Authors, Discover the Heart of the Matter One Layer at a Time: Peeling the Onion

6 of 28 big ideas from the world of coaching to grow your author business

Photo by Wilhelm Gunkel on Unsplash.

The sixth in a 28-part series on 28 big ideas from coaching for authors to coach themselves, adapted from my book, The Coach Within.

“A grownup is a child with layers on.”

— Woody Harrelson

“If you go deeper and deeper into your own heart, you’ll be living in a world with less fear, isolation, and loneliness.”

— Sharon Salzberg

A nice way to follow up the lesson of high-impact, open-ended questions is the concept of peeling the onion. With this coaching staple, a coach takes the conversation with a client deeper, one layer at a time, based on the answer to the last powerful question. A coach doesn’t anticipate, guess, or guide the direction of the interaction. She asks the next question in the moment in direct response to your last reply. And continues doing so until there’s a shift (that’s the next lesson).

For all coaching purposes, the lesson is to engage with the most salient information of the moment. You don’t have to know where the thread, your thinking, someone else’s emotions — anything — is going in advance, and you don’t have…