You may have already asked AI what you should do with your life. Today, we will talk about how it can honestly help you and the one thing it will never be able to give you. Welcome to the Midlife Reinvention Podcast, a podcast helping women in career and life transitions achieve clarity on their next steps so they can transform uncertainty into an energizing next chapter. I'm your host, Kavita Ahuja, and the founder of It's My Time Now Coaching. If you're wondering what's next in your career or life, you are in the right place. Through solo and guest episodes, you'll gain practical tips, tools, and inspiration to help you uncover blocks, gain confidence, and be, do, and have what you want. I rediscovered myself after the age of 50, and I know you can too. It's my time now to help you do just that. I'm so excited you're here. Let's dive in. In this episode, you'll discover three things. First, what AI can genuinely do to help you find your reason for being. Second, exactly where it stops, and why the four circles of your Ikigai cannot be deciphered by a robot. And third, what actually happens the moment your reason for being becomes apparent, and why you need another human being in the room for it. Stay with me to the end because I'm going to show you exactly where the benefits of AI end and the pitfalls begin. Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Midlife Reinvention Podcast. It's your coach Cavita. If you're new here, welcome to the family. Something brought you to this episode, and I'm so glad that you've come. And if you're a returning listener, thank you so much. I don't take it lightly that you choose to spend your time with me here today. I want to start today with a picture, and maybe this will resonate with you. Perhaps it is late and the house has gone quiet and everyone else is asleep, and you find yourself sitting there with the light of a screen on your face wondering. And maybe at some point you may have typed the question in, what should I do with my life? Or should I leave my job? Or how on earth do I find my purpose? And within seconds, back comes something beautifully written and perfectly organized and remarkably intelligent, full of neat suggestions and tidy frameworks that look for all the world like an answer. And you read it, however, you have absolutely no idea how to begin. If that has happened to you, my friend, that is perfectly normal, and you did not do anything foolish, because it is the most natural thing in the world to do these days, and I would very likely have done the same. But I want to talk to you today about why that process may have left you feeling so empty, and about what that tool can genuinely give you, because while it can give you a great deal, there is some point where it doesn't. I use AI every single day, and it has transformed my business in many ways. I use it for logistics and I use it to think through whether an idea actually holds up. I use it to proofread my writing and to take all the day-to-day work off my plate so that I can spend my hours on the things I love most and do best, which is coaching and making this podcast for you. Now, if you are new to this podcast, let me tell you quickly about what I'm going to be referring to today because this is the basis of my coaching framework, and I don't want you to get left behind on that. Ikigai is a Japanese concept and it means your reason for being. And the way I work with it with all my clients is through a process of working through four circles, four parts of you that already exist within you, whether you have ever named them or not. Those circles are your strengths, which is what you are genuinely good at. Then there is your passions, which is what you love, things that make you lose track of all time. Then they are your values, which is what matters most to you now in this chapter of your life, and not in the chapter you were in, let's say 20 years ago. And then there is your contribution, which is the difference that is yours to make in the world. And your reason for being lives in the place where all of those four overlap. That is the work. And if you want to hear it properly, go back to episode 318, where I walk you through the whole thing in detail. So back to AI. As I mentioned, I use it every day, and I would encourage you to use it also. For example, if you were laid off tomorrow, you can use it to, let's say, ask about your rights and what your contract might mean and what questions you ought to be walking in with, and then take those questions to human being, perhaps an employment lawyer or a career counselor who can actually help you. Let's say you're going through a divorce. I would say the same thing. Perhaps you might use it to understand your rights and what to consider for your children and what to ask, and then go and sit with a professional, perhaps a divorce therapist or a divorce lawyer. And if you have a health scare, of course you would use it to research your condition, maybe causes and remedies, and to understand what is happening to you, and then compiling intelligent questions to ask your doctor. It's interesting, isn't it? When it comes to our bodies, we do not hesitate at all to go to a professional. Not one of us reads a few paragraphs about a symptom and then decides we have got it all handled. We go and see a person, a trained professional, without a second thought. And yet when it comes to the direction of our entire life, our purpose, the way we are going to spend the years we have left, that