When was the last time someone asked you a question and genuinely wanted to know the answer?

You can feel the difference, can’t you? When someone is truly engaged their inquiry is fueled by curiosity.

It is quite different from performing curiosity.

I expect that most of us have experienced both.

What performance curiosity looks like:

• A colleague asks how you’re doing while looking at their phone.
• Someone at a networking event asks what you do and begins scanning the room halfway through your answer.
• A leader asks for feedback and immediately explains why the feedback isn’t quite right.

Then, every once in a while, someone asks you a question and stays engaged. They actually listen. Then, they ask another question based on what you actually said. As a result, something shifts.

You feel interesting to them.

That is a deeply human experience. And I believe it is becoming a leadership advantage.

We are entering an era of extraordinary answers.

Sure, AI can answer questions with astonishing speed.

But, the more interesting leadership skill may increasingly be knowing what to ask based on what you know about the person and what’s going on in their world.

Last week I mentioned the thought leadership of Andrés Tapia who has been making a similar distinction in his recent work on Human Intelligence + Artificial Intelligence. One of the human capacities he highlights is our ability to ask better questions rather than simply knowing more answers.

That idea resonates deeply with my coaching experience.

The quality of a conversation often changes completely when someone asks a better question.

Consider the difference between:

Did the project go well?

and

What surprised you about leading that project?

Or:

Do you like your job?

versus

Which parts of your work make you feel most alive right now?

Or:

What do you want to do next?

versus

Who are you becoming, and what kind of work would allow more of that person to emerge?

The first question in each pair may produce information. The second may produce insight.

Curiosity fuels the second question in each pair, and more than likely you do not have any idea what the answer will be. That creates room and expands possibilities. It also creates ideal conditions to deepen the relationship and make it more valuable for both people.

As a master coach, I have learned repeatedly that the most impactful question is rarely the cleverest one. Instead, it’s often the question that creates enough space for another person to truly hear themselves.

This requires me to resist a very human temptation: wanting to demonstrate what I already know.

I know that leaders face the same temptation and even feel pressure to prove themselves. Experience gives us pattern recognition, which is valuable. But, experience can also make us prematurely certain. This sounds like…

1. I’ve seen this before.
2. I know what’s happening.
3. I know what she needs.
4. I know why he’s reacting that way.

It’s true that sometimes we do know. But, sometimes our certainty prevents us from discovering what we don’t know and creates a blind spot.

I’m observing that AI makes this tension even more interesting.

Imagine preparing for a difficult conversation with a team member. You give your AI agent the context. It analyzes the situation and suggests several reasons the person may be struggling.

That is certainly helpful. But what happens when you enter the actual conversation convinced that one of those AI-generated explanations is correct?

You’ve arrived with a hypothesis rather than curiosity.

The person sitting across from you may have an entirely different story.

Human beings are wonderfully inconvenient that way. We’re complex. Understanding us requires context and acceptance that we are full of contradictions. We often surprise each other.

Curiosity keeps another person from becoming a data point.

My invitation to you is to try replacing certainty with curiousity-infused inquiry.

Before an important conversation, ask yourself:

1. What am I assuming about this person?
2. What might I not understand yet?
3. What question have I been afraid to ask?
4. What would I ask if my goal were understanding rather than agreement?
5. How can I listen to their answer without immediately preparing my response?

That final one is harder than it sounds. You may recall that last month I wrote about Presence.

You can think of curiosity as Presence in Motion.

Presence says:

I’m here.

Curiosity adds:

And I want to understand you.

That combination changes relationships.

It changes teams.

It changes coaching conversations.

It changes leadership.

Curiosity is also an act of humility.

It acknowledges that another person possesses an interior world you cannot fully know.

1. Their experiences.
2. Their motivations.
3. Their fears.
4. Their hopes.

Their interpretation of the very same event you experienced differently.

AI may help us understand patterns of human behavior at extraordinary scale.

A meaningful relationship still asks us to understand this human being, sitting in front of us, right now. And that requires something more personal: a combination of Attention, Humility, and curiosity.

Next week, I will explore what grows when we practice that combination consistently: Trust.

A question to sit with this week:

What conversation in your life might change if you entered it with one less assumption and one more curiosity-fueled question?

Can AI help you identify the right person to know? Sure.

It can research their background, tell you what you have in common, draft an introduction, suggest what to say when you meet, and remind you when it’s time to follow up.

