A few years ago I was invited into an IT strategy meeting to help think through the future of a chatbot for a service team.

At the time, AI still felt very new and the conversation wasn't about replacing people, it was about helping people work differently.

About half-way through the meeting I had a realization that weighed me down. This wasn't automating factory work anymore, this was knowledge work. And for the first time, I could clearly see technology beginning to do work that had always belonged to people like me.

I left that meeting thinking about everyone else. What leaders would need and what employees would need. How organizations were going to adapt. 

That was familiar territory because I'd already spent years helping people navigate change. But somewhere along the way, the question quietly changed and instead of asking what everyone else would need...

I started wondering what this meant for me.

Not just my job but for what I considered my contributions. Was I going to be relevant any more. Could the work I'd spent decades building still matter? Would the things that made me valuable still matter? If knowledge work was changing this quickly, where did that leave people like me?

That question had staying power but one thing I've learned since then is that many of us are much better at helping other people navigate uncertainty than we are at admitting we're standing in it ourselves.

We stay busy solving problems, leading projects, supporting our teams, reading another article, taking another course.

Sometimes all of those things are valuable.

Sometimes they're also a way of avoiding a harder question.

"What does this change mean for me?"

The turning point wasn't deciding that I had all the answers. It was deciding not to look away.

I could have distanced myself from AI because it felt uncomfortable but instead, I leaned in.

Not because I believed technology would replace people but because I believed understanding it would help me understand something even more important: what remains uniquely human, and how I wanted to evolve alongside it.

One Thing This Week

What is one question you always ask others? Turn that question around and then answer it for yourself. 

If you're helping your team prepare for what's changing, how are you preparing? If you're encouraging others to stay curious, where have you stopped being curious?

Notice where your advice to others might also be the advice you need to hear.

The irony isn't that AI made me rethink my career.

It's that it reminded me I needed to keep doing the very thing I'd spent my career helping others do.

Adapt.

This time, I couldn't stand on the sidelines as the guide.

I had to become a participant too.

If you've been spending more time thinking about everyone else's future than your own, maybe this is your invitation to pause and ask yourself the harder question.

What does this season of change make possible for you?

Warmly,

Heather

Anchored in Possibility™ | The future belongs to those who know who they are when everything changes.