somehow becomes the moment we decide we ought to be able to work it out in the middle of the night with a chat window. So let me go back to the original question. Can AI find your iki guy for you? Let me walk you through the answer circle by circle. Let's start with your strengths. Sure, it can genuinely help you there, because it can give you, if you give it your background, it will offer you your strengths you may have never thought to name. And that widens your vocabulary about yourself, which is no small thing. And then your values. It can also hand you a list to consider and a prompts to you can use to rank them, which is also useful because many women may have never even sat down and named what they truly value now. And your passions. It can ask you good questions about what you loved as a child, about what makes you lose track of time. And those are perfectly good questions, and ones I ask also. And then your contribution. AI can even help you think through what the world might need for someone with your particular experience. So AI can gather your data points, and it can even show you where the gaps are. And that is a real starting place. And I would never tell you not to use it. But here is where it stops. It cannot ask you the question underneath the question. Because when you say, Well, I suppose I'm good at helping people and something in your voice goes flat as you say it, a machine only reads your words, while a trained human being hears that flatness and stops and goes back and stays there gently until the truth comes out, because the truth is almost never in the first answer. It cannot catch the thing you dismissed. Do you remember the woman I told you about, the one who had reached the very top of her corporate career and felt completely empty at the summit? She was my client, and her greatest strength was that she could somehow take something impossibly tangled and get straight to the root of it and make it simple for everyone else around her. Yet she never emphasized this to me because it came so easily to her that she had long ago stopped counting it as a talent at all. It was only until I probed her further did she realize it was indeed a valuable gift that she possesses. A machine would have taken her at her word, and a coach does not. It cannot hold your story over time the way a good coach remembers what you said three weeks ago and gently brings it back to you when it quietly contradicts what you're telling her today and says, Wait, do you hear what you just did there? AI has your last few messages, but a human being has you. And it cannot find the overlap. And that is really the crux of it all. Because your reason for being doesn't live inside any of those first circles. It lives in the place where they all meet. And finding that meaning place is not data work, it is human work. It is the digging and the questioning and the noticing and the connecting of one part of your life to another until the pattern finally rises up to the surface where you can see it. And it evolves through honest and deep conversations, reflections, and aha moments. And then there is a moment, and this is the part that no machine will ever be able to hand you. You may remember from episode 319, the client, the woman who sat with me as her ikeguy finally came into plain sight. And then when she looked at me and said, Oh my god, Kavita, I just got goosebumps. That chill down the spine, sometimes it arrives as tears instead. It's a quiet and staggering recognition that it was right there in front of me the whole time and I never saw it. Your body tells you the truth before your mind has caught up with it. And in that moment there's another person sitting right there with you. Someone who has been with you through every single rung of that pyramid, who feels it the same and the very instant that you do, and who is able to say, Yes, that's it. And now, what are we gonna do about it? That is not something you can prompt for. That is two human beings in a room together, and that, my friend, is priceless. I want to read something now which comes directly from one of my clients to emphasize these points, and she says this far better than I could. Here's what she wrote. When I first discovered Kavita through her podcast, I knew that I was at an inflection point in my life, where the fear of nothing ever changing had finally outgrown the fear of the unknown. But I didn't have a clear vision of what that change should look like. Kavita met me where I was, patiently guiding me through the steps of defining my Ikigai and envisioning my future self. Her coaching style is warm, generous, and supportive. She will gently push you past your comfort zone while acting as an accountability partner, one that knows when to nudge you forward and when to bring you back to what is unresolved. As I read her kind words, I contemplated which parts of this AI could actually do and not do. The knowing when to push and when to stay quiet, the remembering of what she had left unresolved, and a choosing to bring her back to it. The caring enough to hold her to what she said she wanted on the days when she no longer wanted it. That is accountability. And it works precisely because when you have a commitment to a person, it feels entirely different than from when you close a chat window. And this is not only my opinion, because the research is beginning to say it out loud also. I've been curious to see how AI has genuinely changed the coaching landscape, and it has for so many professions. And