What was it like for you?

How to ask about feelings without asking about feelings

Content warning: birth trauma

I’m going to get vulnerable today.

I didn’t think I’d be going here this early, but I want to talk about whitespace and product-market fit and getting to a complex, nuanced understanding of feelings, and the best way to do that is to talk about something that made me feel all the feels lately.

I have an almost four-month-old baby boy. Here he is in ChatGPT Studio Ghibli style. He’s getting chunkier by the day, and the way he looks at the sunlight glinting off his mobile thingy is a reminder that life really can be simple and joyful if you just let it.

He came into this world in rather a hurry. At my 37-week scan, he wasn’t moving enough, and I was rushed into an induction, which ended a few hours later in an emergency C-section under general anaesthesia. That’s a story for another substack*, but it was full-on. It’s been a lot to process and is a lot for people to hold. Of course, I’m grateful beyond words that both my baby and I are alive and healthy, but it was pretty damn traumatic.

The one thing I wish someone had asked me in the days and weeks following the experience was:

What was it like for you?

The reason this is a good question is that it’s an invitation, not a demand. It says: I care about your experience, and I’m inviting you to share it with me in a way that works for you.

What this question is really asking is: How did you feel? The answer will most likely include feelings, but you’re more likely to get a rich and nuanced story, not just a bunch of adjectives. And the person you’re asking won’t feel boxed in or compelled to talk about their feelings if they don’t feel comfortable doing so.

Here’s why it works so well.

🧠 It’s in the passive voice

Some of the most powerful questions in my toolkit are in the passive voice. The passive voice structures a sentence so the subject receives the action, rather than performing it.

• Active voice: How do you feel?

  • (You are the subject - you are doing the feeling.)

• Passive voice: What did that feel like to you?

  • (The subject is that, the thing being felt - you are experiencing the feeling.)

In writing and life in general, I am a passive voice hater. In fact, if someone uses the passive voice, I suspect that they’re trying to avoid taking responsibility (there’s a great book called Mistakes were made - but not by me that goes deeper into how us humans are great at turning cognitive dissonance into deflection.)

But putting questions in the passive voice flips that idea on its head: they can feel more open, less confrontational, and sometimes more thought-provoking precisely because they shift focus away from who’s doing and toward what’s being experienced. They invite people to zoom out and reflect more broadly, taking away the pressure to make things personal.

This makes them particularly useful in strategy, innovation, and experience design, where root causes often lie beyond individual behaviors. More on that in another post!

🧠 It invites a story, not just a label.

If I asked you “How did you feel?” you’d most likely give me a label from the list of emotions in your head: sad, angry, happy. You would name a specific emotion, because I’m asking you to give me one.

But if I asked “What was it like for you?,” I’m not defining what “it” means. I’m inviting you to create your own definition. This opens the door to a story, and makes it easier to access and share your experience without needing to label the emotion(s), which is especially helpful when feelings are complex or not yet fully understood, and when inviting someone to share their feelings feels too intrusive.

You can also replace “it” with “that experience” to make the question more concrete.

Building a foundation

“What was it like for you?” is a foundational question. The subtle shift from asking about feelings in the active voice to asking about experiences in the passive voice can make a big difference in your discovery process.

In my next post, I’ll go deeper on how you can use this question to uncover whitespace for innovation and test for product-market fit.

As always, if you have a good question that’s helped you in work or life, reach out and we can collab on a post!

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*I’m in group therapy for birth trauma, and part of the process has been writing out my story. I don’t think I have the guts to put it on the internet for all to see just yet, but I’m happy to share it privately if it might be helpful to you or someone you know. And if you’ve been through something similar and want to talk about what it was like for you, I’ll listen. Pregnancy and birth are intense experiences, and up to 45% of births are traumatic. We don’t talk enough about the massive diversity of experiences and outcomes in this space and I hope that changes.