The Habit Mechanic - Unlock your Human-AI Edge

Build The Human Skills That Make the AI Era Work For You

• Dr. Jon Finn

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🗓️ Book a FREE call with Andrew Foster (Tougher Minds, Head of Coaching) 👉here to see whether one-to-one coaching for AI-Era Success is a good fit for you.

AI is advancing faster than people can adapt — and for many professionals, that feels scary. In this episode, Dr. Jon Finn returns after several weeks inside the AI frontline: panel events with NHS leaders, private dinners with business executives, and discussions with academics and technologists building the next generation of agentic and generative AI systems.

What he found is clear: the technology is accelerating, the opportunity is enormous, and people are overwhelmed.This episode explains why — and what to do about it.

Jon breaks down what’s really happening in the AI build-out (including trillion-dollar valuations and unprecedented chip demand), why “bubble” headlines miss the point, and why experts in medicine and business now trust AI to improve safety and accuracy in ways humans often can’t.

But the heart of the episode is human:
Why does AI feel threatening? Why is everyone anxious? And how do you stay confident, clear-headed, and high-performing while everything around you accelerates?

Jon introduces the Six Habits of High-Performing AI-Era Professionals, the practical behaviour system built from 25 years of neuroscience and behavioural science:

• Build a 30-day focus loop to ignite daily motivation
• Recharge your cognitive battery with sleep, diet, exercise habits
• Recode your stress response to stop overwhelm at its source
• Engineer robust confidence that survives uncertainty
• Prepare for pressure so you can deliver in High-Charge moments
• Develop laser-sharp focus for your most leveraged work

You’ll hear how these habits underpin Brain State Intelligence™, why traditional change-management approaches fail in the AI era, and why businesses now urgently need experts who can help humans adopt new behaviours — not just new tools.

Finally, Jon introduces a new way to get personalised support:
One-to-One Coaching for AI-Era Success, led by Andrew Foster — Tougher Minds’ Head of Coaching and one of the world’s leading practitioners in habit formation for the AI era.

This is for coaches, leaders, forward-thinking professionals, and even parents who want to understand the new world of work their children are growing into.

If you want to thrive — not just cope — in the AI era, this episode shows you what to focus on and how to get started.

SPEAKER_00:

