Transcript
00:00:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m Joanna Lindenbaum, a coach, ritualist, and all-around transformation nerd who is obsessed with helping clients go deep to create more change and results with their clients.
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I created the Coaching Revolution podcast to share with you coaching skills, tips, and advice, as well as a deeper understanding of human behavior and of yourself.
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so that you can do even better client work and group work, grow your business organically, and know that you’re making a real difference in the world.
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This is about creating a revolution in the transformational industry so that more practitioners feel amazing about what they do and so that more of our clients experience life-changing shifts.
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Let’s get started.
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Welcome back.
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So I’ve been sitting on creating this particular episode for a while now and honestly, I’m a little nervous to talk about it, but I also feel finally ready.
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Today’s episode is all about artificial intelligence, AI.
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And
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On the episode, I’m going to share a little bit about my own ideas and beliefs about AI and how I approach AI inside of my own business.
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But the episode is going to mostly be about why I’m positive that even though a lot of folks out there are turning to AI for coaching instead of hiring actual coaches, I’m still positive that AI won’t take away your clients or business
00:01:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
anytime soon, particularly if you have some strategies in place that we’re going to talk about.
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So if you’re a coach or a therapist or a transformational practitioner who’s been doing your own work for years and lately you’ve found yourself wondering if any of it matters in a world where people can just open ChatGPT and get coached for free,
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Or if you’re a coach or therapist who maybe has felt a little bit uneasy when clients have mentioned that they’re using AI for something that you used to help them with.
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Or if you have felt maybe some frustration and heartbreak because you know you’ve spent years honing your craft
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And the idea that a chatbot might be competing with you for clients just feels awful.
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Or if you found yourself asking, am I falling behind if I’m not using AI?
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And if I do use it, does that compromise everything I stand for?
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Or
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Maybe you’ve been worrying, what if the world stops valuing the depth of what I do because of AI?
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Then this episode is for you.
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Because here’s what I want you to know before we even dive in.
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If you are a truly skilled and masterful practitioner, the kind who creates real lasting transformation for your clients,
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I believe deep in my bones that you have absolutely nothing to worry about.
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And I mean that.
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AI might be able to put mediocre practitioners out of business.
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And that’s because for better or worse, in some ways, AI listens well.
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It can pick up on your needs, reflect well what you’ve said.
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It can even sometimes ask pretty good questions.
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And it can strategize.
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people are turning to AI as coaches, as therapists, because it’s free.
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It’s available all the time, 24-7.
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It never loses patience.
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It doesn’t have boundaries.
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It sounds really smart.
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It knows all the things on the internet.
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I get all of that.
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But I am telling you, AI can never, ever replace an extraordinary practitioner.
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And today I’m going to tell you exactly why that’s the case and what it takes to make sure you’re on the right side of that line.
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But before I get into the heart of this episode,
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I want to share a little bit about my own complicated evolving relationship with AI, because I think it’s important context for everything I’m about else I’m going to share in the episode.
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So for a very long time, I avoided ChatGPT, Claude, anything AI, I avoided it like the plague.
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I was morally opposed to AI for so many reasons, and I probably still am.
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I was scared, and honestly, I still am scared of AI and the impact that it can have on humanity, on privacy, on global economy,
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on war and human life.
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I’m worried about the impact that AI can have on human loneliness, on creativity for sure, and so much more.
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Plus, not to mention, it takes up an enormous amount of water and energy.
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It consumes so much and it impacts the environment and Mother Earth.
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And so for the longest time, I really thought of AI as kind of like the devil and I didn’t engage.
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But in maybe, I don’t know, the last eight months or so, I’ve shifted ever so slightly on that.
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I still have my concerns.
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And I still only use AI very sparingly for all of the reasons that I’ve mentioned.
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But that being said, along with my concerns, I’ve also become really curious about the ways that artificial intelligence can help and can serve and can help me serve others.
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And so just very little, I’ve started to experiment using it with things like analyzing data.
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So finding data patterns inside of open rates on emails that I send or click rates on emails that I send.
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I’ve experimented with it a little bit to repurpose some materials that I’ve already created.
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Some of it has been helpful.
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So for example, one of the recent preview workshops that I did for the Befriend Your Fear certification, it just didn’t convert as well as I thought it was going to.
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And so I gave AI the script that I had written for that workshop, and I asked it to analyze that script and tell me why it thought that the workshop wasn’t converting.
