The Question Behind the Question

I often hear the sentence: I’m stuck, I can’t move forward.

What lies behind it is different every time, but there’s a common thread. Sometimes the trigger is a job that hasn’t fit for years. Sometimes a layoff that just happened. More and more often it’s “only” the feeling that everything works, but the meaning is missing. What they all have in common: they know something needs to change, but nobody really understands what.

Getting coached is one of the first responses. Through strengths analysis, personality tests, systemic approaches, coaching basically. They ask what you can do, what you want, what your dreams are, what’s important to you, and then the result comes in the form of a plan or a checklist or something that’s supposed to become your tool.

But often that doesn’t work. And I say this not because I personally am no friend of systemic coaching or because the tools are bad, but because they skip a question that from my perspective should come first.

When someone says “I need more freedom”, that isn’t a statement, it’s a door. Behind it could be financial independence, control over your own time, the absence of a particular boss, substantive control over your own work, and much more. These are all different things that lead to very different individual decisions. But most conversations about career change take such words at face value and are already on the next step before it’s clear what the person actually means.

What do you mean when you say “success”? Is it your personal success, or the kind you learned to want because success follows a stereotype whose pressure you can’t unconsciously escape? What do you mean when you say you want to do “something meaningful”? I’d argue that behind “meaningful” lies a deeply personal need that doesn’t require a moral anchor.

It sounds like a philosophical exercise, but it isn’t. It’s a very pragmatic question you have to ask, because the answer determines which direction someone takes who is standing at a real crossroads with no signposts.

I went through such a process myself, with a psychologist who has worked with biography for decades. The experience changed how I think about career decisions. Not because the process gave me an answer, but because it showed me that I had already been carrying the answer inside me. I just hadn’t observed my thoughts carefully enough and had used the wrong words for them.

The system I’ve adapted since then is based on an assumption that sounds counterintuitive: the most reliable indicator of your future is your past.

Not your wishes, not your ideas of who you could be, but what has actually happened. What made you content will make you content again. What frustrated you will frustrate you again. Most people thinking about change look forward. They design a future based on hopes. The look back would be more reliable, because biography doesn’t lie.

The process works with stories. Someone tells six key moments from their life, and in the conversation what repeats becomes visible. What someone tells is important. But what someone doesn’t tell could often be more important, or at least equally important. The misconception is that in a conversation about the inner world the right memories or thoughts automatically come up immediately. The assumption is that the patterns that emerge are more reliable than any self-assessment, because they aren’t based on what someone believes about themselves but on what they’ve done.

Seven dimensions form the framework I’ve designed for these kinds of conversations. What someone can do. How their story has unfolded. Which people they want to work with. What makes them content. Under what conditions they function. What truly matters to them. And where all of that concretely leads. Each dimension is its own question, and each question builds on answers to the previous ones. “I want to work with smart people” doesn’t mean the same as “I can’t work with people who just execute thoughtlessly”, even though both can come from the same mouth.

The result isn’t advice and isn’t a plan, but a profile made of capabilities, patterns, values, conditions, an inner compass and concrete directions. That’s then grounded enough to test decisions against. Not because someone else says this is right for you, but because the person themselves recognises what fits and what doesn’t. “Fits” sounds casual here, but often feelings don’t express themselves more concretely, even when they show the direction clearly.

Recognising yourself is the hardest form of recognition. You’re both researcher and research subject. You can’t look at yourself from the outside, you need someone who listens and reflects back what they see. Not as a diagnosis, but as a translation, so that often diffuse feelings and thoughts can take concrete shape. All of it, what you already know but have never been able to formulate clearly or put into words that can really guide you across this crossroads.

Career clarity therefore doesn’t begin with the first convenient answer, it emerges from the right questions, which have to be asked in a very individual way so that they bring light into the fog.