Something I read this week stopped me mid-scroll: “The hardest thing AI is replacing is not software — it’s your identity.”
When I moved from 1:1 coaching with neurodivergent young adults into AI trainings for corporate teams, I caught myself trying to prove I was still “corporate enough” — that my years out of software sales hadn’t made me irrelevant.
What freed me was realizing that was exactly the wrong thing to prove.
I’ve spent almost a decade sitting with people who struggled to feel successful in a traditional academic setting. That experience — understanding what avoidance and overwhelm actually feel like from the inside — is exactly the lens that lets me see what’s happening when AI adoption stalls.
Recent research from Fractional Insights and Ferrazzi Greenlight puts a number on it: 4 in 10 employees strongly believe in AI’s business value while simultaneously fearing what it means for their own relevance. And here’s the part that surprises people — those employees are often using AI more, not less. But when the fear of becoming irrelevant is running the show, fight, flight, or freeze isn’t far behind. And you can’t truly adopt AI in the innovative way organizations are asking for when your nervous system is in survival mode.
It’s the student who reviews the study guide over and over instead of doing the harder work of actually committing the material to memory. It looks like studying. It isn’t.
When I stopped trying to be the AI expert in the room and leaned into being the executive functioning skills expert, I found the piece of the adoption conversation that most AI trainings leave out.
Because avoidance and over-reliance often aren’t opposite problems — they’re the same discomfort wearing different clothes. The discomfort of uncertainty. Of not yet knowing how to move forward. Of sitting with an unformed thought long enough to make it yours.
Emotional regulation is what keeps people in their prefrontal cortex — able to think, evaluate, and engage — rather than reacting from their amygdala. And impulse control is what makes it possible to pause and determine your own thoughts before asking AI for its thoughts. That’s not a rule against using AI. It’s how you stay connected to the work — and keep the work yours.
Those are executive functioning skills. And they’re exactly what preserve cognitive health as AI changes how we work.
That’s the training that’s missing. And it turns out, it was the expertise I’d been building all along.