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And while it answered me with many, many, many words that I had to sift through, I’ll tell you that some of its reasoning was, I think, spot on.
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And some things that I just hadn’t seen, even though I had read it over a couple times myself.
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Or I’ll give you one other example of how I’ve started experimenting with AI.
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I read in a few
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places that the way that search engines work now is, or rather I should say that most people are using AI the way that they used to use search engines.
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In other words, they’re asking AI questions to look for resources and AI is searching the web for those resources.
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And so I’ve asked
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AI to produce for me some SEO optimized keywords so that my business can come up when people search for coaching mastery and masterful coaching skills inside of AI.
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So that’s been interesting.
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I’ll also share that I have kind of just tinkered and played around with AI editing some of my copy for me.
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So copy that I’ve already written, but just to see like, can AI edit it?
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And I’ll tell you, I haven’t loved the results.
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It, yeah, doesn’t really sound like me.
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So anyway, I’ve got a back and forth pull.
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with AI.
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I am really trying not to buy into the idea that you absolutely need it for business and marketing, even though most businesses, competitors are using it.
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And the truth is, I’m not sure what it’s gonna look like for me in the future.
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The truth is that AI still feels super confusing for me.
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I still feel a lot of moral ambiguity around it.
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So I’m not really sure where I’m ultimately gonna land with it.
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I might end up leaning into it a little bit more, using it a little bit more.
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But I also may end up pulling back from it all the way and just leaving it behind.
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in my business.
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I’m going to continue to follow the research carefully, particularly around its impact on humanity and the environment.
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And I’m going to continue to really look to see can it be used ethically, is it ethical, et cetera, et cetera.
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I think the jury is out on that one.
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So I share all of this so that you know where I’m coming from.
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I’m neither an AI cheerleader, but I’m also not someone with my head in the sand when it comes to it.
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And it’s from that grounded and researched and somewhat experienced place that I feel like I can tell you with full conviction that AI is never going to replace a truly extraordinary coach or transformational practitioner.
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And let me break it down and tell you why.
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I’ve thought six reasons that AI is never going to replace you.
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And I really hope that as I share these, this will be encouraging for you.
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This will be inspiring for you.
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This will maybe take away some of the worry that you might be having around it.
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These are all really big, important reasons.
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Okay, so reason #1,
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that I really believe AI is never going to replace an extraordinary coach or therapist or practitioner is because AI doesn’t have a body.
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And since it doesn’t have a body, it can’t co-regulate with clients and it can’t create authentic, deeper trust with clients.
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Okay, so there are a bunch of things I want to say about this one.
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First of all, here’s a foundational truth of any transformational work.
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Co regulation can’t happen without trust.
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It just can’t happen without trust.
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No transformation can really happen without trust.
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Befriending fear can’t happen without trust.
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Working with shadow can’t happen without trust.
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Expanding true resilience can’t happen with trust.
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Helping a client take a stretchy, courageous action generally also can’t happen without trust.
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And trust, real trust, requires human connection.
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It requires lived experience.
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It requires an actual body.
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Real
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Trust and human connection requires someone, a practitioner who has been afraid, who has struggled, who’s sat in the discomfort of their own transformation and come out on the other side.
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AI has none of these things.
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Sure, it can consult, it can encourage, it can ask decent questions,
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But AI cannot be a truly safe container for deeper work, for that transformational work that requires trust and co-regulation.
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Pacing matters.
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Tone matters.
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The energy of the container matters.
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And AI can’t do this.
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And so it simply can’t set the kind of container
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where real trust is.
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Now, if you’re listening to this podcast, I am positive because I know who I draw.
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I know who is attracted to this work that I’m sharing.
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So if you are here listening to this podcast, I am certain that you are already really good at creating trust
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with your clients.
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You are for sure better at creating trust with your clients than the average practitioner, if you’re listening right now.
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You care.
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You show up.
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You probably hold space in ways that your clients have never experienced before.
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I know this about my community.
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So for you, the question is, how can you get
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even better at creating trust in your client containers.
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Because there’s a difference between a container that feels safe and trustworthy and then one that feels deeply, deeply, genuinely, profoundly held.
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And
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It’s in that difference between those two that some of the most important and profound work gets done.
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The deeper fear work, the real shadow work, expanding the stretchy edges with clients.
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And here’s the other thing.
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Real deep and extraordinary trust
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isn’t just built in the easy moments inside of your client sessions.
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You probably know this.
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Real trust is built and deepened in the harder moments inside of sessions.
