When someone comes to see me, there’s usually a clear reason sitting at the front of the conversation: anxiety, a relationship breaking down, a pattern they can’t seem to shift. It would be easy to treat that as the whole picture. But one of the most useful tools I bring into a session isn’t a technique at all. It’s curiosity.
Curiosity lets me dig deeper and really get to understand the person outside of just their issue. Who are they? What have they been through? What do they care about, what are they good at, what has carried them this far? The presenting problem matters, but it’s rarely the full story, and staying curious is what stops me from treating someone as a diagnosis rather than a person.
Practically, that curiosity is directed as much toward someone’s strengths as it is toward what’s going wrong. It’s easy for both of us to get pulled toward the problem that’s usually what’s loudest in the room. But asking about what’s working, what someone has managed to hold onto even through difficulty, often reveals just as much about them as the struggle does.
Curiosity also protects against something I think is genuinely risky in this work: jumping to conclusions. It’s tempting to pattern-match, to hear a few details and assume you already know what’s going on. Staying curious means slowing that down. It means asking rather than assuming, and genuinely not knowing the answer until the person in front of me tells me.
That combination, understanding without assuming, and looking at strengths alongside struggle, is what I think makes curiosity so central to how change actually happens. Not because I have the answers, but because curiosity helps me understand the person well enough that, together, we can find them.
