She came in ready to fight.
Not aggressively. But prepared. Slightly coiled. The kind of energy that says: I've had this conversation before, and it didn't go well.
She was managing significant perimenopause symptoms.
Fatigue.
Hormonal disruption.
Weight changes she wasn't expecting and couldn't shift.
She'd done her research, arrived with views already formed, and the moment nutrition came up, she pushed back on almost everything.
My first instinct was to work through it. I know what I know. The evidence is clear. With a bit of patience and the right explanation, we'd get there.
But I stopped.
Because the pushback wasn't really about nutrition.
She wasn't disputing the science. She was telling me something else entirely.
That she'd spent months feeling out of control in her own body. That she'd been to appointments where people had explained things at her rather than listened to her. That she was exhausted and frightened, and she needed, before anything else, to know that this was a safe room.
I put the answer away.
Not permanently. But for that session, the right answer was the wrong move.
So instead of explaining, I asked. Not questions with correct answers built into them. Just: what's been the hardest part of this? What have the last six months actually looked like?
She talked for twenty minutes.
By the end of it, the combativeness was gone. Not because I'd won her over with information. Because I'd let her be the expert on her own experience before I became the expert on anything else.
The coaching conversation that followed was completely different from the one we would have had if I'd pushed through.
This is the thing I come back to with every new client, and I still have to remind myself of it: expertise is not just knowing the right answer. It's knowing when the right answer is the wrong move.
Some clients arrive ready to absorb. Some arrive needing to be seen first. You can't give them the same session and expect the same result.
The intake process tells you what they know and what they want to achieve. It doesn't always tell you what they're carrying. And until you know what they're carrying, you're working with incomplete information.
Adjust in real time. The session in front of you is always more important than the plan you walked in with.
Paul