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In the moments when
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A client is frustrated when they come into a session or upset in a session.
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In the moments maybe when a client is projecting onto you or shutting down.
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When you know how to build trust in those moments, it goes so much farther.
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When you know how to build trust in the moments where there’s been a rupture,
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A moment where something went sideways, where maybe trust was kind of poked at a little bit.
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And when you know how to repair that skillfully without making it worse, that’s when deeper trust is created.
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So this is all learnable skills, although most practitioners were never taught them.
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The practitioners that know how to do this, AI doesn’t stand a chance against them when it comes to client work.
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Now, I want to take all of what we’re talking about a step further, and I want to hone in even more on this idea about co-regulation, because this is really important.
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And I say this often, a coaching session isn’t just
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a conversation and an exchange of content.
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A coaching session is also an exchange between 2 nervous systems.
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So why do I bring this up here when we’re talking about AI?
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Because AI cannot sit with your client when fear arises for them
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and then co-regulate and regulate alongside them.
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Fear doesn’t respond to words.
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Words is all that AI has, maybe images too, right?
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I mean, it does respond to words, but not exactly.
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Fear responds to presence, to energy, to a real nervous system that is steady,
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and unafraid right there in the room or the Zoom room, sending a signal that says, I’ve got you.
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can stay with this.
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You’re safe enough to go deeper.
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Nervous systems co-regulate.
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Energy follows energy when you as the practitioner show up regulated, when you
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continue to be regulated even in the tough moments, even when fear arises, energy follows energy.
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Your client is going to be more likely to do this.
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And these aren’t just fancy words and concepts.
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This is literally how biology works.
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No AI algorithm can replicate this.
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No chatbot can hold this kind of quality of presence.
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And no amount of AI sophistication can change the fundamental truth that human beings grow, transform, move through fear in relationship with other humans.
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Period.
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End of story.
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And to me, this is incredible news when it comes to the AI issue, right?
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It means that the most irreplaceable thing that you can build right now, the thing that’s never going to be automated is your own capacity to be that steady, skilled, present human in the room with your client.
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the one with real presence, the one that can support your client to co-regulate and trust.
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Okay, so that was reason #1 why I really believe AI is never going to replace extraordinary practitioners.
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It’s because AI doesn’t have a body, so it can’t regulate and it can’t create authentic, deeper trust.
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Let’s move on to reason #2.
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It’s another biggie.
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Without lived experience, you just can’t have authentic empathy.
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So AI can produce a kind of empathy, a manufactured empathy, we can call it, or like a formulaic empathy.
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And over the top, it’s algorithmically generated, and it’s algorithmically generated reassurance that sounds caring, but ultimately for most people, it lands hollow.
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So here’s the thing.
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Not only do clients need authentic empathy,
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in order to feel deeply seen and heard and loved and to move forward.
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But they can also feel the difference between true empathy, true human empathy, and AI empathy.
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They may not be able to name it or immediately recognize it, but I promise you, because this is biology as well,
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at the level of the nervous system, they know.
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They know the difference.
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Real empathy comes from having lived something, from knowing in your body what it means to be afraid, or to be stuck, or to really want to change and not be able to.
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Real empathy comes from the moment a practitioner recognizes something in a client’s struggle because they’ve genuinely been there themselves or because they’ve sat with enough humans, enough clients to know this particular flavor of fear intimately.
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And that recognition, that moment,
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where a client feels truly met, not advised, not redirected, not cheerfully encouraged the way AI does, but that moment where a client feels really, really seen in their struggle.
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That’s one of the most transformative things a skilled practitioner can offer.
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It’s the moment a client’s nervous system has more freedom to exhale.
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And it’s the moment when real, deeper work becomes possible.
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AI might look like it can create that moment, but it can’t.
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Not truly.
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Now,
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Here’s where things get even more interesting on this.
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Authentic empathy isn’t just a feeling.
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It is a feeling, but that’s not all that it is.
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In the hands of a skilled practitioner, authentic empathy becomes a lens.
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It’s a way of seeing beneath the surface of what a client is sharing or presenting, and then being able to recognize what’s actually happening beneath the surface.
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So let me tell you what I mean by this.
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Think about some of your clients.
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Maybe
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the client who has every reason why nothing can work for them.
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Not this week, not last week, just not nothing works for me, right?
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Or maybe think about the client who criticizes your suggestions or pushes back on the ideas that come up in a session.
