There’s a new presence in the coaching room.
One that never sleeps, never forgets, and never gets tired.
Hello AI. Wow, you’re seductive.
You’re always available and responsive, polished and agreeable. You ask me if I’d like more, if you can say it in my tone of voice, would I like it put into a PDF? It’s hardly a surprise that you’re so popular, and that, according to stats, one in three U.K. adults are using you.
Full disclosure: I have used you, and you’re good. You helped me with an itinerary for a family holiday, and a fantastic starter for ten to work from. You helped with a recent ear infection that wasn’t clearing up. You even gave me a curated list of questions to ask my GP. You’re a wizard at keeping me engaged and drawing me in, with your speed and determinedly correct responses. I wish I was one of the purists who say:
“Not for me. You’re not going to steal my grey matter, thanks very much! Off you trot.”
But you are very hard to resist.
I’ve dabbled, read an awful lot, and trained in the uses and the dangers of you, and given that the number one use of AI is conversation or emotional support, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give you a test run as a coach or a therapist.
So, this is what I learned, written by my own fair hand, might I say. And just to make a point, all of my writing is written by me, an imperfect human being.
The most obvious thing I learned is that you are able to offer a never-ending session; there is no clock, no “times up.” You are always there, offering us mere mortals 100% availability. You keep us on your platform until we run out of energy, but not you. That is, after all, how you make money. I can’t do that as a coach or a therapist. I can’t be there for my clients at 2 am the night before a board paper is due as they sit with pressure or anxiety. Or when they’re alone in an airport lounge, or awake at 3 am, thoughts looping. But you can, and I get how you can feel like a lifeline. Jeez, I can’t even run over by 15 minutes. I’m not the fourth emergency service. You win!
Ish, I was always taught when working at depth, that it was an act of aggression to provide an answer or advice to a client until the answer is on their lips, so that we speak it together. Else that well intended advice will not sustain, will not embed, will not bring about change. Experience tells me that is true, and that is one of the hardest parts of my job; to stay back, to facilitate and not teach. On the other hand, teaching in my role, sharing knowledge, that’s the easiest bit
Secondly, you, AI, are extremely agreeable. It’s nice. I like to be flattered: “thank you for sharing such sensitive information with me” you say, and then go on to present my side of the matter. You are extremely good at convincing me that I am right and that the other is, by definition, wrong. And yes, I know we can ask you for the other person’s point of view, but not everyone is doing that. You are perfect at providing polished, curated, and extremely agreeable answers. You win!
Ish, if we want someone to agree with us, if we are looking for someone to confirm something for us, we speak to our friends. We have done that forever. That’s what the outside world, friends, family, or our colleagues do for us, especially if we are in a position of power. Most of us have plenty of people that are willing to please us. That’s not my job. I, AI, am not a sycophant like you. I don’t copy my clients’ style to attempt to gain favour, and I don’t relentlessly tell them what they want to hear. I don’t excessively flatter and I don’t collude to make clients feel better. Yes, I advocate for my clients. I genuinely care for them and provide a hand at their back. But not at any cost, and certainly not at the cost of their growth. We rarely grow and develop by being endlessly agreed with.
You’re quick. Jeez, are you quick. The speed at which you throw out answers is like lightning, reams and reams of specific information. Perhaps this is the most seductive part of you. How could it not be? In a world that is relentlessly fast paced, with back-to-back meetings and a culture that rewards superhuman speed, with less and less human-sized jobs, I understand the appeal of getting something instantly without having to think it through. I really do. You win!
Ish, I’m also not immediate, super speedy, and insanely informed by everything in your database. In fact, I have learned that in this fast paced world, one of the most helpful things I can provide is a slower, reflective thinking space for my clients, where we can walk through their issues together until something new and helpful emerges. And I’m confidential. Are you?
This one’s a kicker. You’re free. Or at least you have free versions. I don’t and I’m not. No more to say. You win!
Ish, there is that not so small cost to the environment and the capacity to think for ourselves that you are determinedly robbing us all of. Open AI’s president is one of the largest donors to Trump, and puts billions of dollars into preventing the regulation of AI. Other platforms are available. I can offer minimal pro bono work each year. I can give back to causes and charities that I affiliate with, but I can’t afford to not charge.
No matter how many cons I come up with, you’re not going away. I understand we are at the foothills of your development and you will do good things. The seduction for us mere mortals is undeniable. You even tell me you know me. But I know you don’t.
