We talk a lot in career coaching about being curious — asking curious questions, staying interested in the client’s world. It’s usually framed as a virtue, and it is one. But there’s a progression worth naming that gets missed when curiosity is talked about as a single thing.
Our job isn’t just to bring our curiosity into the room. It’s also to create curiosity in them.
Those are different things — and it’s easy to blur them without noticing, because both can look identical from the outside. Both involve a practitioner asking an interested, open question. The difference is underneath, in whose curiosity is actually doing the work.
The difference in practice
A question driven by our curiosity follows what we find interesting. A client mentions something in passing — an old job, a throwaway comment about a relationship with their manager — and we want to know more. So we ask. Nothing wrong with that on its own. But it’s our interest steering the conversation, not necessarily the thing the client most needs to explore.
A question aimed at their curiosity does something different: it opens up something they hadn’t wondered about themselves yet. It’s not “tell me more about that, I’m intrigued” — it’s “have you noticed that pattern before?” or “what do you make of the fact that you keep coming back to this?” The practitioner isn’t following their own interest into the client’s story. They’re planting a question inside the client that the client now has to sit with.
A moment this might look like
A client mentions, almost as an aside, that they always seem to leave jobs around the eighteen-month mark. A practitioner led by their own curiosity might ask, “What was different about those roles?” — genuinely interested, but following their own train of thought.
A practitioner aiming for the client’s curiosity might instead ask, “What do you make of that pattern?” — and then stop. Now the client is the one wondering. They’re the one turning it over. The practitioner’s curiosity did its job the moment it noticed the pattern was worth naming; from there, the work belongs to the client.
Why this matters
- A question driven by our curiosity follows what we find interesting — which may not be where the client needs to go. Our interest and their need don’t automatically align, even with good intentions.
- A question aimed at their curiosity opens up something they hadn’t wondered about themselves. That’s a different kind of value — it expands their thinking rather than satisfying ours.
- If we’re the curious one, we risk leading the conversation. If they’re the curious one, they’re leading their own thinking. The direction of travel matters as much as the destination.
- The best sign it’s working isn’t that we learned something interesting — it’s that they did. If you leave a session having learned something fascinating about your client but they leave without a new question of their own, the curiosity stayed with the wrong person.
The real skill
The skill isn’t staying curious as a practitioner — that part is relatively easy, and most good practitioners already do it. The harder skill is knowing when your curiosity has done its job, and it’s time to hand it over to theirs. That’s a handover most of us aren’t trained to notice, let alone make deliberately.
This is the kind of subtle practice shift we explore on our Level 6 Diploma in Career Guidance and Development — get in touch if you’d like to talk it through.
