The only thing worse than making a mistake is keeping it bottled up inside. Learning from the mistakes of others could help you embark on the healing journey of sharing and working through a mistake of your own, with someone you trust.
When the CEO held a virtual town hall in 2020 and said there needed to be layoffs, I knew I would be one of the first to go because I served zero purpose at that point.
If you scroll through LinkedIn, it will look like everyone is an executive coach. That's not entirely wrong, as mass layoffs have led many leaders to hang out a shingle as a coach, even if just temporarily, until they find their next role. But let's be real: not all executive coaches are created equal. Sorting true executive coaches from self-proclaimed leadership experts can be difficult, particularly since AI has made it easier than ever for practitioners to rapidly produce polished marketing content that doesn't always reflect genuine expertise.
Devon Hase states, 'People are trying desperately to fix, optimize, or escape their way out of relationship difficulty - and suffering more for the effort. Social media has made this worse! We're surrounded by images of perfect partnerships while quietly drowning in our own ordinary struggles.' This highlights the pressure couples feel in the age of social media.
When we think about getting help for our mental health, therapy is often the first-and sometimes only-option that comes to mind. Therapy works, and for many people it is essential. But it is not the only effective path. Emerging evidence suggests that well‑designed coaching -especially when delivered inside an adaptive, stepped‑care model-can help people feel better faster, build emotional skills, and relieve pressure on an overburdened clinical system (Sagui Henson et al.).
Whether it's something personal like physical fitness, or something professional like finding a new job, we all get stuck from time to time. And once you do, the ability to pull out of that place and take productive steps forward can be incredibly hard. At the same time, once you get moving again (physically or otherwise) that same inertia can keep you going, even when there are lots of obstacles standing in your way.
Artificial intelligence can lower the barrier to self-reflection and be genuinely empowering for some, she explains. For people who feel stuck, overwhelmed, or unsure of where to begin, prompts can act as a scaffold for expressing and understanding your ideas, says Iftikhar. If the AI has access to information you've either shared or asked it to generate, it's also an efficient tool at synthesizing that information, explains Ziang Xiao, an assistant professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University.