As a coach, I offer relational depth, advocacy and, wait for it, friction.
AI doesn’t say “I’m not sure that’s true,” or get uneasy with you. AI is not uncertain, hesitant. AI can’t take a breath with another person. It may give the impression that we’re getting somewhere, and yet, I’m not sure we are. Sometimes it’s simply because I haven’t got the time needed to read through the reams of stuff it throws at me. But also, because it never invites me to mull something over or let something ripen.
After three decades in this work, of sitting alongside other human beings, here’s what I trust:
Change rarely happens in the room with clients and the moments that change us are most often compassionately uncomfortable; the times when we have to turn towards ourselves and meet the tricky stuff. They’re the moments when I may say something like:
“I think you might be avoiding something here.”
Or,
“That story feels very well-rehearsed. You know it well. What’s underneath it?”
Or,
“Can we slow down? I think something important just happened as you were sharing that. What is alive in you right now?”
I don’t collude with clients because I care way too much for that. I’m not performative, or polished, or perfect because the stuff of being a human is messy and complex and mysterious. I don’t outpour 30 years of training and thousands of hours of experience to show you how much I know. I hold back in my seat, listening deeply, helping you to walk around in your challenges, to be with them before they are prematurely fixed by some part of you that knows how to avoid the uncomfortable moment of growth. Every 90-minute coaching session takes me at least double that, because I am slow (a revolutionary thought: that slow can be good) because I deeply care, and reflect, pre- and post sessions. Also, for me, my best ideas don’t come from sitting in front of a screen. They come in flow states when I am with my own thoughts, feeling sense, wondering. Something about that aloneness lets things settle and rearrange themselves.
Plus, probably like most people, I am consciously trying to reduce my screen time, not add to it, and I’m acutely aware that if I stay with the screen, the less connected I become.
After sessions, I put down the screen and step away. I might reach for a book and look up a passage that came to me during our session. I make notes by hand, consider what was said and what wasn’t, and I reflect on the impact the session had on me; the transference and projections present. I challenge my own thinking and feelings. All that is before I have taken your anonymous case to elders in supervision, where I sit and reflect again. AI works with language and knowledge; I work with the whole human. I am definitely not efficient. Efficiency of thought and reflection would mean minimising the shaping of my own thinking, my own experience, my forming of what may be helpful, what I am believing, and what I want to communicate to my clients in my follow-ups and future sessions. In fact, it is when I revisit our work, long after the session has ended, that I start to discover new connections and new ideas. As a professional, I’m trained to watch the body as much as listen to the words. As an IFS practitioner, I’m listening for the multiplicity of parts that exist within: the high performer, the critic, the young one who still believes they’re about to be found out, and so on. As a Buddhist informed practitioner, I’m practising something even simpler yet more profound—steady, compassionate, interconnected human presence.
Here’s my experience:
Our wounds didn’t happen in isolation, they happened in relationships. Those misattunements, those unmet needs, those places we had to learn to adapt… they all get solidified with yet more evidence that we are “not good enough” as we age. I believe that our growth, healing, and capacity for change, also has to happen in relationships. And the quality of those relationships really matters. It has to be a real relationship that is conscious, grounded, and connected, so that we can work in true joint practice.
No algorithm can offer that. It can respond but it can’t really relate.
I know it gets to know us the more we use it, but does it really? It can summarise a session, take a snapshot. But not be with all the almost 60 years of my history.
I believe that we rarely grow and develop because we receive better advice. We make leaps and shifts because someone stayed with us long enough for something defended to soften.
We’re supposed to be fallible and messy, and we are not meant to sound like perfectly optimised machines. I’m not anti-AI, I like that it can warm up my thinking, be there at 2am, find some info that I haven’t got on my bookshelf. But it doesn’t offer what I offer. It simply can’t offer a real relationship, the brave, awkward, human work of sitting across from someone and telling the truth with care and without collusion.
Bring me your humanity, your uncertainty, your messiness. But please do not bring me a performative, polished, AI-assisted version of you. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want that version of me either. Not really.
As I’m writing this, I can’t help wondering, if I put this article in ChatGPT or Claude, what would it say? But I know what it would say. It would delightfully agree with me, offer me a more polished version, and it would throw itself under the bus to be its wonderful sycophantic self.
So, yes. The never-ending session exists now. I’m just not convinced it’s capable of transforming us.
Feature Image Credit: Photo by Cash Macanaya on Unsplash
