One Question with Leah Farmer

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...

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 wher...

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 toleratin...

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 abou...

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...

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 netw...

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...

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 philosop...

What if anger isn't a lapse in your composure — but one of the most reliable signals you have about what you value? This week's episode opens with the new Netflix documentary Trust Me: The False Prophet , and the justified rage so many of us have felt watching it, as the starting point for a deeper question: what is my anger actually trying to tell me? Drawing on Aristotle's ethics of anger, Myish...

Earlier this week, Leah had a plan: go to sleep. The decision about whether the United States would bomb Iran was not hers to make or to stop. She was exhausted. She got into bed. And then she lay there in the dark for hours, caught in a loop — what will this mean, what will this mean, what will this mean — until the timeline passed and the decision was made. She went to sleep with a pit in her st...

It feels good to turn your face to the sun. The sound of rain on windows is one of the best sounds there is. A cat sleeping on you — choosing you, trusting you — is more of an honour than a lot of things people spend whole careers chasing. These are small things. True things. The kind of knowing that lives in the body, below opinion and above doubt. This week's One Question is an invitation to pus...

For much of her career in tech, Leah performed toughness. Not cynically — but she did it. She cultivated an edge, used bluster, took up a certain kind of space. And underneath all of it was someone who is, by her own description, fairly mushy: tender, gentle, deeply feeling. Not hard. Just strong. And those, it turns out, are not the same thing. This week's One Question opens with that distinction...

Spring doesn't ask permission. It simply comes — quietly, tentatively, and then all at once. And if we're paying attention, it has something to teach us about our own inner seasons. This week's episode of One Question uses spring as both metaphor and genuine invitation. Drawing on ancient seasonal wisdom from Celtic and Japanese traditions, Abraham Maslow's work on self-actualisation, Carol Dweck'...

Today is International Women's Day 2026, and this week's episode is a personal one. Leah shares the stories of the women who changed the course of her life — her older sisters, who loved her with uncomplicated delight during years when love at home felt uncertain; her first grade teacher, Mrs. Arlen, who saw something in her worth championing and set in motion a chain of events that shaped her ent...

Earlier this week, Leah felt rage. The kind that burns — that arrives without warning and makes your body feel too small to contain it. And her first instinct, like most of ours, was to shut it down. To manage it. To make it stop. This episode begins with that moment and the choice she made instead: to let the feeling be there, to give it space, and then — once it had moved through — to regulate h...

What does it mean to be truly inspired — not motivated, not impressed, but genuinely moved? This week's episode opens with the remarkable story of Gisèle Pelicot, the French woman who waived her anonymity in one of the most high-profile abuse trials in recent history, choosing courage over comfort so that others might feel less alone. Her story is the anchor for a deeper question: who inspires us,...

Niceness keeps things pleasant. Kindness builds trust. In this episode of One Question , Leah explores the difference between being nice and being kind — and why the two are not interchangeable. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, Brené Brown’s insight that “clear is kind,” and Gavin de Becker’s work on intuition and social conditioning, this episode examines how niceness can sometimes prioritize...

When we consider change, we often focus on risk — what could go wrong, what might be lost, and how we’ll protect ourselves if things don’t work out. But staying the same is also a choice, and every choice carries consequences. In this episode of One Question , Leah explores the psychology and neuroscience behind risk-aversion, negativity bias, and status quo bias, alongside the emotional and perso...

In this episode of One Question , Leah explores how peace can exist even in the midst of uncertainty, noise, and difficult times. Drawing on personal experience, somatic awareness, and nervous system science, she reflects on how peace isn’t a global state we achieve when everything is okay — it’s something we can locate in small, embodied moments. Through a gentle guided exercise, listeners are in...

Over the past eight years, Leah has moved across cities and countries — sometimes running from what was no longer safe, and sometimes choosing what felt quietly right. In this episode of One Question , she reflects on the difference between leaving something behind and consciously moving toward something new. Drawing on personal experience, nervous system science, values-based decision-making, and...

This week’s One Question episode starts with a small confession: Leah forgot to record and post this podcast episode! No drama. No crisis. Just a very human moment where something slipped through the cracks. But instead of turning that into self-criticism, this episode explores a more interesting question: how do we treat ourselves, and others, when we drop the ball? Through humor, nervous system...

January often pressures us to decide, plan, and move forward before we’re ready. But winter operates by different rules. In this episode of One Question , Leah explores how deep winter invites learning through stillness rather than action. Drawing on nature, nervous system awareness, and coaching insight, this reflection offers permission to pause, listen, and trust that not all growth is visible...

As the year comes to a close, there’s often pressure to summarize, extract lessons, or make everything mean something. But real life doesn’t always resolve on demand. Some truths don’t arrive as conclusions — they simply remain. In this season-ending episode of One Question , Leah invites you to pause and ask a quieter, more embodied question: What feels true at the end of this year? Drawing on ps...

The holiday season is full of lists, expectations, and giving — often to the point where we forget ourselves entirely. But what if the most important gift this season isn’t something you buy or wrap? In this episode of One Question , Leah invites you to pause and ask a quieter, more honest question: What gift do I actually need right now? Drawing on psychology, nervous system awareness, and gentle...

We talk about rest as though it’s optional — something we squeeze in once everything important is handled. But what if the real question isn’t how to rest, but why we’re afraid of it ? In this episode, Leah explores the internalized fear and guilt many of us carry around slowing down. She shares a personal story about forgetting to record the podcast, the moment of guilt that followed, and the dee...