🌥️ "Does he love me?" 🌥️

How Primal Question started with one question in a cloud.

Hey friend,

Welcome back to the Primal Question Newsletter.

If this is your first time reading, subscribe here to receive future posts.

Next week, I have a big announcement!

It’s the biggest update since I released The Seven Primal Questions book, and my team and I have poured ourselves into it all year. I cannot wait to share this with you. But first, I want to tell you a story I’ve never fully shared.

The story of how all of this started.

I’ll never forget the moment I saw the first Primal Question.

It was 2019.

I was in my third session with a new client, and she was telling me about her frustration with her husband. He was always looking at his phone. He kept arriving home from work 15 minutes later than he said he would be home. They were small things on the surface, but they were causing her an enormous amount of emotional pain.

She couldn’t figure out why.

I’m a visual thinker.

I’m always doodling and drawing pictures while I work with clients, and as she talked, I saw something. It wasn’t a supernatural moment, but it was a moment of visual clarity. I saw a cloud hovering over her head.

And inside that cloud was a question.

I paused her and said, “Can I tell you what I’m seeing right now?”

“I see this question hovering over you. Maybe all of this is not about him on the phone or arriving 15 minutes late. Maybe it’s about a simple question you need answered with more clarity:

Does he love me?

Do you feel like that’s the question you’re trying to get answered by your husband?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what it is going on,” she said.

As we unpacked it more, her whole story came into clearer focus. That question had been running her life long before she got married. When the answer was yes, she felt secure and alive. When the answer was confusing, everything felt shaky.

After that session, I wondered if I had a question like this, too.

It didn’t take long to find mine: Am I going to be safe?

Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. It explained my hypervigilance and need for control. It explained why I have about 20 nightlights in my house and why I only ski the bunny slopes. Things I’d chalked up to personality were really me trying, again and again, to get a yes to the question I’d been subconsciously asking since I was a little kid.

That’s when I got really curious.

I started asking everyone the same thing.

Every client. Every friend. Even strangers at dinner parties. Is there a question driving your life and your choices right now?

For the first year and a half, there was no framework. No list. No seven questions. Just lots of conversations. I heard thousands of answers and took lots of notes.

All the questions were phrased differently, but they kept circling the same handful of core ideas.

I’ve always been a big reader.

On any given day, there are about five books in my bag, and most of them have something to do with psychology, trauma, or personal growth. The more I listened to people, the more I saw that the research I’d been reading on attachment theory, family systems, and early childhood development was describing the same thing I was hearing, just in different words.

I realized that the questions I was hearing weren’t just random questions.

They were questions about our core emotional needs.

That’s when COVID hit.

My speaking calendar and in-person workshops came to a halt overnight.

It was a very stressful season, but it also provided me the time and space to dive deeper into this research. I laid out all of my notes, everything I’d heard in my conversations. I started looking for patterns.

I started trying to narrow the questions down to their simplest form.

First I got it down to about 15. Then 13. Then 9. And finally, 7 questions.

Seven was as simple as I could make it without feeling like I was leaving out something essential or losing something true. And by the way, the goal of simplifying all of those questions down to 7 was never to put people in a box. I still encourage people to phrase their Primal Question in a way that feels most true to them. The goal is to take something incredibly complex and make it simple enough to act on.

Why? Because breakthrough happens when we shrink the gap between awareness and action.

That’s exactly what I started to see: breakthrough.

People who had spent years in counseling would sit across from me and say, “Nobody has ever explained me to myself like this.” Couples who’d been stuck in the same fight for a decade finally understood what they were fighting about. And it happened fast. Sometimes in a single session.

I knew I couldn’t keep this framework to myself.

After more than 6,000 hours of 1-on-1 interviews, 4 years of research, and 22 group labs, I distilled my findings into a short book.

In 2023, I self-published The Seven Primal Questions.

Alongside it, we released a simple, free assessment to help people discover their question.

The response humbled me. The book became a bestseller, selling tens of thousands of copies. The assessment has been taken over 200,000 times. I started receiving messages from people all over the place:

• “This changed my marriage.”

• “This changed how I parent.”

• “I finally understand why I do what I do.”

Churches asked me to come teach it. Organizations like Chick-fil-A brought me in to share it with their leaders. My coaching practice filled up, and I realized something.

I had become the bottleneck.

This was never meant to be the Mike Foster show.

This has always been about transformation. So to help this framework reach more people, we started training other coaches to use it with their clients. Today, there are 319 certified Primal Question Coaches doing exactly that.

It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come.

• 7 years

• 200,000 assessments

• 319 certified coaches

That’s a lot of growth for an idea that started as a hunch about a question in a cloud.

But the reality is, it’s still a drop in the bucket.

Every person has 1 question running their life.

Most have no idea what it is, and just like that first client in 2019, it’s causing them great pain. In their marriages. In their relationships with their kids. In their careers. I think we owe it to them to help as many people as possible discover their Primal Question.

I’ll be honest. This is a shift for me.

I’ve never been a big “legacy” guy.

My question is “Am I safe?” It’s not “Do I have a purpose?” For a long time, I was content to stay in our little corner of the world and serve whoever happened to find us. That felt safe to me. Looking back, it also kept Primal Question small.

For three years, it’s been the same book, and the same free assessment.

There haven’t been any major developments, but all of that is about to change.

Next Thursday, I’ll tell you what we’ve been building that’s launching at the end of the month.

My team and I have been working on this all year. Lately, we’ve been working a lot of late nights and a few too many weekends. But we’re almost there, and I know it will be worth it when we get to share these new products with you.

Please don’t miss next Thursday’s email, because here’s the truth: we need you.

Many of you have been with us since the beginning. You’re the reason we’re building Primal Question, and you’re the source of its success so far. You shared the assessment with a friend. You gifted the book to a family member.

You got us where we are today.

If Primal Question has helped you, we need your help reaching others with what’s next.

More on that in the coming weeks.

To your growth,
Mike Foster

P.S. Do you remember the moment you first discovered your Primal Question? What was happening? How did it feel? What did it change for you? Hit reply or leave a comment and tell me. I read every one, and I’d love to hear your story.