What ChatGPT Can’t See

Sep 11

8 min read

As answers become infinitely available, perhaps what we need most is not another answer.

“Do you ever worry that AI will replace you as a life coach?”

Someone asked me this recently during an interview.

It was a fair question.

It has become incredibly easy to turn to ChatGPT whenever we have a problem we want to talk through. We ask whether we should leave our job, why we keep repeating the same pattern in relationships, how to become more confident, what our strengths are, or what we should do next.

And often, the answer is remarkably good.

I know because I use it too.

I like experimenting with AI, both personally and in my work. Sometimes I give clients exercises to better understand their personality, talents and values. We might have the results of an MBTI or Enneagram assessment, reflections from previous exercises, things they feel naturally drawn to, and things they are good at but don’t necessarily enjoy.

Put all that information together and interesting patterns begin to emerge. AI is excellent at this. It can hold a huge amount of information at once and make connections that might otherwise take us much longer to see.

So when I was asked whether AI would replace me, my instinct wasn’t to defend coaching by dismissing what AI can do.

Quite the opposite.

The more I use it, the more impressed I am by it.

But the more I use it, the more aware I also become of what it cannot see.

The answer depends on the question

There is something I’ve noticed when using ChatGPT that I find both fascinating and, at times, unsettling.

Its answer can change considerably depending on the angle from which I ask the question.

If I describe a situation already leaning toward one interpretation, AI will often explore the situation from within that interpretation. If I return later and frame the same situation differently, I can receive an equally convincing answer pointing somewhere else.

This isn’t necessarily a flaw. It is, in part, what we are asking AI to do: respond to the information and perspective we give it.

The problem is that, when it comes to our own lives, we are rarely neutral narrators.

We come to a problem carrying our fears, assumptions, past experiences and the stories we have already constructed about what is happening. Sometimes we aren’t actually looking for an answer. We are looking for confirmation of the answer we already want.

And we don’t always know we are doing it.

Imagine asking: How can I become confident enough to finally leave my job?

There is already an entire story embedded in that question.

That leaving is the right decision. That confidence is what is missing. That becoming more confident needs to happen before leaving.

Perhaps all of that is true.

But perhaps the most interesting conversation begins by questioning the question itself.

What makes you believe you need to become more confident before you can leave?

Or:

What are you hoping leaving will give you that you don’t have today?

Or perhaps neither.

Perhaps something happens while you are answering that takes the conversation somewhere completely unexpected.

That is one of the things I love most about coaching: I don’t necessarily know where the conversation is going either.

My role isn’t to validate the story a client brings me, nor to contradict it for the sake of challenging them.

It is to stay curious enough to notice what might be hiding underneath it.

AI remembers. Sometimes I need to forget.

One of AI’s great strengths is its capacity to hold information and recognize patterns.

Strangely, one of the things I value most in myself as a coach is the ability to temporarily do the opposite.

Before each session, I make a conscious effort to become present and grounded. I try to put aside what I think I already know about the person who is about to sit in front of me.

I don’t want to meet someone exclusively through what they told me last week. Or through their Enneagram type. Or an exercise we did three months ago. Or even through an interpretation I formed about them that may have been completely valid at the time.

Because people change.

Sometimes very quickly.

And sometimes the most important thing happening in a session is precisely the thing that doesn’t fit with everything we thought we knew.

A hesitation before answering a seemingly simple question.

A sudden shift in energy.

Someone smiling while talking about something painful.

A sentence delivered with certainty that somehow doesn’t feel certain at all.

A subject they keep moving away from.

Sometimes I can’t immediately explain what I have noticed. I simply sense that we should stay there a little

longer.

And very often, that is where something important is hiding.

AI can analyse what we tell it.

A person sitting across from us can sometimes notice what we aren’t telling them.

Understanding ourselves is not the same as changing

I think this is where we sometimes overestimate the power of insight.

We assume that if we understand ourselves well enough, change will naturally follow.

Take confidence.

