Pebbles on the beach: the discipline of asking “And What Else?”

A child walks along the shore, where the sea has done its quiet work of sorting stone from stone. Pebbles are everywhere: clustered in patches, scattered in lines, half-buried in wet sand.

There is no strategy. Only curiosity.  A hand reaches down. A pebble is picked up, turned over, rubbed between fingers. It might be smooth or oddly shaped, or faintly glint when it catches the light. For a moment, it is held as if it might be the one. Then, without ceremony, it is placed back down again.  Another is picked up.

There is something buoyant and generous about this kind of searching. Nothing is final. Nothing is precious in a way that prevents movement. A pebble can be admired and still released. The next one might be better. Or simply different. There is an optimistic belief that the shoreline provides abundance.

Sometimes the child returns to an earlier stone, as if recognising something familiar that was not seen properly the first time. Sometimes several are held at once, weighed against each other in small hands, compared without language. There is no urgency to decide. Only the quiet assumption that there are more pebbles than can ever be held.

There is a kind of freedom that comes from belief in abundance or from non-attachment to early certainty. In coaching conversations, something similar is possible, but not easily practised.

You ask a question. Your client offers a first response. It is sensible, coherent, and often neatly formed. It is the pebble that sits closest to the surface. And because it makes sense, it can be tempting to treat the first response as complete. To pick it up, admire it briefly, and move on. Or worse, to assume it is “the one”.

Coaching needs us to be more patient. It asks us not to stop at the first pebble that fits in our hand. The discipline of “and what else?” is a way of walking further along the shoreline. This question (the “AWE question”, coined by Michael Bungay Stanier in The Coaching Habit) is really a refusal to assume that what appears first is what matters most. It invites the possibility that the most useful thinking is still partly buried, and waiting to be turned over in the light.

At times, it can feel slow or  slightly uncomfortable. The client has already answered. The “obvious” work has been done. Yet something changes when we resist the urge to conclude too soon.  

More pebbles appear.

Not because they were not there before, but because attention has shifted. As the client’s thinking deepens, the surface layer gives way to something less rehearsed, less obvious, and more human.

This is where first answer bias quietly shows itself: the tendency to treat the first coherent response as complete, rather than provisional. In coaching, this can narrow the possibilities without anyone noticing.  “And what else?” is a small intervention with significant effect. It interrupts the pull towards closure. It slows the pace of agreement. It creates space for thinking that has not yet been rehearsed into familiarity.

In transformational coaching, this means resisting completion too early, staying with curiosity a little longer than feels necessary, and remembering that the first pebble picked up is rarely the only one worth holding.

What does a pear taste like to you? Curiosity in coaching

There is a beautiful scene in the 1998 romantic fantasy film City of Angels. Nicolas Cage’s

character (Seth, an angel who cannot feel, touch or taste) asks Meg Ryan (Maggie, a mortal)

to describe the taste of the pear she is eating. Responding to her surprise that he does not

know what a pear tastes like he says: “I don’t know what a pear tastes like to you.”

This tender scene played and replayed in my mind recently as I reflected on the multifaceted

role of curiosity in coaching. The co-creation of a coaching relationship and the

establishment of agreements can feel a little like route planning before a journey. It is

tempting to treat this as a straightforward preliminary step, something to complete before the

real work begins. In practice, it is anything but. It is too easy to accidentally rush through

what is actually the foundation of the coaching partnership. Without curiosity, coach and

client may believe they are heading towards the same destination when they are actually

imagining quite different journeys. We might find ourselves carefully plotting a route before

we have fully understood where the client wants to go, or what that destination means to

them.

The beginning of a coaching conversation is a discovery phase. It is where clarity emerges,

but only if we are willing to slow down and remain curious. When a client uses a particular

word or phrase, it often carries personal meaning, assumptions and emotions that are not

immediately visible. It is easy to assume we understand. It is more valuable to pause and

ask: "What does that mean for you?" Curiosity helps us resist the urge to navigate by our

own map. Instead, it allows coach and client to develop a shared understanding of the

terrain before setting off together.

Secondly, enquiring in this way (What is that like for you? or What is your experience like?)

is an act of trust-building. Models of trust emphasise rapport, which is built through curiosity,

attention, and care. This aids the growth of psychological safety: creating a space where the

client knows their perspective matters, that it is safe to contribute, and that they will be met

with interest rather than assumption or judgment.

This feels closely connected to the humanistic roots of coaching. Carl Rogers’ empathic

understanding asks us to suspend certainty long enough to really understand someone

else’s inner world. It asks us to step into someone else’s perspective without assuming we

already understand it. It requires us to stay with their experience rather than quickly

translating it into our own understanding.

There is something profoundly respectful in that line: “I don’t know what a pear tastes like to

you.” It recognises that even seemingly common or shared experiences are not, in fact,

experienced in the same way. We are asking “what is it like to be you?”

Finally, curiosity encourages deeper thought and more meaningful responses. By placing the

focus on Maggie’s experience, Seth receives a much richer answer. Maggie responds to his

curiosity by saying the pear was “sweet, juicy, soft on your tongue, grainy like sugary sand

that dissolves in your mouth.” Seth’s curiosity resonates with Nancy Kline’s Time to Think,

where attention and the suspension of assumptions allow people to think for themselves with

greater clarity. Maggie offers a richer, more honest and thoughtful response, one that Seth

could never have arrived at on his own.

Curiosity in coaching begins with the humility to recognise that we do not know what the

pear tastes like to someone else. By slowing down and asking, we create the conditions for

understanding, trust and deeper thinking to emerge.