth and depth of your contributions.
Someone asking you to send over your bio or your LinkedIn is horror-movie-level terrifying.
You have a diverse team and are looking for the thread that holds your distinct efforts together.
You work in a high impact space with chronically ambiguous metrics for success—which makes decision-making and collaboration tricky.
The process is designed for individuals but has been used for partnerships and teams. Even businesses have a soul that knows what it is to be most alive, an essence to be witnessed, celebrated, and named.
In Part 1: Meet the Ground Truth, we’ll name what the Ground Truth is, where it came from, what goes into it, and what it does for you.
In Part 2: Name your Ground Truth, we’ll go through each of the steps I take my clients through. You’ll emerge both with a new way to talk about yourself and a new way to use language and tweak words through time.
In Part 3: Translate Your Ground Truth, we’ll explore the ways we take our Ground Truth, our True Name, out into the world so we can be seen and known. It’ll be how to do everything from choosing brand positioning to bio writing to complex decision-making. All of it has its roots in the Ground Truth.
This is how we find words for what we want to say. It isn’t so much about discovery as it is uncovering—you know who you are.