That’s incredibly useful. But it can’t actually build the relationship for you.

Last month, I talked with you (via this newsletter) about the qualities I believe become more valuable as artificial intelligence becomes more capable: Presence, Discernment, Wisdom, Embodied knowing, and Meaning.

This month, I want to take our conversation somewhere I believe is equally important:

Our relationships.

I’ve spent more than two decades coaching leaders through promotions, leadership growth, career transitions, organizational complexity and the inevitable moments when they are asking “What’s next?”

One thing has remained remarkably consistent throughout those years: Careers move forward due to relationships… who you know, who thinks of you, who guides you and tells it to you straight, etc. Here’s what that looks like…

• Someone sees potential in you.
• Someone tells you the truth you need to hear.
• Someone recommends you for the opportunity.
• Someone gives you context you couldn’t have found in the organizational chart.
• Someone advocates for you in a room you aren’t in.
• Someone introduces you to the person who changes the trajectory of your career.

We tend to call all of this networking. I think that word is far too small for what is actually happening.

Your network is made of human beings.

That sounds obvious. But, our behavior sometimes suggests otherwise. We tend to be too transactional, especially when we’re busy. What does that look like in practice?

We collect connections. We send the obligatory follow-up. We comment on the post. We add the person to our contacts. We reach out when we need something. And technology makes every one of those actions easier.

AI can make those actions even more efficient. And yes, efficiency is useful. But…

Relationships are something different. A valuable relationship requires:

1. Curiosity.
2. Attention.
3. Reciprocity.
4. Trust.
5. Memory.
6. Generosity.
7. Time.

Perhaps most importantly, valuable relationships require a willingness to engage with another person without constantly asking, consciously or unconsciously: What can this person do for me?

My former colleague Andrés Tapia has been writing and speaking about the relationship between Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence, and I’ve been following his thought leadership on this quite closely. One idea in his recent work that resonates deeply with me is that the opportunity isn’t necessarily to pit HI versus AI. Instead, it is understanding what each does well and being far more intentional about developing the human capacities technology cannot replace.

I believe relationships belong squarely in that territory because relationships contain intelligence.

I wrote last month that information doesn’t only live in our minds.

1. Our bodies contain information.
2. Our lived experience contains information.
3. Our intuition contains information.
4. Our relationships contain information, too.

Think about someone who has known you professionally for ten years. They have witnessed you succeed. They’ve likely seen you struggle. They may know very well what energizes you. Perhaps they remember what you were like before the promotion, acquisition, layoff, career pivot, marriage, divorce, illness, parenthood, or whatever else has shaped you. They may recognize something about you that no AI system could infer from the professional information you feed it.

That kind of relationship information, from truly knowing a person, develops over time. It cannot be downloaded or manufactured via the digital ether by AI.

So, how do we become more intentional about relationships when your busy schedules are pushing us to be transactional?

I encourage you to think about your relationships in a few different categories.

1. Who knows you deeply? These are the people who understand more than your résumé.
2. Who challenges you? These are the people willing to tell you something you may not want to hear.
3. Who expands you? These people expose you to ideas, industries, cultures, perspectives and possibilities outside your usual world.
4. Who do you invest in? Our relationships ecosystem can become quite out of balance when we’re always the beneficiary.
5. Who have you lost touch with? Some of the most valuable relationships in your life may not need to be created. They may simply need to be rekindled and intentionally nurtured.

You can consider this a relationship inventory, and I believe it matters enormously in the age of AI. Why? While technology can help us maintain relationships, it cannot become a substitute for actively engaging in them, human to human.

1. Use AI to prepare for a conversation.
2. Use it to research someone before you meet.
3. Use it to remember the details you don’t want to forget.
4. Use it to free yourself from administrative work so you have more capacity for people.

Then do something deeply human with the time you reclaim.

1. Call someone.
2. Have lunch.
3. Ask a better question.
4. Mentor someone.
5. Reconnect without an agenda.
6. Listen long enough to learn something you weren’t expecting.

Your greatest career opportunities will likely continue to come through people. But the deeper opportunity is becoming the kind of person with whom others genuinely want to build something.

That distinction matters.

Over the next few weeks, I will explore with you how we can all engage our most important relationships with greater intentionality.

Next week, I begin with something deceptively simple: Curiosity.

A question to sit with this week:

Who in your professional life deserves more of your attention, not because you need something from them, but because the relationship itself matters?

