The Irreplaceable Asset: Owning Your Value in the Age of AI | EP 589

There's a concept circulating right now that stopped me mid-scroll, and it's the most precise language I've found yet for something founders at this level have been navigating for a while. This episode is about owning what's irreplaceable in you, especially right now. Full show notes, transcript, and chapters at sheilabotelho.com/589

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Transcript

Why Expertise Feels Shaky Now

Sheila 0:01

When you've built real expertise over decades and suddenly the landscape shifts around you, it can get very uncomfortable and raise many questions in your mind, to say the least. This episode is about what it actually means to own your value right now, the one that no one can automate or replace. I've worked over the years with highly credentialed leaders and entrepreneurs across industries, and I'm finding this conversation keeps coming up. So today I'm sharing a new way of looking at these times we find ourselves in. So stay with me to the end because the last thing I share might be the piece that you've not considered yet. Hi, welcome to the podcast. I'm Sheila Botelho, and I believe that true success is built from the inside out. So I posted something on LinkedIn this week, and I wasn't sure how it would land. And I noticed within a few hours it was starting to get some traction. And what that told me is this conversation is one that we need to be having today. And it all started because a former colleague of mine, someone who I worked with in the SaaS world, software as a service, shared a post about working with AI without losing yourself. And that just stopped me in my tracks because that is so much of what I value and the line of thinking that I've been taking also. So it stopped me completely. And especially this one phrase that he shared that was from this event he had been at. And it was the concept of cognitive debt. So now, while I'd love to, I'm not claiming this term, my colleague surfaced it and it landed for me because I've honestly been searching for words to describe this exact thing for a few years. And I'll explain what it is. But the reason why I've been searching for this is because I'm very grateful to have been working with people learning AI, learning from people much smarter than myself as to how it all works for over four years. And I know people have been in that realm for much, much longer because this has been a long time coming. But what I found was it was just a concept. And then while I was working in that space with it, it became something that was embedded in entire organizations in every single department. And this is happening over and over. We're seeing it in real time unfold and how it's impacting the global workforce, right? So with that in mind, I was thinking we really need to have a way of thinking about how do we move forward ethically using amazing tools. We can be really productive and help more people and give more value and be more efficient and hopefully get some time back in our lives, right? Isn't that what they promised with a personal computer? First, there'd be no paper and we'd have all our time back. Well, it kind of worked out a little different than that, didn't it? So now I'm really curious to see what actually happens, and I'm sure you are too. But I wanted a term to describe how do we use this ethically? And cognitive debt really stood out to me because what it means, cognitive debt means that you skip the thinking and go straight to the output. So you're borrowing against your own judgment just to get the answer faster. And so you end up with a result that you may not fully be able to defend or build from because you don't actually understand why it is what it is. And I wrote about this in Sheila's notes this week. You can join Sheila's notes in the show notes below or in the description below as well. And I plan to go deeper here today because I think this concept is connected to something much bigger that we all need to be paying attention to right now. And I want to share some data with you. And of course, not doing it to create any panic or anything because that's not what this is about. And I also think we can do ourselves a lot of a disservice if we look away from what's actually happening. There's a lot of different research coming in. There's new research. There's, you know, you can, I really invite you to do your own research on this as well. Um, and so recent research is confirming what a lot of us have been sensing. And I'll share some from the US workforce. 58.87 million women occupy positions that are highly exposed to AI automation compared to 48.62 million men. That is not a small gap. It's actually a decent size gap. And there's also Harvard Business Review research showing that when participants believed a woman had written code with the help of AI, so we're talking about computer engineers, software engineers, they said that the competency penalty was more than double that for men doing the same thing. So the stakes for women in highly skilled roles right now are genuinely different. And I hear this, I hear it from people in various credentialed careers that I've worked with, colleagues, people all over the place. And we're talking people who have spent a long time building their career, building their skill set, having massive higher education as well. And people working for decades. The founders who built something with physical products, even, are now wondering if this is the moment to finally do the thing that's been tapping them on the shoulder for years. The displacement is real. And new AI roles being created require master's degrees in 77% of cases, which means the gap between what's being lost and what's replacing it is not small or simple. Like it's quite vast. But here's where I want to land. It's a lot of data there. You can go check it out for yourself. I want to land here firmly. This is not a moment of panic. This is truly a moment for precision, though, for knowing exactly what you bring that cannot be replicated. And for owning it out loud instead of quietly hoping someone else is going to name