I had an unsettling moment with a client recently. The session started typically for her, for us. Then, she switched gears and began talking about a familiar human experience — envy, frustration, the sense of life not unfolding as she had hoped.

“Allyson, what do I do with these feelings?” she asked.

It was a completely reasonable question. A coachable question. The kind of question that usually opens a productive line of inquiry.

Except — almost immediately — something unusual happened.

She answered it herself.

Not defensively. Not intellectually. But with striking clarity. She articulated why envy is unhelpful, why indulging it leads nowhere, why — in her words — it is a “dead end.” It was thoughtful and precise — exactly what I would have suggested.

That was the problem.

If there is one thing this client is, it is self-aware. Impossibly, acutely, almost painfully self-aware. There was nothing to reframe, nothing to excavate, nothing to “unlock.” The question had not emerged from confusion.

But what was it emerging from?

Allyson, think.

I could feel the energy between us shift. She kept talking, but internally, I had stalled out.

One part of my brain kept doing what coaches are trained to do: listen, track, form questions, search for the next opening.

Another part was saying:

This isn’t landing.
I’m missing something.
I’m not helping her.

As a coach, I have been trained to believe that forward equals effective. I have been trained to provide insight, reframes, invitations, even breakthroughs. But it wasn’t working. My questions weren’t landing. My tools were beside the point. In fact, they were hampering the process.

So I did something I had never done with her: I just told her what’s up–that is, I shared that one part of my brain was valiantly trying to be the coach she was paying me to be, and the other part was saying: okay…this requires a different approach.

And yes — I picked a cuticle.

She nodded.

And just like that, everything changed.

The dynamic shifted from expert-solving-client to two people looking at something that did not have a tidy answer.

“Maybe some puzzles aren’t meant to be solved right away,” she said, smiling.

And my goodness, is she right.

People are not problems to be solved or fixed. They are puzzles to be sat with — sometimes for a while.

Coaching is so often framed as forward-moving and solution-oriented. No one captured that ethos better than Vanilla Ice: “If there was a problem, yo, I’ll solve it.”

I recognize myself in that lyric.

But some moments in this work resist being solved on demand.