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Or think about the client who is so clearly brilliant
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but somehow can never quite grasp what they’re supposed to do next.
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Or the one who is committed, they make commitments to take forward action, but then they don’t follow through again and again.
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What artificial intelligence can do with these clients
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is take their behavior at face value and try to solve the problem.
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So for example, more strategy for the procrastinator or more validation for the overwhelmed one, or even for the overwhelmed one, you’re trying to take things off their plate, which may or may not be helpful.
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Or maybe AI tries to create more clarity for the confused one.
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Okay, but a skilled, empathic practitioner, one who’s
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done their own inner work and has also– they’ve developed real somatic and emotional capacity, that practitioner can see beneath the behavior to the fear that’s driving the behavior.
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And that changes everything.
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And that will lead you in a different direction in a session.
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So many years ago I developed, and some of this, you’ve trained on this for me, I developed what I call the resistance archetypes.
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It’s A framework that I teach for understanding the specific ways that resistance shows up in clients.
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the archetype of the victim or the judged or the confused one, the procrastinator, the overwhelmed one, etc.
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These aren’t personality types.
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They’re fear responses.
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They’re protective patterns that developed inside of clients for very good reasons.
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And now they sometimes quietly run the show and the behaviors.
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Now, here’s what most practitioners don’t realize and also what AI is never going to understand.
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When you encounter a resistance type in a session and then you meet your client’s resistance archetype with more strategy or with ideas for it,
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or pressure or encouragement, guess what?
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You drive it deeper.
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And then the client stalls even more.
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And then sometimes the client even disengages.
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And then you’re left wondering what went wrong.
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But when you can recognize the archetype and then feel into the fear underneath it with genuine empathy,
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and then meet it with a skilled and somatic and precisely calibrated response, well then something completely different starts to become possible.
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Then your client feels seen in a way that they’ve never feel seen before.
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Their resistance archetype can start to relax.
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Their system can start to relax.
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And that’s where transformation can begin.
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So that’s the difference between reflecting language back, which AI is very good at, versus meeting a human being with embodied, earned empathy and wisdom.
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Now those skills, you can develop those because you’ve got a body.
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and you’ve got a nervous system, those skills are irreplaceable.
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Okay, so that was #2, reason #2 why AI is not going to replace extraordinary practitioners.
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And that’s because without lived experience, you also can’t have authentic empathy.
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Only humans can have that.
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Let’s keep on going.
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And let’s look at this next reason, another biggie.
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AI doesn’t have somatic awareness.
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And somatic awareness counts for so much in client work.
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So a skilled practitioner, they can notice body language shifts in real time and then integrate
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that those body language shifts into the session.
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A skilled human practitioner can pick up on a change in breathing.
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If you’re on Zoom, a shift in posture, whether you’re on Zoom or on the phone with a client, attention that appears when a certain topic comes up.
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A real human skilled practitioner can sense when a client has gone quiet in a way that means something important is stirring just beneath the surface.
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AI, it just sees words on a screen.
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It processes language.
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It doesn’t really have a sense of time or timing.
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It can’t see the moment a client’s shoulders drop.
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It can’t notice that a client has been breathing shallowly for the last couple minutes.
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It can’t feel the shift in the session when something really important has just been said.
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But you can, right?
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Humans can do this.
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If you are a coach or practitioner who has developed incredible listening skills and incredible somatic awareness skills, then you know what to do.
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You see it, you hear it, and you know what to do with what you’re seeing and hearing.
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So what I’m talking about right now
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For those of you that have been in Sacred Depths or really any of my trainings, this is an example of what I mean when I say my kind of one of my sayings that I say over and over, which is always coach the who based on the what.
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And what that means is that the content of what your client is bringing
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is only half the picture.
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The other half of the picture is for you as the practitioner to be able to really discern who is showing up in this moment through their body, through their nervous system, through their energetics, through their emotional state.
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If you’re a practitioner who can read and respond to these things, you’re doing something that is genuinely irreplaceable by artificial intelligence.
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And of course, this is where having real somatic skills also becomes so critical.
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It’s not optional to have somatic skills.
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It’s not a nice add-on.
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This is foundational.
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Because, for example, we don’t just think fear, we feel it.
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Clients don’t just think resistance, they carry resistance in their bodies.
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And if you can only work with what a client can articulate in words,
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If you’re missing that kind of body level information that’s often saying something completely different, then you’re only working with half the picture at best.