it for you. You need to know yourself. Now, I've been thinking about conditioning a lot lately. Specifically, the conditioning that we carry around wealth, opportunity, and what we believe we're allowed to step into. My goodness, this has been a lifelong journey for me. You know, witnessing my mom's worth narrative and how it trickled down to me, my sister, girlfriends of mine, colleagues, friends, clients. And then, you know, reaching midlife and really having some eye-opening experiences around it. Because I've seen this across every type of founder and leader that I've worked with, that whether it's someone who's built a thriving physician practice, or someone who's been in academia for 20 years and is ready to take what they know into consulting, or someone who's built a business with a physical product who now wants to build something around their expertise because they certainly have a lot to offer. The outer situation is always different. The inner dialogue is almost always the same, right? The type of business, the type of product, very different, very unique. But the inner dialogue is identical in most cases. It sounds like, who am I to think this idea is worth pursuing? Someone else is probably already doing this better. I mean, goodness, I think I said that earlier to myself this morning. So it's not just my clients, it's me too sometimes, right? It's it's just part of our human nature. Something else we say, maybe I should wait until I know more. Maybe I should get another credential. Maybe the timing isn't right. And underneath all of that, usually is the conditioning around deserving, around whether it's okay to want what you want, around whether your specific experience and your specific perspective and your specific way of seeing the world is actually worth something in the marketplace. And here's where it lands. It always has been. You are so valuable. Your insights, your experience, your perspective is more valuable now than ever. Now, here's something that I have believed for a very long time, and I'm gonna say it again today because it bears repeating. You'll hear it sprinkled throughout my podcast episodes over the years and all over my socials. If an idea has been given to you, it is yours to follow. This is not something I created either. This is just a principle in life. I really believe it though. Now, this doesn't mean though, that you're the only one who this idea has been given to. It means that your particular combination of experience, your skills, your perspective, your history, and your place in the world will bring something to that idea that is completely and entirely yours. Someone else may be soul-tasked with a similar mission. And their version will come from a completely different angle. They will reach different people, they'll land with this in a different way. And I don't believe really there's any such thing as competition. This is how ideas expand in the world. And we are really connected. So it's common that we can be hearing things in the ether around us and they land for us, like, oh, that that is in my soul contract. That is, that is my work to be doing. So now, bringing back that term I mentioned earlier, the cognitive debt piece connects here in a way that is really important. At least I believe it is. When we outsource our thinking, whether it's to AI, to a mentor's framework, to someone else's launch strategy, to what worked for a colleague's business, to what, you know, our grandfather who had a really thriving business 30 years ago, what worked for them, we accumulate debt against our own judgment. And the interest on that debt is paid in identity erosion. It's the slow dimming of the inner voice that actually knows. The decisions that feel the most urgent are often the ones that deserve the most stillness. That is actually what I've been sitting with this week. And I will tell you a little behind the scenes about the urgency of decisions. I was taken out of my regular, regularly scheduled programming in my day-to-day because of an appendectomy surgery that I had weeks and weeks ago. And so, yeah, the urgency bells go off about, oh, but I have these things to do. I have these things to reschedule. I have to get back. I have to get back. I want to get back. I love, I love what I do, and I want to show up. And I've never had an experience where I've had something like that take me out physically. And the interesting thing though, I'll be talking more about this. I I love this, this how everything landed. And that is that when you are forced to sit in stillness, things land for you. And you get a clarity that maybe you don't otherwise have because you don't have any other distractions. And it's a great time to be like putting things aside, getting rid of things, ideas, and really knowing and having a supreme understanding of what is yours to do right now. So that's why I really believe that the decisions that feel the most urgent are often the ones that deserve the most stillness. Because when they're urgent, it's very easy to make a wrong turn, go down a rabbit hole that is really not where you're meant to be heading. And when we think about ethics, when we think about the value of human capital and people's skill sets and their livelihoods and all of these things, we want to take some stillness before we make some choices, right? And some behind the scenes of some experiences I've had in conversation with clients and people that I've just talked about this with. This is something I've I've shared before, also. I have worked with people who are highly credentialed. They've built successful practices. We're talking doctors, lawyers, like people who have really put, I mean, doctors go to school for a long time. They privately question whether the structure they built still fits who they are now, because it's been a while. Um, people who are extraordinary at what they do, and yet they're terrified that the very skills they've spent decades developing are being commoditized. And educators, even who have transformed thousands of students and have no language yet for how to take that impact and bring it into a different container. My conversations