For the first several years of my career, I started every coaching session the same way.
"What would you like to work on today?"
It's the standard opening. You'll find some version of it in every coaching school curriculum, every ICF competency framework, every beginner's guide to professional coaching. It signals respect for client autonomy. It positions the coach as a facilitator rather than an expert. It establishes the agenda.
It is also, I came to understand, a gate that closes something before the session even begins.
When I ask "what would you like to work on?" I am signaling to the client what kind of meeting this is. I am telling them: arrive with a task. Come prepared with an objective. Know what outcome you want. The implicit message is that we are here to achieve something — and achievement requires a target.
The client arrives in their head before they've arrived in the room.
I don't remember exactly when I changed the question. I remember the conditions: I had been working with a senior executive for several months. He was intelligent, articulate, always prepared. He would arrive with a clear objective, we would work it through together, he would leave with clarity and a plan. By any standard measure, the coaching was effective.
But something kept nagging at me. Session after session, his objectives changed — the content shifted, the context evolved — but the pattern underneath stayed exactly the same. Different goal, same driver. Different decision, same fear underneath the logic.
One day he arrived and before I could ask my usual question, I noticed something. He looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. And so instead of opening the session professionally, I asked something else.
"How are you? Not your week — you. How are you?"
He stopped. Looked at me for a moment. And then something in his face changed entirely.
What followed was the most important session we ever had. Not because we solved a problem, but because for the first time, he stopped managing the conversation and started having it. The goal he had walked in with — a decision about a restructure — never came up. Something older and truer surfaced instead. And from that place, the restructure question became obvious. He didn't need coaching on it anymore. He had just needed to stop running for long enough to see what was underneath.
I've been coaching for over twenty years. I've logged more than ten thousand professional hours across four continents and three languages. And the single most consistent thing I've observed is this: people arrive in coaching knowing what they think they need. And they leave their most important sessions having encountered something else entirely — something they didn't know they were carrying until the space was quiet enough to hear it.
The standard coaching model is built to serve what people think they need. There is nothing wrong with that. But there is something it systematically misses: the fact that an objective is always a limit. It is the boundary of what you could imagine at the time you formed it. A coaching methodology organized entirely around helping you reach that boundary keeps you inside it.
The question "What would you like to work on?" reinforces the limit.
The question "How are you?" opens the space beyond it.
This is at the heart of what I call the Outgrowing Thesis — the philosophy behind Somatic Thinking®. Human development is not about reaching goals. It is about outgrowing them. About expanding your awareness — of yourself, of your patterns, of what you actually need — until the objective that seemed so fixed dissolves or transforms into something you could not have seen from inside the original question.
In Somatic Thinking®, we work with إشارات حسّية جسدية — the physical signals the body carries before the mind has formed a narrative. When I asked my client how he was, I was not asking for a status update. I was asking him to check in with النَّفْس — the living self, the whole person who walked in, not the professional facade. That moment of genuine self-contact is where real coaching begins.
Not the work of reaching the goal. The work of outgrowing the need to cling to it.
I've been thinking a lot about this as I begin to share التفكير الحسّي — Somatic Thinking® — with English-speaking audiences for the first time.
Because the question "how are you?" sounds simple. Disarmingly simple. But as a coaching move — as a practice rooted in presence, in attentiveness to the whole human being — it is anything but.
If you've ever felt like your best coaching sessions happened when you let go of the agenda and something else opened up, I'd like to explore that with you. I'm running a free Somatic Thinking® workshop in July for coaches and leaders who sense that development is about more than reaching the next objective.
I'll share the link when registration opens. For now: what question do you start your sessions — or your days — with? I'm genuinely curious.