I think you might find it interesting. Coaching has grown enormously over the last decade, with the number of practitioners up more than 50% since 2019. So demand is clearly not the problem, and people do see the value in this work. But that growth has brought its own troubles with it, unfortunately, because there are a great many people calling themselves coaches who hold little or no accreditation or have little or no training at all. That in itself has bred a healthy skepticism in people, which is understandable. So I will say this plainly to you: that if you are going to trust another human being with a direction of your life, then do the work of choosing one who is properly trained and accredited, because that matters enormously, and is the difference between someone who has a genuine method, experience, and training, and someone who simply does not. And into that landscape has come AI, and what it has done is to make the free end of this market genuinely good, which means that anyone who was selling a shallow or surface-level version of coaching is now competing with something that is free and honestly quite capable. And I think that's a good thing because it has raised the bar for what a paid offer actually has to be. That may be a controversial thing to say to some, but it is true. But here is something interesting that was uncovered when they tested it properly. There was a randomized control trial published this year, the first of its kind, in which accredited human coaches were put head-to-head against AI coaches alongside a control group who received nothing at all. The human coaching produced real and significant improvements in goal attainment, in stress levels, and in how effective people found the coaching to be. And the AI coaching showed no statistical significant improvement over the people who had received no coaching whatsoever. And then there was a detail that was very interesting. Those who were in the AI group dropped out roughly 10 times the rate, and four of the participants asked whether they might be, please, be switched to a human being instead. Given a machine, people ask for a person. Now, in fairness, there is another research showing that AI can genuinely help people to hit specific and well-defined goals, and it does that rather well. So if what you need are specific and well-defined goals, like your resume polished or help with your interview preparation or schedule built, then use it because it will do a lovely job of it. But that is goal completion and it is not real transformation. And if you are listening to this podcast, then I don't think it is goal completion that you are looking for. Not to diminish the importance of it, but unless and until you do the internal work, those external tasks will not be as effective. You are trying to work out who you are now and what you are here to do with the rest of your life. So here is where I land. Use AI to gather the pieces and use it well. But you cannot outsource the culmination of the pieces of your own life to a machine because the interpretation is where the meaning is, and the meaning is something that gets made between real human beings. So I know this has been a different episode today, but as we face the realities of the world we live in now, I believe it's so important to face them with honesty. AI is not an enemy. It is another tool in your toolbox, but it cannot replace the human connection that arises when you actually feel those goosebumps with another person. So let me leave you with the three things I want you most to carry out of this episode today. First, that AI can genuinely help you gather your data points, your strengths, your values, prompts for your passions, and it can even show you where the gaps are, and you should absolutely use it for that. Second, that it stops exactly where the depth begins because it cannot hear what your voice does when you are not quite telling yourself the truth, and it cannot catch the talent you dismissed years ago, and it cannot find the overlap where your four circles meet, because that is human work, and the research is now bearing that out. And third, that it will never be in the room for the moment your reason for being comes into focus, when the chills run down your arms, and someone who has walked every step of it with you says, yes, that is it. So here is the now. This week, notice where you may have been taking the deepest questions of your life to a screen, and then imagine what it might be like to just bring just one of those questions to another human being instead. Just imagine. And if you want a place to begin, take my free career and life fulfillment quiz, which will show you honestly where you feel most alive right now and where the gaps are, and that is your data. But the filling in of those gaps and the asking of the deeper questions and the finding of the overlap where your reason for being actually lives, that is the work of a human being, and I would love to be that human for you. Take the quiz and then book a clarity and next chapter call with me. Both links are waiting for you in the show notes. Thank you so much for being here today, and I would love to hear how this episode and this topic landed for you. And what topics would you love to hear more of? Send me a line at cavita at it's my timeowcoaching.com and share it with me. I read every response. And remember, until next time, my friend, you get to decide what comes next. So say it with me and say it with confidence. It's my time now.