The Coherence Gap
What happened when I used my own product to diagnose why I wasn't sharing
Every builder knows the tension. You’re deep in the work — shipping, fixing, improving. Sharing feels like a distraction from the real thing. You tell yourself you’ll write about it when it’s done.
Except it’s never done.
Last month: 379 commits in three weeks. Four features shipped. Production-live product.
Zero posts.
It wasn’t a discipline problem. It wasn’t that I didn’t have things to say. Something else was running underneath — something I couldn’t name until I ran my own coherence check on myself.
The coherence check is a 2-minute daily practice I built into Liminal Space: seven questions, a semiotic intelligence model under the hood, a simple score.
The seven factors: Stability, Vitality, Agency, Connection, Expression, Clarity, Wholeness.
I’d been running it daily for 46 days. Mostly as product testing. But when I ran it looking at the silence — the months of shipping with nothing said — the data showed something clear.
Vitality: 9/10.
Expression: 2/10.
Seven-point gap. Forty-six days of data.
The building energy was as high as I’d ever measured it. The sharing energy was nearly absent.
What the check is actually for
Not mood tracking — I didn’t need a score to know I was enjoying the building. What I needed was to see the shape of the imbalance. To see which dimension of my identity was thriving and which had gone quiet.
Vitality high, Expression low: productive and invisible.
The work exists, doesn’t compound. You ship constantly, but nothing reaches anyone. The building is real. The surface area is zero.
The usual advice is “just post more” or “be consistent.” Those are discipline prescriptions. They treat sharing as a habit problem.
It’s not a habit problem. It’s a coherence problem.
When one part of your system thrives while another atrophies, you feel the tension but can’t locate it. The measurement locates it.
The gap is the signal
The most useful insights from coherence tracking don’t come from individual scores — they come from the gaps.
High Vitality + low Expression — productive but invisible. The work exists, but nothing compounds.
High Clarity + low Agency — you see exactly what you want but can’t move toward it. Paralysis with perfect vision.
High Connection + low Stability — relationally present, structurally unmoored. Everyone else’s needs feel more real than your own.
Every combination tells a story.
I’ve spent years in therapy understanding my patterns. Therapy gave me language for the pattern. A 2-minute coherence check showed me the pattern was active right now — with a 7-point gap I could measure.
Language helps you understand a pattern. Measurement shows you when it’s running
What closing the gap actually looks like
I want to be specific about this, because “I saw the gap and it changed” sounds cleaner than it was.
Week one after seeing that 2/10: nothing obvious changed. I still didn’t post. But I started noticing when the resistance showed up — the exact moment I’d finish a feature and feel the pull toward the next one instead of saying anything about the one I’d just shipped. That moment had always been there. Now it had a name. I could see the shape of it.
Week two: I wrote one thing. A single observation about a product decision I’d made. Didn’t call it a post. Just wrote it down. Expression score: 3.
Week three: I published it. Not because I’d solved the psychological problem of being visible — but because the data made ignoring it feel less defensible than the discomfort of sharing. Expression: 4.
What I noticed by week four wasn’t just that Expression had climbed. It was that the gap had started affecting other factors in ways I hadn’t predicted.
When Expression was at 2, Agency was at 7. Confident about what I was building, but only directing that agency inward — toward the product, never outward toward an audience. Once Expression moved to 4, Agency shifted too. Suddenly I was making faster decisions about what to build, because I had a feedback loop outside my own head. Other people’s questions were shaping what I built next.
The factors aren’t independent. They pull on each other. That’s what coherence means: not each dimension at its peak, but the dimensions in right relationship.
A high Agency score looks different when Expression is low versus when it’s high. The number is the same. The meaning isn’t.
What came next
I’ve been running the check every morning since. Expression score: 2 in January. It’s a 6 now.
Not from willpower. From seeing the number and not being able to ignore it anymore. The gap makes the prescription obvious: bring Expression into rhythm with the rest of the system.
This essay is what that looks like. The gap is the signal. What you do with it is up to you.
For me, seeing the gap clearly enough wasn’t just an insight. It changed what I built next.
I’d been logging coherence scores every morning — 2 minutes, seven questions, a number. The data was useful. But it couldn’t hold the moments that didn’t have numbers yet: the decision that cracked something open, the conversation that shifted a pattern I’d carried for years, the morning I knew something had actually changed.
Measurement shows you when a pattern is running.
But some things that matter don’t resolve into a score. They need somewhere to be kept.
That’s what I built next. A place for the moments that feel like thresholds — not data, not a journal, something between. I’m still testing it. But it starts where the coherence gap ends: with the thing the measurement can’t hold.
Take the 2-minute coherence check. Look at your Expression score. If it’s below 5, you’re probably sitting on work the world hasn’t seen yet.
What gap have you noticed in your own patterns? The kind you can feel but haven’t named yet.
If you want to run the check yourself — no account needed, takes about 2 minutes: https://theliminalspace.io/rituals/check
Curious what your scores say!
Thanks, the Coherence check has been helping me get more aligned and track my state before, during and after work. It’s been helpful for me as I take a step back and figure out the next direction.