03/23/2026
This week you're going to ask your team questions. Will any of them be questions you could not already answer?
When I started recording conversations for the Master Coach Collection five years ago, I thought I had a good opening question: "Who is the first person who truly saw and heard you?"
I assumed it would build rapport. People would name a parent, open up a little, and we'd warm into the real conversation.
I was wrong. I'm still in awe of what this mistake showed me.
Across the first ten conversations, the answers split roughly in two. Some coaches named parents. Connie Kadansky grew up adored. Diana Ideus had parents who were, as she later recognized, natural coaches. Karen Cappello's father paid for her Great Books program on one condition: she had to come home and teach him what she had learned. For these coaches, the question landed without much friction.
For others, it did not.
Michael Stratford told me he did not feel seen until he was 41. His community college drama teacher, Bonnie Coghill, had seen him more than anyone had up to that point. But the nuns at his Catholic school treated him as a problem. He was ahead of the other kids, he was bored, and that combination got him into trouble. He shoplifted. He ended up in the hospital after an attempted su***de. Coming out of that experience was when he first began to see himself. Then he encountered Thomas Leonard in his first coach training workshop.
As we were recording this conversation I told Michael I was 41. My eyes were welling up at the thought that it could take someone this long to be truly seen and heard, or that it might never happen.
Jan Rybeck said she did not think she got it at all growing up. She said she yearned to be seen and heard, and she used the present tense. Then she went looking. She found her third grade teacher. He had read a poem she wrote and said: "I'm going to find a book of poetry by you in a bookstore someday." She said she does not remember anything else about her childhood except that comment.
One sentence. Nothing else survived.
But Jan came back to it later in our conversation. She grew up thinking she was stupid. She probably had ADHD, undiagnosed, and standard tests took a lot out of her. Then, years into her coaching career, she took the Maturity Assessment Profile, a sentence-completion assessment for measuring adult developmental stages. It was, she said, like falling off a log. When the results showed that what she had been picking up on her whole life actually made sense somewhere, she said: "Maybe that's one of the first times I really felt seen and heard."
I said: "And a test, no less."
Eddy Macdonald's answer was the one I did not see coming. His parents loved him, but his father was a doctor working 60-hour weeks, and his younger sibling had special needs that took a lot of his mother's attention. When I asked who truly heard and saw him as a kid, he said: Mr. Rogers. On VHS tape.
Gobsmacked, I said: "You were seen and heard, as a child, as an individual, by someone who never saw you or heard you as an individual." By a VHS tape.
He said, "Yeah." He meant it.
What all three had in common was the pause before the answer. Michael said "growing up?" as if he needed to confirm the terms. Jan said "wow" and then went quiet. Eddy almost apologized for his answer. None of them had this organized into a story before I asked. The question made them look for something they had not looked for before.
That is the thing about this kind of question. It sounds soft, like a warm-up. But it is asking the person to locate the first evidence that they existed as a specific person, not a student, not a family member, but as themselves. Most of us have not done that inventory. So we have to do it right now, in front of you, and what comes out is true and often new.
Christopher McAuliffe, who was my own first coach trainer, turned the question around on me. Had I ever felt truly seen and heard? I admitted I had not thought about it, not for myself. He said: "Maybe it hasn't happened yet."
I am still sitting with that. And I think most leaders haven't had the chance to sit with it.
Because the question Christopher asked me is the same question that everyone who reports to a leader is living with, usually without saying it out loud: Does the person I work for know who I actually am?
Most professional cultures are not built around that question. They are built around performance, output, and alignment to goals. These things matter. But a culture organized entirely around what people produce will always be missing something about who people are. And people know when that something is missing. They feel it before they can name it. Eventually they name it by leaving.
What this kind of question does, at its core, is interrupt that pattern. It does not ask for anything that can be retrieved from a personnel file or a performance review. It asks for something the person being asked may not have named yet. The act of asking it, and waiting for the answer, is itself an act of seeing.
Michael Stratford said that the experience of not being seen became fuel for him once he encountered coaching. He described it as a driver. And he put it plainly: coaching is grounded in the recognition that each person is one of a kind and deserves to be seen through that lens. Not seen from me as a person, but through the lens that there is nobody else like this one, ever, nor will there ever be one again over the entire course of history. That is not a soft idea. I haven't found a more precise argument for treating each person as irreplaceable.
Leaders who treat their people as irreplaceable do not need a policy for it. One simple thing they can do is to ask questions they cannot already answer.
A leader who asks questions they already know the answer to is checking boxes. A leader who asks questions nobody can answer yet is doing something different. They are making space. They are saying, without saying it: I do not already know who you are, and I want to find out. That posture, practiced over time, is what creates a culture where people feel they belong.
Belonging is not the same as being welcomed. Being welcomed is a moment. Belonging is what you feel when the people you work with keep proving, through their questions and their attention, that they are curious about who you are. And the research, and common sense, point in the same direction: People leave managers, not organizations. What makes a manager worth staying for is not only compensation. It is the experience of being known.
When someone at work asks you something that requires you to go inside yourself for the answer, and they wait while you look, and they receive what you find, you are not just answering a question. You are being witnessed. And that experience changes how people relate to their work. They bring more of themselves to it. They perform at a level no job description can account for, because what they are bringing is not just skill but identity. The knowledge that who they are matters to where they are.
That is not a small return on investment. It's something even more important.
Jan Rybeck took a sentence-completion assessment and found something she had been carrying for decades without a name. The Maturity Assessment Profile is not a person. It cannot look you in the eye. But it showed her something true about herself that no one had handed her before, and she called it one of the first times she felt seen and heard. An instrument did that.
Leaders have at least that much capacity. The question does not have to be "who was the first person who truly saw and heard you?" It just has to be a question you cannot already answer, one that asks the person in front of you to go looking for something real. When they find it, and name it, in your presence, they remember it. They remember who was there when they found it.
That's one way to be truly seen. And that's what keeps people, and brings out the best of them, and makes the whole enterprise worth showing up for.
A simple question no one can prepare for might be one of the most powerful gifts you can give.
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