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All of this, as many of you know, is what I teach through the Befriend Your Fear methodology.
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That somatic piece, it’s not just about helping clients regulate or calm down.
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It’s about knowing how to work with fear at the level where fear actually lives in the body, in the nervous system, in the protective patterns that were built long before your client most likely had language for any of it.
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So these are all specific learnable skills.
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And once you have them, not only do your sessions change,
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not only are you able to take your clients further, but it distinguishes you 110% from artificial intelligence and from what any chatbot could do for a client.
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All right, so that was #4.
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AI doesn’t have somatic awareness and somatic awareness is kind of everything.
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Let’s look at reason #4 why AI, I believe AI is never going to replace really good practitioners, extraordinary practitioners.
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And that’s because information isn’t wisdom.
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And wisdom is what actually creates, part of what actually creates transformation.
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It’s A vital part.
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So AI has access to more information
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than any human being could ever absorb in a lifetime.
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I mean, it’s got that edge on us humans for sure.
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So yes, for consulting, for answering a straightforward question, for strategy and logistics, yeah, AI can be genuinely useful sometimes.
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But sharing information
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is fundamentally different from sharing from a place of wisdom, lived experience, and intuition.
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Wisdom is what happens when your body, your history, and your years with sitting with human beings bring something unexpected into the room.
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It’s that question that you didn’t plan to ask.
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It’s that reframe that comes from somewhere that you can’t even quite explain.
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It’s that moment that, as the practitioner, you decide to stay in the not knowing with a client instead of rushing towards clarity.
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Because you’ve learned through your own transformation that sometimes the most important thing isn’t to have the answer in the moment.
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Instead, it’s the unfolding.
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AI, artificial intelligence, it prioritizes clarity and knowing and facts above everything else.
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But that’s not always how people grow.
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That’s not always how transformation happens.
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Sometimes what a client needs is not an answer.
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It’s a witness.
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Or not a strategy, but a new way of being with themselves.
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So wisdom knows all of this.
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Wisdom knows when to slow down, when to follow the unexpected thread that comes up.
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Wisdom knows when the most important thing
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is the thing that just came out of nowhere, right?
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Wisdom knows that the sacred unfolding between two human beings in a real coaching container is something that really can’t be predicted or generated or replicated by any algorithm.
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Yeah, AI, it can give your clients a ton of information, but it can’t give them wisdom and it can’t give them lived experience or embodied knowing or the capacity to be fully present in the moment where everything is about to open.
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So again,
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Number four here, information, excuse me, information, it’s not wisdom.
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And wisdom is what creates transformation.
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That brings us to reason number five, that AI, I believe AI is never going to replace us, especially if we’ve got extraordinary skills.
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This is a biggie.
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AI
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can iterate, but it simply cannot create something that is completely new.
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So a couple things I want to say on this one.
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AI works the way it’s set up.
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is by drawing on what already exists.
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So it combines and recombines and refines and iterates what it is programmed on or what it finds on the internet.
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But what it can’t do, it can’t create something that is truly new.
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It can’t really create
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the unexpected.
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And it certainly doesn’t have the capability that two humans coming together have, right?
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That emerges from the aliveness of two nervous systems in contact with each other and brainstorming with each other.
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We all know that, or I shouldn’t say we all know, maybe you don’t know, but I’ll tell you this is what I believe.
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I believe that at the end of the day, frameworks are good, but some of the most transformative moments don’t come from frameworks.
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And really, AI only just works from frameworks.
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Truly some of the most transformative moments that can happen in a coaching session comes from a practitioner who is being so fully present, who is so deeply skilled, who is so authentically connected to the human being in front of them that something unexpected emerges.
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I know you’ve had those moments, right?
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Those are the magic moments.
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And those moments, those are for human coaches.
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Those are yours and yours alone.
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Okay, so this leads us to the last one, maybe the most important one.
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You can decide for yourself the last reason why AI is never going to, I believe, never going to replace extraordinary coaches.
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Without lived experience and a body, you just can’t have true ethical judgment.
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Period.
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End of story.
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Without lived experience and a body, you just can’t have true ethical judgment.
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So how does AI function or like make ethical choices?
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Here’s how.
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By iterating on what it pulls from the internet mostly.
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And as we all know, the internet is definitely not a reliable ethical compass.
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The most popular answer that can be found on the internet is certainly not always the most ethical one.
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Also, the most practical answer isn’t always the most humane answer or aligned answer.
