It All Started with a Juicy Peach
In the fall of 2014, I was in Manhattan for a corporate business trip, sitting in a chic little restaurant in the West Village, with a journal open in front of me and absolutely no idea what to write.
The page was blank.
I'd been staring at it for over an hour. My dinner had come and gone. The sky had grown dark, and the city was vibrant and alive outside the window where I was sitting.
The assignment from my life coach was simple: Write about what brings you joy.
But I couldn't.
Not a single word.
I was so disconnected from myself, my own preferences, my own desires, my own voice, that I couldn't access anything even close to joy.
Everything in my life at that time was about meeting expectations. What my career needed from me. What my failing marriage required of me. What mothering an eleven-year-old demanded of me. I had grown so used to making decisions and choices through the lens of other people's needs, systems, and structures that I didn't even recognize the lens anymore. I thought it was me.
But it wasn't.
So I sat there. Immobilized. Embarrassed. Frustrated. A little ashamed. And completely blank.
After an hour of white-page silence, it finally occurred to me that I could change the question.
I stopped asking, "What brings me joy?" And I started asking, "What is one small thing I love?"
And something in me softened.
It was very subtle. But it was real.
The new question didn't feel like a test I was failing. It felt like a door I could open with the gentle turn of a knob.
I told myself, "Keep it small. Just one thing."
And with a deep breath, I picked up my pen and wrote: A juicy peach.
That was it. That was the thing that broke the blankness. That was the memory, the taste, the smell of a ripe summer peach that got me back to me.
From there, more followed. Sunshine on my shoulders. Watching flamenco dancers in Spain at midnight. The smell of the ocean. A deep conversation with a close friend. My solitude.
Thirty minutes later, the page was full. My heart was open, and there was so much more to say.
All because I changed the question.
What Happens When You Can't Answer Your Own Questions
That night in Manhattan was the beginning of a reconnection to myself that I am profoundly grateful for. But at the time, I didn't understand what was happening. I just knew I felt stuck, and I assumed the problem was me.
Here's what I've come to understand in the eleven years since: I wasn't broken. I was disconnected. And there's an important difference.
When you spend years making decisions through the lens of what everyone else needs, you don't lose yourself overnight. It happens gradually, one small compromise at a time, until the voice that used to tell you what you wanted goes so quiet you forget it was ever there.
Research on self-awareness shows that most people believe they're self-aware, but only a small fraction actually are. The gap isn't about intelligence or effort. It's about the fact that self-awareness requires access to your own internal experience, and that access gets blocked when you've spent years prioritizing everyone else's experience over your own.
This is what I see in so many of the women I work with. They can tell you exactly what their partner needs, what their kids need, what their team needs. But when I ask, "What do you want?" the room goes quiet. Not because the answer doesn't exist. Because the pathway to the answer has been overgrown from disuse.
The blank page isn't a sign that you have nothing to say. It's a sign that you need a different way in.
Why the "Right" Question Can Sometimes Shut You Down
"What brings you joy?" is a beautiful question. It's open, invitational, full of possibility. There's nothing wrong with it.
But for me, sitting in that restaurant, it was too big. It required access to a part of myself I'd lost connection with. It assumed a level of self-knowledge that I didn't have in that moment. And the gap between where I was and what the question was asking me to reach for felt enormous. So my brain did what brains do when they're overwhelmed: it shut down.
This happens in coaching, too. Sometimes the questions we ask, ourselves or our clients, don't open the door. They unintentionally reinforce the stuckness. Not because they're bad questions. But because they don't land in that particular moment.
A client who has been people-pleasing for decades can't always answer "What do you really want?" on the first try. A woman who has been performing confidence for years might not be able to tell you what she's actually afraid of. A leader who has been making decisions for everyone else might draw a complete blank when you ask what she needs for herself.
The question isn't wrong. The timing is off, or the size is off, or the entry point needs to be gentler.
And that's not a failure of the person being asked. It's an invitation to shift the question.
How Making a Question Smaller Can Open Everything
What I did that night, without fully understanding it at the time, was take a question I couldn't answer and make it small enough to hold.
"What brings you joy?" became "What is one small thing I love?"
The content was similar. The emotional demand was completely different.