There are countless ways to understand why you might lack it. You can identify your strengths, examine your childhood, understand your personality, challenge limiting beliefs, analyse your attachment style, take an Enneagram test, journal about your fears.

You can ask ChatGPT to put all of it together.

And the analysis might be brilliant.

But you can understand exactly why you lack confidence and still not feel confident.

Because knowing something about yourself and experiencing yourself differently are not the same thing.

The most powerful moments in coaching aren’t usually the ones in which I give someone an exceptionally clever piece of advice.

In fact, I don’t believe my job is to have the answers.

Ultimately, the client holds the answers. My role is to help them access them.

Sometimes that happens through a question. Sometimes through something I mirror back. Sometimes through silence.

And sometimes a client says something they have probably thought a hundred times before — but this time, they hear themselves saying it.

Something lands.

There is a pause.

Real breakthroughs are often intuitive.

They are not necessarily the moments when you understand something new, but when something you may have understood intellectually for a long time suddenly feels true.

Nobody has convinced you of anything.

You have recognized something in yourself.

Perhaps what we need most is to be seen

This has made me think a lot about confidence in particular.

We often approach confidence as something we can build by collecting enough evidence about ourselves.

Know your strengths. Understand your personality. Improve your weaknesses. Accumulate accomplishments.

All of that matters.

But I think confidence also grows through something much simpler and more human:Being seen.And eventually, learning to see yourself.

Perhaps one of the most underrated things that happens during coaching is that, for an hour, another human being is paying extraordinarily close attention to you.

Think about how rare that actually is.

Someone isn’t waiting for their turn to speak. They aren’t checking their phone. They aren’t deciding what they would do if they were you. They aren’t trying to reassure you because your discomfort makes them uncomfortable.

They aren’t reducing you to a personality type or immediately searching for a solution.

They are simply there.

Listening. Noticing. Asking. Reflecting.

Holding enough space for you to begin noticing yourself.

There is something powerful about being witnessed in that way.

Sometimes another person sees courage in you before you can see it yourself. Or notices the way your entire energy changes when you talk about something you love. Or reflects a contradiction you couldn’t hear while it was happening inside your own head.

And eventually, if the process works, you don’t need that person to see it for you anymore.

You begin to see it too.

We don’t suffer from a shortage of information

There is also a much more practical reason coaching works: Accountability.

I have been thinking about this lately because it is remarkably similar to exercise.

Most of us already know that exercise is good for us. We can find thousands of free workouts online. We can ask AI to design a training programme tailored to our goals in seconds.

And yet paying for a gym membership, booking a class, or knowing a personal trainer is waiting for us at 8 a.m. somehow makes us much more likely to show up.

The information wasn’t the missing piece.

Showing up was.

I think coaching often works in the same way.

You are creating an appointment not just with your coach, but with yourself.

With the career change you have been thinking about for three years.

With the conversation you keep avoiding.

With the idea you insist you don’t have time for.

With the person you say you want to become.

A coach cannot make any of those things happen for you.

But week after week, the process asks:

Are you still choosing this?

And sometimes that is exactly the structure we need to turn an intention into a life.

What happens between two people

I also think we underestimate how much of coaching happens not in the method, the exercise or even the question, but between the two people in the room.

Over time, there is trust.

There is shared language. There are moments of resistance and vulnerability. There is laughter. Sometimes there are tears.

There are things I begin to understand without needing the full explanation, and things the client becomes brave enough to explore because they know they will not be judged for finding the answer.

I bring my attention, intuition, experience and intention. My life energy, if you will.

My client brings their story, contradictions, fears, humour, courage and desire for something to be different.

And together, something exists that neither of us could create alone.

Maybe synergy is the right word. Maybe connection. Maybe it is simply the effect of two human beings giving their full attention to the possibility that one of them can change.

Whatever we call it, I believe it matters.

Not because human beings possess some magical wisdom AI will never acquire.

But because we affect one another.

We borrow courage from one another. We feel when someone believes us, and when they believe in us. We recognize ourselves in other people’s reactions. We regulate, challenge, inspire and surprise one another.

We don’t grow only through information.

We grow through relationship.