What Coaches/Mentors Can Learn from The Filter Bubble
Yolanda had been mentoring a young client for months, and she noticed he kept arriving at sessions with the same narrow set of ideas about his career options, no matter how many exercises she assigned to broaden his thinking. When she asked him to walk her through a recent search on his phone, she saw exactly what he saw, results that quietly confirmed the same handful of paths he had already been considering. He was not being closed-minded. Between sessions, he was reasoning entirely from whatever his feeds handed him, and those feeds had learned to keep giving him more of what he already clicked. Yolanda realized her coaching reached him an hour a week, while his feed shaped him every day in between.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
The blind spot that looks like independent thinking
Yolanda's client believed his conclusions were his own careful reasoning, when they were substantially the product of a feed that had learned what he engaged with and kept delivering more of it. The confidence he brought to sessions was itself partly a symptom of narrowing, not a sign that his thinking had been genuinely tested.
A coach cannot monitor a client's feed between sessions without overstepping reasonable boundaries. Practice: periodically ask a client to walk you through a real recent search, rather than only discussing their conclusions.
Periodically ask a client to walk you through a real recent search, rather than only discussing their conclusions.
The discomfort a feed quietly removes
Growth often requires encountering an idea that unsettles a comfortable assumption, and that is precisely the kind of content an engagement-optimized feed tends to suppress in favor of agreeable material. Yolanda's client had never once encountered a serious counterargument to his preferred path, not because he avoided it, but because nothing in his feed ever offered it.
Manufacturing constant discomfort without support can damage trust rather than build growth. Practice: assign a specific piece of deliberately unfamiliar material between sessions, and discuss the reaction to it directly.
Assign a specific piece of deliberately unfamiliar material between sessions, and discuss the reaction to it directly.
A mentoring relationship built on two different pictures
When a coach and a client each read from separately personalized feeds, the shared understanding a mentoring relationship depends on can quietly erode without either person noticing. Yolanda assumed her client understood the same industry landscape she did; his feed had told him a meaningfully different story.
A coach cannot fully align their own information diet with every client's situation. Practice: at the start of a coaching relationship, compare notes on where each of you gets information about the client's field.
At the start of a coaching relationship, compare notes on where each of you gets information about the client's field.
Curation is a choice, not a law of nature
The narrowing shaping Yolanda's client was not a neutral fact about how feeds work; it reflected design choices optimized for engagement and comfort rather than for growth. That means coaching itself can counteract it deliberately. Teaching a client to notice their own default information diet, and to occasionally step outside it on purpose, is a transferable skill that outlasts the coaching relationship itself.
The push to expose a client to genuinely unfamiliar, discomforting material competes with the trust a coaching relationship depends on: too much unsolicited challenge can feel like an attack on a client's own judgment, while too much deference to their existing research leaves the narrowing untouched. The workable approach is to frame discomfort as a shared experiment rather than a correction. Introduce unfamiliar material as something to examine together, not as proof the client's prior thinking was wrong.
Name one thing, honestly
- Can you recall the last time a client changed their view because of something you deliberately introduced, rather than confirmed something they already believed? - Have you asked a client to show you an actual search or feed recently, rather than just their conclusions from it?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
At the start of a coaching relationship, compare notes on where each of you gets information about the client's field.