When You Don't Know What You Want: Using Guided Audio to Discover Rather Than Perform
There is a question I ask clients that produces a longer silence than almost any other.
What do you actually want?
Not what would you settle for. Not what do you think is reasonable to ask for. Not what has your partner offered that you have accepted. What do you actually want — specifically, in your intimate life, if nothing were in the way?
A substantial number of intelligent, self-aware adults cannot answer that question. Not because they are withholding, and not because they have no wants. Because they have never examined the territory closely enough to know.
This post is about why that happens, and about a specific and underappreciated use for guided audio: not as a way to have a better experience, but as a way to find out what you actually want.
Why Most People Don't Know
The reasons are structural and largely not anyone's fault.
Nobody ever asked.
Most adults have never been asked this question in a context where a genuine answer was possible. Not by a partner, not by a physician, not by anyone. The inquiry simply never occurred.
Shame forecloses the examination.
As I have written about in the shame and reverence post, a great many people — particularly those formed in restrictive environments — learned early that wanting was itself the suspect activity. You cannot honestly examine a territory you have been taught to suspect. The examination gets skipped and a set of inherited assumptions occupies the space instead.
Performance substituted for discovery.
Most people's sexual development involved figuring out what to do rather than discovering what they like. The script was acquired from culture, from media, from early partners. Once acquired, it runs — and the question of whether it actually corresponds to genuine preference never comes up.
The monitoring prevents the noticing.
This is the mechanism I find most important. As I have written about extensively, most people spend intimate encounters partially outside the experience — monitoring how it is going, how they appear, whether they are performing adequately. That monitoring occupies the exact attention that would be required to notice what they actually feel.
You cannot discover your preferences while evaluating your performance. The two use the same faculty.
Why Guided Audio Is Unusually Good for This
Here is the specific use case I want to make, and it is different from the ones I have written about before.
A guided audio experience removes the two obstacles that most reliably prevent self-discovery.
It removes the performance dimension.
There is no one to perform for. Whether you are alone or with a partner, the guide is holding the structure — which means no one is evaluating your execution, because there is no execution to evaluate. There is only following, noticing, and experiencing.
It directs your attention where you would not direct it.
This is the part I think is most underrated. Left to your own devices, your attention in an intimate context goes where habit sends it. A guide sends it somewhere else — to a sensation you were not attending to, to a part of the body you routinely skip, to the breath, to a quality of contact you have never specifically noticed.
And in that redirection, information arrives. You discover that something you had never attended to is significant. Or that something you assumed you liked produces very little. Or that a quality of slowness you had always experienced as a delay is actually the thing.
That is discovery, and it is largely unavailable when you are running your own script.
How to Actually Use It This Way
The shift is mostly one of intention. Same practice, different purpose.
Go in as an investigator rather than a participant.
The frame is not "I hope this is good." It is "I want to find out something." That reframe removes the pressure of outcome entirely and replaces it with curiosity, which is both more useful and considerably more comfortable.
Notice rather than evaluate.
There is a real difference between "that felt good" and "I noticed a distinct response to that, more than I expected." The first is a verdict. The second is data. Practice collecting data.
Pay particular attention to the surprises.
The most useful information is whatever you did not expect. Something you thought would do nothing and did something. Something you have been doing for twenty years that turns out to be fairly neutral. A quality of attention that produced more than any technique ever has.
Surprises are where the genuine preferences are hiding, because the unsurprising responses are mostly the script.
Use individual experiences first.
I would generally recommend doing this alone before doing it with a partner. Not because partnered discovery is wrong, but because the presence of another person reintroduces exactly the performance dimension you are trying to remove. Discover privately, then bring what you found.
Write something down afterward.
Two or three sentences. What you noticed, what surprised you, what you would want more of. The information dissipates remarkably fast otherwise, and the accumulation over several sessions is where the actual picture emerges.
Vary deliberately.
If you use the same experience repeatedly, you learn one thing. The discovery value is in the range. Rotate.
What This Produces
The reason this matters is that genuine self-knowledge is the precondition for almost everything else.
You cannot communicate a want you have not identified. You cannot ask for a condition you do not know you need. You cannot bring genuine preference into a relationship if what you have instead is a script you inherited and never examined.
And the couples who make the most progress in coaching are, without exception, the ones where both people actually know something about their own wanting. Not because they are more adventurous. Because they have something specific to bring.
The discovery is not a preliminary to the intimate work. It is a substantial portion of it.
Where to Start
Pick one individual experience. Go in with no expectation of it being good and a genuine intention to notice something. Afterward, write down two sentences about what surprised you.
Do that four or five times over a few weeks and you will know more about your own erotic wiring than most adults learn in a lifetime.
Then bring it to your partner.
Explore Coelle — individual and couples guided audio experiences. For this purpose specifically, start with the individual ones.
And if you would like help interpreting what you find, book a free discovery call — this is a substantial portion of what coaching actually does.
Scott Schwertly is a Nashville-based sex and intimacy coach, founder of Coelle, and co-host of Do You Feel That? with his wife Brittney.
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