The big question felt like a test with a right answer I couldn't find. The small question felt like a conversation with myself, one where any answer was welcome. Where a juicy peach was enough.
This is one of the most transferable coaching skills I know. When a client is stuck, when you see the blank look or the long silence that comes from overwhelm rather than processing, you don't need a better question. You need a smaller one.
"What do you want your life to look like?" becomes "What's one thing that felt good this week?" "What are your values?" becomes "When was the last time something felt really right?" "What would you do if you weren't afraid?" becomes "What's one tiny thing you've been wanting to try?"
The smaller question lowers the stakes. And helps you slow everything down, which I’ve written about here. It gives the nervous system permission to relax. It says, "You don't have to have it all figured out. Just start with one thing." And once that one thing arrives, the rest tends to follow. Because the door is open. And once it's open, the voice that's been waiting to be heard starts to speak.
Why Great Coaches Stay Flexible with Their Questions
That experience in New York taught me something I now consider essential to good coaching: the right question doesn't always come first.
As coaches, we listen patiently as our clients find their answers. But we also need to be willing to shift our questions in real time. To pivot. To listen again. To offer something gentler, simpler, or to go in an entirely new direction when what we've asked doesn't land.
This takes a kind of presence that goes beyond technique. It requires you to watch your client's face, not just listen to their words. To notice the difference between a silence that's full of processing and a silence that's full of shutdown. To trust that the goal isn't to ask the perfect question but to help your client access their own wisdom through flexible, responsive, compassionate questioning.
I've seen coaches, especially early in their practice, get attached to their questions. They've prepared a powerful question, they deliver it beautifully, and then they wait for the breakthrough. But when it doesn't come, instead of shifting, they rephrase the same question or push harder. And the client's stuckness deepens.
The shift that matters most isn't finding a better question. It's being willing to let go of the one you already asked.
This is a skill you can practice. After a session, reflect: Was there a moment where my client seemed to shut down? What question preceded it? What might have opened the door instead? Over time, you develop an instinct for when to go smaller, gentler, or in a completely different direction. And your coaching becomes less about the questions you've planned and more about the questions that emerge from genuine connection with the person in front of you.
If you want to practice this skill, I created a free resource that helps: the Impactful Coach's Question Guide. It's full of prompts designed to invite awareness with your clients and with yourself, and it's a good starting place for building the kind of question flexibility I'm describing here.
How to Know If You've Lost Touch with What You Want
If the peach story resonated, if something in you recognized that blank-page feeling, here are some things worth sitting with.
When someone asks what you want for dinner, do you default to "whatever you want" or "I don't care, you pick"? Do you find yourself knowing exactly what everyone else needs but drawing a blank when it comes to your own needs? Have you ever been asked a simple question about your preferences, your favorite anything, and felt a surprising amount of difficulty answering? Do you make decisions based on what will cause the least friction rather than what you actually want? When was the last time you did something purely because it brought you pleasure, with no productivity attached?
If you recognized yourself in any of that, I want you to hear me clearly: that's not a character flaw. It's a pattern. And patterns can change.
The reconnection doesn't require a dramatic overhaul of your life. It starts with one small question. One honest answer. One juicy peach.
This is the work we do inside the Golden Coaching Certification Program™. Before you learn to coach others, you learn to coach yourself, which means reconnecting with your own desires, voice, and wisdom. The women who come through this program often tell me that the first thing that shifted wasn't their coaching skills. It was their relationship with themselves. They started hearing their own answers again. And from there, everything else followed.
Whether your next step is reconnecting with yourself or learning to help others reconnect, I'd love to be part of that.
Learn more about the certification →
With immense appreciation & gratitude. Always.
About Katie Pulsifer
Katie Pulsifer is a Master Certified Life Coach and the founder of the Golden Coaching Certification Program™, a training program for women who want to learn how to compassionately coach themselves and others to create extraordinary results. She specializes in working with high-achieving women who look great on paper but feel unfulfilled, helping them rebuild self-trust, make aligned decisions, and stop postponing the life they actually want. Katie's coaching is grounded in neuroscience, radical self-responsibility, and the belief that your worth is inherent, not earned. Featured in Life Coach Magazine →
