What Don’t I Want To Talk About?

“What don’t I want to talk about?” This is how one of my clients begins our sessions now. It’s the question that takes her straight to the edge—the place where fear, doubt, and transformation live.

Our coaching together has always been powerful. She came to the work with a large, complex, passion-fueled project, and from the start, our sessions were rich and meaningful.

And then, we discovered this question.

We didn’t begin here. It took time and trust to find the pathways to what felt riskier, more raw, and alive. Together, we learned how to hold those moments when we reached them. And when we began starting each session with this single question, our work both deepened and accelerated.

“What don’t I want to talk about?”

Most of us are experts at talking around the thing that matters most. We avoid the fears, the doubts, and the messy truth about where we feel stuck.
The stuff that’s vulnerable.
The questions we don’t have answers to yet.
The things that feel taboo to say out loud.
The worries that keep us up at night but we’d rather pretend aren’t there.
The raw emotions—shame, anger, sadness—that feel like too much to reveal.

We avoid the conversations that make our heart beat faster or our stomach tighten.
We avoid them because they feel risky.
We avoid them because they make us feel exposed.
And yet, these are the exact conversations that hold the most potential to change us.

With this client, starting with the thing she didn’t want to talk about gave us a direct line to the work that mattered most. Each time we stepped into the discomfort, clarity and transformation met us there.

This is a muscle we can all build. At first, it feels like jumping into icy water—you want to pull back. But the more you practice, the more you realize:

• The fear is temporary.

• Avoiding the conversation costs more than having it.

• Life gets better and better when you face what’s real.

Eventually, these conversations stop feeling like optional risks and start feeling like essential steps. They become the doorway to growth, clarity, and freedom.

So I’ll leave you with the question that deepened and accelerated my client’s journey:

What don’t you want to talk about?

Start there.
Because those are the conversations that transform your life.