Maybe we’re asking the wrong question about all these AI technologies.

The question I hear everywhere is: What will AI replace?

• Which jobs?
• Which skills?
• Which tasks?
• Which industries?

Those are important questions. But after spending this month thinking and writing about what it means to leverage what is irreducibly human about us in the age of AI, I’m increasingly interested in another question:

What becomes more valuable precisely because it is irreducibly human?

That question opens a very different conversation. Here’s where I’ve landed:

Human potential is larger than productivity.

For decades, we’ve talked about human potential largely in terms of output.

1. What can you achieve?
2. How quickly can you advance?
3. How much can you produce?
4. What can you build?
5. How much responsibility can you handle?

AI is going to challenge some of those assumptions because machines will increasingly outperform us at tasks, we once considered evidence of exceptional human capability.

Perhaps this moment gives us an opportunity to remember that human potential was never simply about how much we could produce. I invite you to pause and consider the moments in your life and career that have changed you most indelibly.

When I think about the most meaningful moments, I’ve witnessed in more than twenty years of coaching, very few involved someone finding the perfect tactical answer.

They were human moments:

• A leader finally having the conversation they’d been avoiding and feeling relief about the result.
• Someone recognizing that the career they’d spent years building no longer represented who they had become.
• A mid-career leader seeing their own potential differently.
• A leader realizing that their need to have the answer was preventing their team from growing.
• Someone deciding that the next chapter of their career needed to support their life rather than consume it.

Those human moments involve courage, trust, self-awareness, relationships, meaning, and growth.

Technology doesn’t diminish the value of those things. I think it increases it.

As we all evolve forward together in this era of AI, I believe that how we cultivate and leverage our relationships may become an even greater career advantage.

That means that relationship development is one area where I believe we’re going to need to pay particular attention.

AI makes the transactional side of relationships more effortless. Tasks like:

1. Sending an email.
2. Generating a follow-up.
3. Draft the networking message.
4. Research the person.
5. Optimize the outreach.

But relationships aren’t transactions. The people who advocate for you when you’re not in the room are not doing it because you sent the perfectly optimized LinkedIn message.

They do it because they know you.

They trust you.

You’ve helped them.

You’ve shown up.

You’ve built something together.

As you advance your career in an increasingly technological world, don’t neglect the deeply human network around you.

Here’s my advice for what you need to do in an irreducibly human way:

1. Build relationships before you need them.
2. Be curious about people without needing something from them.
3. Help others advance.
4. Have conversations without an agenda.

That’s not networking. That’s being human.

It’s not the only human capacity we tend to overlook at work. There’s an entire intelligence most of us were never taught to trust.

Your body. Your heart. Your intuition. Your creativity.

This is the part of you capable of making an unexpected connection between seemingly unrelated ideas.

The part that feels another person’s grief.

The part that recognizes beauty.

The part that laughs.

The part that loves.

The part that knows something matters before you can articulate why.

For thousands of years, wisdom traditions have explored the enormous interior landscape of being human.

We’re entering an era of extraordinary technological intelligence. Perhaps it’s also time to become more curious about our own.

Staying human doesn’t mean resisting AI. I want to be very clear about this.

I am not interested in a humans-versus-machines conversation.

Technology offers extraordinary possibilities.

I want leaders to use them. Experiment. Learn. Become more effective.

Let AI take work off your plate that doesn’t require your uniquely human capabilities. But use some of that reclaimed capacity to become more human, not simply more productive.

1. Have the conversation.
2. Take the walk.
3. Mentor someone.
4. Think deeply.
5. Listen.
6. Create.
7. Build relationships.
8. Notice what your body is telling you.
9. Decide what enough looks like.
10. Ask what you want your career to make possible for your life.

The Irreducible Human Advantage:

This month has invited you to explore a single important question: what’s actually irreducible about us? Not our output. Not our optimization. Our potential, our relationships, our interior wisdom.

The leaders who thrive in the age of AI won’t necessarily be those who resist technology.

Nor will they be the ones who surrender themselves to it.

I believe they’ll be the ones who can hold both. Technologically fluent. Deeply human.

Able to harness extraordinary external intelligence while remaining grounded in their own internal wisdom.

That’s the leadership territory I want to continue exploring with you over the coming months.

And perhaps that’s the opportunity in front of all of us:

As our machines become more intelligent, how much more intentional can we become about being human?