with founders who've built physical product businesses and had a service or some kind of idea sitting on the shelf for years that they couldn't quite give themselves permission to activate. That's another conversation I've been having. It's been very diverse and really interesting and also a little heart-wrenching at times because we're talking about your life's work. It's heavy. And what every single one of them had in common was definitely not a lack of capability. It was the conditioning around what they were allowed to claim as their own in terms of what they were valued for. Every one of them had an idea, also, tapping them on the shoulder. Most of them had been putting it back on the shelf for longer than they wanted to admit because the life is full, right? And you have your day-to-day stuff that's going on, it can get in the way. They also will say when we got down to it, they didn't believe they had the right container for it yet. And because somewhere along the way, they absorbed this message that their specific angle, their specific story or lived experience wasn't quite enough. And I'm here to tell you, if you may be asking yourself, is what I have to offer enough? It is. It is enough. It's actually the most irreplaceable thing that you have. So coming back to cognitive debt, because it's just it's been a really interesting thing. I've been thinking a lot about this week. The time that we're living in. This is a time where we can get an answer to almost anything almost instantly. My car was just in the shop. My poor mechanic. I had a list of, well, did you look at this? What about this? And I'm thinking, how do I ask this in such a way that really respects that they've been a mechanic for 40 years? Now it gave me some solace to know I had questions to ask and that yes, they had checked all those things, but oh boy, you see where we can go with this. Uh, it's extraordinary, truly, truly. But there's a cost to always reaching for the fast answer. My mechanic, if he had just listened to me, he would have missed something completely, completely, because when he's there with the actual car, he can tell me what's going on, right? The cost for us is that we stop developing our own capacity to sit with a question long enough to find our own answer. Imagine, right? I'm a mom. My my sons are adults now, um, college age. And thankfully, I spent a lot of time talking to them with my husband about critical thinking skills. We had such incredible, and we still do, conversations around the dinner table and the lunch table. Spent a lot of time eating together. And that is a beautiful space to be able to sit and think about what your answers are. But right now, we are being rushed, rushed, rushed because of all of the advancements of everything happening. That it can feel like there's no time to sit. We just have to get there fast. And for founders and leaders, that capacity, the ability to think through a hard question and trust your own reading of a situation to make a decision from self-trust instead of just from speed, that is the irreplaceable asset. That's what AI cannot generate. Like AI can generate a framework, but it can't generate your lived experience, your scar that was well earned from something you experienced and that you know it's taught you what to do and what not to do. So the antidote to cognitive debt is not just slowing down AI. Okay. It is a deeper relationship with your own knowing. Your knowing, protecting the space where your own thinking has room to develop before you reach for someone else's answer. And it's also what the inner work is for. And I know we talk about the inner work, it sounds like such a soft practice that you know, you can just fit in and squeeze in. So you can say you're doing it and be performative about it. But truly, the inner work is a strategic practice that sustains the business. So here's where I want to leave you today. If there's an idea that's been tapping you on the shoulder, this is the moment to stop putting it back on the shelf. And I'm not saying it's because like of panic or fear or any of that kind of stuff. Like, I really believe it's so often we get what we fear, right? So let's focus on what we want. The world is genuinely, though, at a place where the people who know their value and can articulate it and have a container for activating it, these people are the ones who are going to lead what comes next. And don't you want to have a voice and be part of what comes next? Your specific angle, your years, your story, your way of seeing the world, these are not soft assets. These are the foundation. And if you've been accumulating cognitive debt, borrowing against your own judgment to get faster answers. And I think many of us, we've all been there because it's such a new technology. We're all playing with it. How does this work? I just want to invite you to slow down just enough to find your own thinking again. Get out in nature, go to the beach, go to the forest, just take a walk down the street to the mailbox. Because that may just be enough to start to find your own thinking again. The decisions that feel the most urgent truly do deserve the most stillness. So this week, before you reach for someone else's answer, sit with the question long enough to hear your own. And if these are things that you're grappling with, if you're feeling the pull to finally activate what's been sitting on the shelf, I want you to know I have something open very soon that's designed exactly for this. So check the show notes. There's a link to join Sheila's notes where you'll get all the details first. And if you're ready to work on this one-on-one right now, my breakthrough day is linked there too. I would love to be that container for you if it falls aligned for you. And I'm really grateful that you're here. And if you've listened this far, this means this is something on your mind. And I applaud you for being open to listening, taking your own notes. That's what this is about. So thank you so much for being here. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your week. Mining your own thoughts for what is next for you. I'll see you on the next episode.