I want to tell you about the moment Beverly Howard mentioned Harry Belafonte.

We were well into our conversation — she’d already shared a full, rich life: her career with the U.S. Coast Guard, her work in theater and television, her path to becoming a speaking coach. And then we got to the part of the show I think of as the exhale. Two Truths and a Lie.

Beverly leaned in and described an ordinary workday that turned into anything but. Nelson Mandela had just been released from prison and was on his way to Yankee Stadium to speak to thousands of New Yorkers. The Coast Guard had brought him through the New York area, and that meant a stop at Beverly’s office. He was exhausted — barely able to raise his hand in greeting as he left. But while Mandela rested, Harry Belafonte put on an impromptu concert for Beverly and her coworkers in the hallway of her office building. Just them. No one else.

I sat there for a second. That’s a story that never gets to come out in ordinary conversation.

That’s the moment I think about whenever someone asks me why I end every episode with a game.

The Thing People Carry Into the Room: Most of the guests who sit down with me have a story they know how to tell. It’s the one they’ve rehearsed—at dinner parties, in interviews, when someone asks how they ended up where they are. It’s polished. It has a shape. It ties up neatly at the end.

I’m not saying those stories aren’t true. I’m saying they’re not always the whole truth.

The whole truth is often sitting a little further back. It’s the experience that’s too unexpected, too hard to offer without the right opening. The one that doesn’t fit any obvious on-ramp in ordinary conversation.

Alan Mallory gave me one of those. I knew going in that Alan had done something almost no one on the planet has done — he and his siblings were the first family in the world to reach the summit of Mount Everest together. That’s the story he knows how to tell, and he tells it well. But during Two Truths and a Lie, a different story came out. During COVID, Alan and his wife sold most of their possessions, bought a fifth-wheel RV, and spent a year traveling across the country with their three kids. They did schoolwork in the mornings. In the afternoons, they biked through red rock canyons and did night rides through the Arizona desert — headlamps on, rattlesnakes and tarantulas moving in the dark around them — because Alan thought that sounded like more fun than sitting still.

He mentioned it almost in passing. Like it was just something they did.

These are the stories I’m always hoping to find. The ones that are so fully lived that the person telling them doesn’t quite realize how remarkable they are.

What the Game Does That a Question Can’t: I didn’t add Two Truths and a Lie to Project Candor because I thought it would unlock better conversations. I added it because I thought it would be fun — a light way to close out what are often heavy, meaningful exchanges.

What I didn’t expect was what it would actually do.

When the frame shifts from “we’re in an interview” to “we’re playing a game,” something changes. The rules are different. In Two Truths and a Lie, one statement is supposed to be false — that’s the entire point. Permission to be surprising, even a little mischievous, is already built in. Guests who have been thoughtful and measured for an entire conversation suddenly become animated. They lean forward. They start to enjoy themselves.

And in that enjoyment, things surface.

Paula Casey told me, almost as an aside during the segment, about the night she sat down to dinner with Margaret Thatcher. At some point during the evening, the former Prime Minister turned to Paula and asked for a personal tour of the Opryland Conservatory at the hotel in Nashville. Paula’s response — without missing a beat — was: I’d be happy to, but you’re going to need better shoes.

Thatcher went and changed her shoes. Paula gave her the tour. People in the conservatory stopped and pointed, saying, That’s Margaret Thatcher.

She told me this story like it was a perfectly reasonable thing that had happened to her. And I thought: how does something like that almost not come up at all?

The answer is that there’s no graceful way to offer it unprompted. “So, Paula, have you ever given Margaret Thatcher a personal tour of a hotel conservatory?” is not a question that comes up in ordinary life. But in Two Truths and a Lie, Paula had a natural place to put it.

That’s what the game creates. A container for the stories that don’t have a natural container anywhere else.

Why This Matters Beyond the Podcast: I think about this a lot outside the recording room.

Most of us are walking around with stories like Beverly’s, Alan’s, and Paula’s. Moments that shaped us, surprised us, or turned out to be stranger and more wonderful than we could have planned. Moments we haven’t quite figured out how to share—not because we’re hiding them, but because we’re waiting for the right moment, the right container, the right permission.

That’s the idea at the heart of Project Candor. Ordinary people are carrying extraordinary things. The job isn’t to extract those stories through clever questions. The job is to create a space where sharing them feels natural—even welcome. (For more on this, see Life Has a Way of Rewriting Plans.)

Two Truths and a Lie is a small, concrete expression of that belief. It says, “We’re not only interested in the experiences you’ve already packaged for public consumption.” We’re interested in the ones still waiting for someone to ask.

And in my experience, when you give people permission to be surprising, a little unpredictable, a little off-script — they tell you the truth. Sometimes truths they didn’t even know they were ready to share.

In conclusion, Beverly’s story about Harry Belafonte was completely unexpected. What made it so incredible is that Beverly and her coworkers and the stars themselves are the only ones who could ever say this happened to them — and the only reason I got to hear it was because of a game at the end of a podcast.

I think about how many stories like hers are sitting in the people around us. How rarely we give each other the kind of space where something unexpected can surface. How often we stay in the lane of polished and purposeful, when the real stuff is just a little further back.

That’s what I’m always trying to build with Project Candor. Not a place where people perform their best selves. A place where they get to share the rest of themselves, too.

If you want to explore what that kind of candid, self-reflective conversation looks like in a one-on-one setting, I’m currently developing Chart Your Next Course, a new offering in development for those who want to do that kind of thinking in a more personal context.

Sometimes it just takes a game to get there.

Call to Action

Want to hear the game in action? The Two Truths and a Lie segment is one of my favorite parts of every episode — you never know where it’s going to go. 👉 Listen to a recent episode of Project Candor

Think you have a story worth telling? Project Candor guests come from every walk of life. If you’ve lived something worth talking about, I’d love to hear it. 👉 Apply to be a guest

About the author: Jeanne Andersen is the host of the Project Candor Podcast.