AI Didn’t Save Me. It Exposed Me.

Thinking with AI as a mirror

When Everything Looked Clear

For a long time, I thought I was doing everything right. I was a sales director. The income was good. I worked with smart people and hit my targets. If you were looking at the dashboard of my career, every metric flashed green.

But beneath the surface, something felt off, and I couldn't shake it, as if I was meant to do more than optimize pipelines and polish pitches.

I had started coaching on the side. I’m a certified CTI and NLP coach, working with mindset, behavior, and the strange ways we often sabotage what we say we want. That was where my spark lived. But I still didn’t see what any of it had to do with AI.

My First Prompt

Then one day, I opened a chatbot. I rolled my eyes, typed a quick question, and waited for the mediocrity I expected. Instead, I got something surprisingly good.

Initially, it was purely practical. The kind of productivity bump that feels like a legal upper. Summarize that meeting? Done. Draft that follow-up? Already sent. Ten options for a headline? Delivered in five seconds. It was like hiring a tireless intern with no breaks and zero ego.

The Mirror Effect

But a few weeks in, the buzz wore off, not because it stopped working, but because I started paying more attention to how I was using it and what it was revealing about myself. AI didn’t just do my work faster. It mirrored the quality of my thinking. When I gave it a vague prompt, it returned an ambiguous and fairly useless response. When I asked something sharp, filled with “uncomfortable” context, it met me there, with ideas I hadn’t seen, language I hadn’t considered, patterns I hadn’t noticed.

That’s when it stopped feeling like a productivity tool and started acting like a kind of “honest” mirror. One that didn’t flinch, didn’t flatter, and didn’t let me look away. It wasn’t making me smarter. It was making it harder to ignore how often I wasn’t thinking at all.

That realization didn’t just shift how I worked—it changed how I coached. Before, I saw myself as the one asking hard questions, holding space, and stretching the frame. But once I started using AI in my prep and eventually, in my sessions, it became an unexpected partner. Not because it gave better advice. It didn’t. However, it revealed blind spots that neither I nor my client had anticipated.

Coaching With AI in the Room

Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, we’d drop a “stuck” point into GPT, such as when a client kept saying they’d start a side project but, week after week, found reasons to delay. We had already discussed fear of visibility and time management. However, when we fed the context into GPT, it mentioned things like perfectionism, procrastination, and a fear of being seen, prompting the client to pause. Hearing it from another voice, even a machine, somehow made it land differently.

What came back wasn’t perfect, but it was new. Fresh angles. Psychological patterns. Alternative framings. It opened up thinking that had gone stale. One client described it as “talking to my future self.” That landed. I know some coaches call this cheating. I don’t. I think not using it, consciously, critically, and creatively, genuinely, is shortsighted.

Futurebraining

That insight eventually turned into a method we now call Futurebraining. Not a gimmick or a rebrand, but a response to what we saw again and again: people outsourcing their thinking to AI, when they should be using it to deepen it.

Yes, AI can write your emails and polish your slides. That’s convenient. However, it comes with a critical cost: the loss of friction; those uphill stretches, like sliding up a mountain on touring skis before you get to ski down. It’s the effort, uncertainty, and resistance that force you to confront your thinking. And friction is where clarity lives. Writing isn’t typing. It’s thinking. If you offload the hard part too early, you lose more than time; you lose the insight that comes from wrestling with your thoughts.

Faster Isn’t Always Smarter

That’s the trap most people fall into with AI. They use it to do more of the same, just faster. But if “the same” is confused, reactive, or shallow? Congratulations—you’ve just automated the wrong thing. I fell into that, too. I got faster. I got leaner. And I got emptier. So I stopped and slowed down. Started using AI not to ship more, but to think better. That’s when it became valuable again.

Now, AI isn’t just a background tool in my workflow; it's also an active presence in my coaching. I use it to test logic, surface assumptions, and map blind spots. Sometimes live, sometimes in prep, always in the post. It’s become a method of thinking, not just a means of execution.

The Real Work

AI won’t save you. It won’t fix your process or fill in your blind spots for you. What it will do is expose how much of your thinking was reactive, performative, or shallow. If your questions are lazy, your output will be too. If you want shortcuts, it’ll offer them gladly. And you’ll get dumber, faster. But if you approach it with honesty, resilience, and the courage to examine your patterns and ask better questions, it will meet you there. And it will push you much further than you expected.

So don’t start with the tools. Start with the question: What kind of thinker do I want to become? Then open a chat and start writing. Not to go faster, but to go deeper.