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To have real ethical judgment, particularly inside of coaching work and transformational work, you need something that AI can never have.
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And that’s the capacity to feel the weight of a decision.
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To sit with complexity and not rush to the answer or the solution or the resolution.
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Real ethical judgment in transformational work means holding the responsibility of being a guide for another human being’s inner life and to feel that responsibility in your body.
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not over responsibility.
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I want to be clear about that because it’s a partnership.
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But as the practitioner, you do have some responsibility there.
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So practitioners who really work with depth and work with depth well, they understand all of this.
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Ethics, when you’re doing
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depth work, when you’re doing true transformational work ethics, it’s not a checklist.
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It’s a way of being.
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It’s a willingness to slow down even when speed feels easier.
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It’s a willingness to reflect a hard truth even when saying something soothing or reassuring would be simpler.
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It’s a way of holding a boundary even when it’s not comfortable.
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This kind of ethical presence is never going to be able to be outsourced.
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to AI, or at least not anytime soon.
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It just it can’t be generated.
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This is built through years of doing your own inner work, of holding yourself to a high standard, of caring, like deeply humanly caring about others and feeling all of this in your body.
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Ethics don’t just come from the mind.
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They come from the body.
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Okay, so we’ve looked at a lot in today’s episode.
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And first, just for a quickie review, we looked at the six reasons why I think AI is never gonna
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replace extraordinary coaches or practitioners.
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And a quick review of those six are number one, because AI doesn’t have a body, so it can’t co-regulate and it can’t create authentic, deeper trust.
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Number two, because AI doesn’t have lived experience and without lived experience, you just can’t have authentic empathy.
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Reason number three,
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AI has no body, so it has no somatic awareness.
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And somatic awareness counts for a lot in transformational work.
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Number 4, information isn’t wisdom.
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Wisdom is part of what creates transformation.
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Number 5, AI can iterate, but it definitely cannot create something completely new.
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And #6,
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without lived experience and a body, you just can’t have true ethical judgment.
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Now, here’s the bottom line on all of this.
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I’ve been in the coaching industry, in the transformational industry for 25 years now.
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I’ve watched practitioners with
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very fancy marketing, very glossy marketing, rise quickly, but then crash and burn, just disappear.
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And it’s because they didn’t have the substance, the gravitas, the skills, the capacity, the ethics, the wisdom to back it up.
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In the last 25 years, I’ve also watched
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Truly extraordinary practitioners build thriving, sustainable businesses even when the economy isn’t great on referrals and renewals and reputation.
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And these extraordinary practitioners were able to do this because they helped their clients create real results and transformation.
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and those clients renewed, and those clients told other people, and those clients gave testimonials.
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And all of those results supported the extraordinary practitioner to feel more confident and then be more bold in their marketing.
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Being extraordinary is still the most powerful marketing strategy in the world.
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And I believe that it’s 100% AI proof.
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I really, really do.
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So if you want your business to thrive in the landscape that we’re in right now, not just with AI, but with everything that’s happening in the world and the distraction and the economy and, and, and, and all of the things, the answer isn’t
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a new funnel or a new content strategy or a new niche?
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Most likely it’s not.
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More likely, the answer is become so extraordinary skilled that the depth of your work, number one, is unmistakably irreplaceable human, irreplaceably human.
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And #2, become so extraordinarily skilled that you rise above the noise and the competition in the industry.
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I’ve always said that being an exceptional practitioner isn’t a nice to have, it is an absolute need to have if you want your business to thrive.
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And the good news is that all of the things that we’ve been talking about today, all of the different skills, they’re totally learnable.
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And they’re deepenable.
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If you’ve got those skills, you can deepen them.
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You can get even better at them.
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So I really hope that you walk away from this episode, my friend, feeling hopeful about all of the AI things, knowing that, well, I shouldn’t say all of the AI things.
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I don’t know where AI is going.
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It’s morality, but I mean specifically about feeling hopeful about AI not replacing you.
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So long as you’ve got the skills, so long as you’ve got the capacity, so long as you develop the gravitas, it’s not going to replace you.
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All right.
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If you love this episode, I’d love for you to write me and let me know what touched you about this, what was helpful about this.
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I really, really, really want to know and hear from you.
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Also, if you love this episode,
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Give us a five star rating, give us a great review, and maybe most importantly, share it with a friend who you think could really benefit from it.
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As always, thank you for your time.
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Thank you for being you and the extraordinary human that you are.
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I’ll see you next time.
