One Question with Leah Farmer

Leah Farmer
  • 5.0 (4)
  • Mental Health

One powerful question, once a week. Each Sunday, coach and storyteller Leah Farmer shares a short, reflective episode (always in 10 minutes or less) to help you pause, feel, and reconnect. No answers. No pressure. Just one question worth sitting with.

  1. What Am I Ready to Let Go Of? | The Final Episode of One Question

    1d ago

    What Am I Ready to Let Go Of? | The Final Episode of One Question

    This is the final episode of One Question. After asking many questions over the past year, I am taking my own medicine and asking the question I have been quietly sitting with for some weeks: what am I ready to let go of? The honest answer turned out to be this show. Not because it stopped being good — but because it stopped being good for me to keep doing. The energy ledger stopped balancing, and I have come to believe that fun but not worth what it costs is a perfectly grown-up reason to end something while it is still in good standing. Drawing on Annie Duke's Quit (her landmark argument that quitting is a skill, not a failure), the behavioural economics of the sunk cost fallacy, and Mary Oliver's In Blackwater Woods — which has been quietly running in my head as I made this decision. Thank you for listening. The questions don't expire. Take any of them with you.

    8 min
  2. What Makes Me Feel Warm Inside? | The Body Reading Behind a Familiar Word

    Jun 7

    What Makes Me Feel Warm Inside? | The Body Reading Behind a Familiar Word

    Every language on earth uses the same word for the temperature of a fire and the quality of a friend. Warm. This is not a coincidence, and it is not a metaphor. It is a body fact. This week's One Question takes a quiet, tender look at the word warm — and the surprisingly precise neuroscience underneath it. Drawing on Williams and Bargh's landmark 2008 Yale study on embodied cognition (the one where holding a warm cup made participants rate a stranger as more generous), Stephen Porges' polyvagal work on co-regulation — including inter-species co-regulation, which is why a cat on your chest is doing something genuinely biological — and Mary Oliver's line about the soft animal of the body. With a small story about Lucy, my staple in the middle of the night. What makes you feel warm inside?

    8 min
  3. What Am I Tolerating? | The Question That Made Modern Coaching

    May 31

    What Am I Tolerating? | The Question That Made Modern Coaching

    This week's One Question is one of the oldest, sharpest tools in the modern coaching tradition — a question made central in the early 1990s by Thomas Leonard, who is often credited as the founder of professional coaching as a discipline. His instruction to his clients was deceptively simple: list — not five, not ten, but fifty to a hundred — of the small, medium, and large things you are tolerating in your daily life. The list is meant to feel ridiculous. That is part of the point. Drawing on Leonard's framework, Bruce McEwen's neuroscience of allostatic load (the cumulative wear-and-tear of low-grade chronic stress), the sociology of how we are trained — especially as women — to widen our window of tolerance, and a small story involving a broken cabinet hinge that I tolerated for nearly two years. What am I tolerating?

    8 min
  4. What Guilty Pleasure Do I Not Actually Feel Guilty About? | The Quiet Tax on Joy

    May 24

    What Guilty Pleasure Do I Not Actually Feel Guilty About? | The Quiet Tax on Joy

    A lighter, slightly subversive question this week. The phrase guilty pleasure is doing more work than we usually notice — it's a small linguistic apology we lodge into our sentence before mentioning anything we love that we're not "supposed" to love. This week's episode is an invitation to perform an honest audit. Of the pleasures you have been calling guilty, how many are you actually guilty about? Or have you just been paying the cultural tax out of habit? Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of taste, Paul Bloom on the neurology of pleasure, and a personal confession involving cult documentaries, a knitting project, and a great deal of unrepentant judgment of strangers on screen.

    8 min
  5. Are You Okay? | Asking the Question We Usually Skip — for Mental Health Awareness Wee

    May 17

    Are You Okay? | Asking the Question We Usually Skip — for Mental Health Awareness Wee

    This week marks the final day of Mental Health Awareness Week 2026 in the UK, organised by the Mental Health Foundation. The theme this year is Action — a recognition that awareness, on its own, is no longer enough. So this week's episode offers the smallest, bravest action I can think of: a single, sincere question, asked of yourself and of the people you love. The kind of question my friend Jen once asked me, on a couch in my own house, years ago — and changed my life. Drawing on Matthew Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberger's research on social pain, Stephen Porges' polyvagal work on co-regulation, and current UK statistics from the Mental Health Foundation, this episode explores why being asked sincerely matters so much — and what it takes to receive the answer when someone says no, I'm not okay. Support: 🇬🇧 UK: Samaritans, free, 24/7 — 116 123. SHOUT text service: text SHOUT to 85258. Emergency: 999 or NHS 111, option 2. 🇺🇸 US: 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988 (free, 24/7). 🌍 Anywhere else in the world: A quick online search will find the crisis line for your country.

    10 min
  6. What Page Do I Need to Turn? | The Stories We've Read Too Many Times

    May 10

    What Page Do I Need to Turn? | The Stories We've Read Too Many Times

    We talk about our lives in the language of books — chapters, pages, narratives, storylines. It is one of the oldest, truest metaphors we have, because we are quite literally narrating ourselves all day long. This week's One Question explores what happens when we read the same page about ourselves so many times that we stop noticing it is a page. Drawing on the neuroscience of the default mode network, Hebbian learning ("neurons that fire together, wire together"), Erving Goffman's sociology of the co-authored self, the science of memory reconsolidation, and Joan Didion's foundational line on storytelling, this episode is an invitation to lift the corner of the page you have been re-reading — and decide whether it is still the story you want to be inside. What page do you need to turn?

    8 min
  7. What Intention Am I Setting? | The Neuroscience Behind a Simple Daily Practice

    May 3

    What Intention Am I Setting? | The Neuroscience Behind a Simple Daily Practice

    Setting an intention has been dismissed for years as a "woo-woo" practice — but a growing body of neuroscience suggests it may be one of the most quietly powerful daily acts available to us. This week's episode draws on the research of Stanford neurosurgeon James Doty (Mind Magic) to explore why a single, specific, embodied intention can shift the texture of your entire day — not by changing what happens, but by changing what your brain is wired to notice. Plus a brief mention of the small intention-setting app I built along the way: Wild369.com This week's question is: What intention am I setting?

    7 min
  8. Who Do I Want to Be in This Moment? | Choosing Character Over Winning

    Apr 26

    Who Do I Want to Be in This Moment? | Choosing Character Over Winning

    What if the most important question you can ask in any difficult moment isn't what should I do — but who do I want to be while I do it? This week's episode is an invitation to step out of reaction and back into authorship of your own character. Drawing on Aristotle's idea of practical wisdom, Viktor Frankl's teaching on the space between stimulus and response, and Eugene Gendlin's somatic philosophy of the felt sense, Leah explores how a single internal question — asked before we respond — can change not only the moment, but the kind of person we are slowly becoming inside it.

    6 min
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5
out of 5
4 Ratings

About

One powerful question, once a week. Each Sunday, coach and storyteller Leah Farmer shares a short, reflective episode (always in 10 minutes or less) to help you pause, feel, and reconnect. No answers. No pressure. Just one question worth sitting with.

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