I know I’m not alone in seeing that one of the greatest risks of AI isn’t that it will give us bad answers… it’s that it will give us very convincing ones.

Discerning what to use and believe from our favorite AI agents creates an entirely different leadership problem. Especially among younger professionals who simply don’t have as much lived experienced yet to draw on.

Most experienced leaders have spent years learning how to make decisions amid uncertainty. How? The old-fashioned way…

1. You gather the information.
2. You consult the experts.
3. You consider the consequences.
4. You check-in with your gut.
5. And eventually, you make the call.

Now we have another extraordinarily powerful voice at the table. These AI-powered systems can synthesize information, challenge assumptions, model scenarios and surface possibilities we may never have considered.

I use these tools myself, have a lot of fun with them, and see tremendous potential in them. But there is one capability I don’t want any leader to outsource: discernment.

Advice from a machine isn’t wisdom.

Let’s make this personal: about your next career move.

Imagine you’re considering leaving an executive role. You decide to plug all your considerations into your favorite AI agent, including:

• Your compensation.
• Your experience.
• Your goals.
• The new opportunity.
• Your current company’s trajectory.
• Your financial situation.
• Perhaps even your personality assessment.

It produces a thoughtful analysis and concludes that you should take the job. What happens next?

Do you take it?

I hope not.

I hope you listen.

Then I hope you get quiet with yourself. Remember what I pointed out a couple weeks ago: humans have interiority, embodiment, and the capacity to make meaning.

I’ve worked with numerous leaders whose career decisions looked obvious from the outside… whether it’s a promotion that seems like the logical next step, or the prestigious organization that others would agree is the best next place to move, or a decision to stay that aligns with others’ expectations. And yet, when we slow down the conversation to listen inward with sharper discernment, a deeper knowing emerges that points somewhere else.

More often than not, the body knows before the analysis points us in a direction. What exactly is revealed when we turn our attention inward and ask a question? We may notice:

• A tightening.
• An unexpected sense of relief.
• A quickening of energy when discussing one possibility and depletion when discussing another.

I don’t view these signals as irrational distractions from good decision-making. I view them as critical data points that are irreducibly human.

Most of us have been trained to privilege the mind. Western business culture especially tends to reward what we can quantify and explain.

I understand why. I earned my MBA from Kellogg. I’ve coached hundreds of leaders with advanced business and financial degrees. I value analysis too.

I’ve also spent the past 20+ years studying and applying practices informed by neuroscience, somatic coaching, meditation and wisdom traditions from Asia to the Andes.

These explorations have taught me something equally important: Human intelligence is larger than cognition alone.

1. Your mind contains information. So does your body.
2. Your relationships contain information.
3. Your lived experience contains information.
4. Your values contain information.
5. Your intuition contains information.

Discernment is our ability to bring those sources of information together and assess what is most valuable and relevant to the question at hand. Then take ownership of it, what, and how we use the suggested information. AI can advise you. But it cannot be you.

This becomes particularly important with career decisions.

Your preferred AI agent may tell you which role maximizes your projected earnings. But, while it can compare two career trajectories, it cannot tell you whether you want to miss dinner with your children four nights a week. And while it can identify what successful executives commonly do, it cannot feel what happens inside you when you imagine living out each of those career trajectories. It also cannot determine what success means to you.

That’s where I want to raise another yellow caution flag and ask leaders to stay vigilant: Use the information provided by an AI agent as a powerful input.

Just do not quietly promote it from advisor to authority.

 A suggested practice for cultivating discernment:

The next time you’re making a meaningful decision, try asking three different questions:

1. What does the data tell me? Look at the evidence. Use the technology. Ask the AI agent to challenge your assumptions.
2. What do the people I trust see? Human beings can recognize patterns in us that we sometimes can’t see ourselves.
3. What do I learn when I get quiet?

Here’s how to actually do the “get quiet” thing:

1. Step away from the screen. All the screens.
2. Walk.
3. Breathe.
4. Pray or meditate.
5. Notice your body
6. Give yourself enough space for your own wisdom to enter the conversation.

So where does discernment fit into all this? The goal isn’t to reject technology. It’s to remain the author of your decisions while using every resource available to you.

In a world overflowing with intelligence, wisdom is the scarcer, irreducibly human resource.

I believe leaders who cultivate discernment will have an extraordinary advantage.

• They’ll know how to use AI agents without surrendering their agency.
• They’ll know the difference between a compelling recommendation and the right decision.
• Most importantly, they’ll remember that a flourishing career isn’t something an algorithm can define for them.

Next week, I’ll close this month’s series with perhaps the biggest question of all:

If machines continue becoming more capable, what makes us irreplaceable?

For now, I’d love for you to consider this:Where in your life or career are you looking outside yourself for an answer you may already know inside?

You can be in the meeting, answer every question correctly, and still not really be there.

I see this more often than you might imagine.

1. A leader is listening to a colleague while simultaneously thinking about the next meeting.
2. An executive is on Zoom while their eyes dart over to read the Slack messages that appear in the corner of the screen.
3. Someone is having dinner with their family while mentally composing a text message they plan to fire off the moment they can sneak into the pantry.

Our bodies are in one place. Our attention is somewhere else. And now we have AI promising to help us move even faster.

I’m genuinely excited about many of those possibilities. However, I think there’s a uniquely human leadership advantage emerging alongside them:

• The ability to be fully present with another human being.

Presence has become surprisingly rare and that’s what makes is far more valuable than any commodity we trade on the open markets.

I’ve coached more than a thousand people from nearly 30 nationalities over the past two decades, and one thing I’ve learned is that people can tell when you’re really with them.

They may not have language for it. But they feel it.

They feel the difference between someone waiting for their turn to speak and someone genuinely listening.

They feel when a leader is curious rather than performing curiosity.

They know when you’ve entered the conversation with an answer already formed. And they remember the rare person who makes them feel truly heard.

There are often moments in coaching when I have an idea of where I think we might go. Then my client says something, or I notice a hesitation, or perhaps even a change in their energy… and the entire conversation shifts.

Had I been focusing my attention on my next question instead of deeply tuning into them with multi-level listening, I would miss how my client is evolving micro-second to micro-second.

These moments continually remind me that some of our most valuable information doesn’t arrive as an external data point; it arrives through our attention.

So, what exactly happens when AI enters the conversation?

• AI technologies can now take notes for us.
• They can summarize meetings.
• And suggest responses.
• They can even help us prepare for difficult conversations.

Wonderful. Use these technologies in these ways.

But notice what they’re actually doing: they’re giving you information about the conversation, not putting you inside it.

It’s important that we don’t confuse having better information about an interaction with actually being with someone: those are not the same thing.

The more technology handles the transactional parts of work, the more valuable I believe genuine human attention will become.

Think about the leader you trusted most in your career. Was it because they always had the fastest answer? Or was there something about how you felt around them?

Perhaps they listened.

Perhaps they challenged you without diminishing you.

Perhaps you knew they saw potential in you before you could see it yourself.

That’s presence.

If you’re still present and with me, I invite you to consider an old practice for these very modern problems we’re navigating…

Many Eastern contemplative traditions have spent thousands of years studying something we’re suddenly struggling to protect: ATTENTION.

The practice is deceptively simple.

1. Be here.
2. Notice when your mind wanders off.
3. Return.
4. Notice again.
5. Return again.

This is a common way of anchoring the mind in a meditation practice. But it’s also relevant to leadership presence.

Before your next important conversation, try something very simple.

1. Put your phone away.
2. Close the other tabs.
3. Take three slow breaths.
4. Feel your feet on the floor.
5. And decide that, for the next however many minutes, there is nowhere else you need to be.
6. Then listen.
7. When your mind wanders, return.
8. Listen again.
9. And again.
10. Listen for what the other person is actually trying to tell you.

And don’t just listen with your ears: listen with every cell of your being.

We’ve spent years talking about attention as a productivity issue.

I think we need to start viewing presence as the critical essence of attention, and as the irreducibly human taproot of relationships and leadership. Why? Because…

• Presence builds trust.
• Presence helps us notice complexity.
• Presence gives intuition and embodied wisdom enough quiet to register.
• And presence allows another human being to feel seen.

No algorithm can outsource that responsibility for you. As the machines become faster, I don’t think our job is to race against them.

Our opportunity may be to cultivate something entirely different: human DEPTH.

Last week, I wrote about why our humanity may become our greatest leadership advantage.

Presence is one piece of that irreducibly human advantage. Next week, I will explore another:

Discernment.

When intelligent tools can give us increasingly convincing answers, how do we decide which answers deserve our trust?

Until then, here’s something to notice:When you’re with another person this week, are you actuallywiththem?