Hello, Habit Mechanics. It's Dr. John Finn here. I hope you're having a fantastic week so far. I wanted to touch base really because I've not done a podcast uh for a few weeks, but I have been very busy attending and contributing to AI events. So I've been part of a panel discussion at um university where there was a range of people from the private sector and the public sector talking about how they're using AI, what benefits they're getting, what challenges they're facing. Um then I was that more of a private dinner with business leaders just hearing about um the different stages businesses are at on their journey with embedding AI everywhere from very sophisticated getting massive wins all the way through to um you know just starting the journey, but also some of the stories about it's not actually the the opportunities and the challenges for businesses are not just the businesses using AI, it's their clients, it's their uh partner businesses because that escalates the volume of replies and the intensity of sort of information flow, if you like. So that was really interesting insight. And then I attended um a panel discussion where I was just a member of the audience last week with some really interesting people, again, from a range of academic through to um the National Health Service and the medical side and then uh private business, you know, and things like AI is gonna completely transform how we deliver medicine within the next two years, not in two years' time, but it's gonna start to really shake things up almost imminently because the tech is here and it's so much more efficient to deliver many of the surface services using neural network AI. So I thought it was useful to come back and just at a high level reflect on what I'm seeing, um, because this is a unique period of history where we have this new powerful technology, it's constantly in the news. Um there's the constant noise about is it real or not, is it a bubble? I'll come back to that in a second. But I think ultimately for the majority of people, AI can feel stressful, it can feel overwhelming, it can feel threatening, it can raise questions about your future that you you don't want to have to be thinking about what's going to go on for the kids, all this kind of stuff. So I want to deal with that kind of cornerstone, foundational thing of it being stressful. Let me come on to go back to the bubble piece. So the the headlines in the press, if you follow the the newspapers or the the websites you get your new you get we get news from, there's a strong narrative about is AI, are the AI companies overvalued. Now, what you may see if you actually look is that the companies that are most um involved in AI that are investing the most money, they are becoming more valuable than any other business we have ever seen before or any other businesses on the planet, right? So we've got NVIDIA that makes the hardware, they make uh very powerful AI chips, kind of the premium chips in the world. They can't make enough of them at the moment. Um they're I think about six months ago they were valued at about four trillion, yes, four trillion, not a billion, and then more recently that jumped up to five trillion, and then Microsoft followed suit. They broke um four trillion first time ever, and then Google are kind of stalking behind them. I think Google's pretty much doubled its valuation in the last 18 months, and now they're valued at about three and a half trillion. Um, so the numbers are phenomenal. So when we think about bubbles, we think about the internet crash, the internet bubble, stores like um pet.com, etc., being massively overvalued. There's a big difference with what's currently going on. So, what was very interesting, for example, just last week, less than a week ago, was that NVIDIA um they had a a quarterly earnings announcement coming up, and they actually grew their business 60% more than the markets expected them to. So there was a lot of talk about they wouldn't hit the target the markets had expected. I think they sold an additional$500 billion worth of uh chips. So the numbers are phenomenal. Um so when you hear about the bubble, it's not a question of the technology and whether it works or not, it's just really are some of these um the valuations of the businesses, are they overvalued? And by any standard measurement, they are overvalued, but we're not in a standard period of history. Um, you know, and if you wipe a trillion off um NVIDIA, they're not gonna crash, right? They're still gonna be okay. But really, we we've got to understand what phase of AI we're in, and we're really in the build-out phase right now. So what businesses are investing in is infrastructure build out, they're investing in data centers, which they need chips for. Uh Google are making a big bet on creating their own chip so they can compete with NVIDIA. So I know this kind of technical discussion might not be that interesting to some people that are listening. But I think it's important that we understand that the AI is not going away. So there may be the noise around, it's a bubble, but the tech's proven in the sense of it can do lots of things. The Igentica I can do lots of things, and the automated processes much faster and cheaper than humans, and its ability to do things much check much faster and cheaper than humans in some very specific tasks is accelerating, you know, almost every week. The tools are becoming more and more powerful. And then um we have the generative AI, and if you know anyone who's you know dedicated some time to properly learn how to use generative AI, um things like Claude and Chat GTP and uh Gemini, and there are more industry-specific ones as well. Some businesses have built their own at great cost, they'll tell you how much faster they're able to get through their complex, high-impact thinking, working, and doing. And what I personally see in my own workflows is that I can 7x my output every day, which I know sounds phenomenal, but I I can. I've been doing it consistently now. Um so yeah, it's very, very, very powerful technology and it's not going away. And yeah, there are some ethical concerns and things like that. It was very interesting that um the very senior medical person who was uh on the discussion now is that in London last week. He was asked by one of the other panelists, would you trust um AI to deliver medical services versus you know human beings delivering the medical services? And his response was very interesting. He said, I I regularly follow doctors around wards to see what they're doing, it's part of my job, and I see them hallucinate and I see them make mistakes and I see them give patients wrong advice, and I see they have lots of errors in their thinking, and AI also has errors in how it thinks, but what his point was so he he said I would trust AI over doctors because he said I can see the errors that AI are making and we can program out their errors, whereas with doctors it's much more difficult to program out the errors. So, you know, these are people that have been working with these technologies for a long time and they've really thought about this stuff, and it's just very, very fascinating. I don't think anyone expected him to say that. So, but you hear all these amazing insights, what this stuff can do, but then consistently, what I hear from the audience, both in the panel I was part of, but in these other discussions I've I've been attending and the dinner I went to is fear, anxiety. People are worried, they're scared, they are uncertain, and that's all on top of a world which already has a ton of anxiety and uncertainty in it, you know, arguably more than ever before, as we get overloaded by digital uh interactions and information and just constant bombardment, harder to sleep well, harder to um eat properly, harder to exercise like we need to to get our brain working well, harder to uh manage stress, and therefore harder to focus when we need to. So AI is coming into our lives at a time when we're already fatigued, you know, some are already exhausted. I think most days of the week, everybody will feel overwhelmed at some point when the AI is just adding to that, and businesses are under pressure from uh shareholders to deploy it and to put it into their businesses because it's very clear that when you get the AI right, it can have a phenomenal impact. And you hear stories like uh Amazon, they're they've laid off 14,000 people. Now they're a massive organization, right? But the fact that they think they can replace 14,000 people with the technology is a pretty phenomenal statement. We hear from um companies like Salesforce who've pioneered agentic AI workflows, massive company. They say they've halved their workforce by uh replacing lots of tasks they used to pay humans to do with agentic AI. This is not something to be worried about because we need people, we need good people on this journey, and AI is gonna create lots of new jobs as well. Uh, probably not as many as it is it's predicted to replace, just being frank. But I don't think we're gonna see mass unemployment with this kind of technologies we currently have. But what we are gonna see is that businesses that use AI really effectively, and that means businesses with people that use AI really effectively are gonna get a massive competitive advantage. They're gonna be able to deliver their services much cheaper than their competitors and in a much faster, more impressive way to their to their customers than their competitors can ultimately delights their customers and get some more and more customers because that's how business works, right? So, what what I'm seeing is that people are worried, they're stressed, they need help, and they need support. And the journey we've been on over probably 15, 16, maybe 18 months now is we've been working out how do we make it really easy for people to get to be at their best, and if they want to to build AI into their workflows, it's 90% about helping people to be at their best, and that AI is there if you want to use it. Um there's some people that are not gonna have to use AI in their in their roles, um but that's what we've been working on, and you may have read Train Your Brain for the AI Revolution, and you will I mean I think we're talking I'm talking myself down a little bit because I do talk about AI in the habit mechanic as well, which is significantly older than 18 months ago. So we but the neural network AI is new, but anyway, so we know that if we want to help people to thrive, and I I'm very optimistic about the positive impact AI can have, it's not gonna go away, there's too much invested in it, so we have to make we have to make it work for us. Um we want to help people to actually have the very best chance of thriving in the AI era, and you will know if you've read Train Your Brain for the AI Revolution that we see that brain state intelligence is the key. And because brain state intelligence at a high level might feel a bit ambiguous, we've gone further and we've broken that down into six core habits. The first habit is what we unpack in um and just to go back, sorry, the six core habits, the six habits of high performing AI era professionals. And the first habit is the four-step framework that we unpack in Train Your Brain for the AR evolution. But again, reading the book doesn't build the habit, it shows you the system, right? And then we've gone further and we've created the four habits for high-performing AI era leaders and the five habits for high performing AI era teams. We haven't just made these things up overnight, it's a refinement of what we've worked on for over 25 years, and we know that if you build those six habits in the first instance, that that is the key to actually not only developing your brainstorm intelligence, but being healthier, being happier, being at your best more often. And if I just go through those six habits again, because I think I mentioned in the last podcast, it's habit one is build a 30-day focus loop. This fires up our motivation, it keeps us focused on being at our best every day. So we've got those have the best chance of being healthy, healthy, and happy. Habit two is about recharging the cognitive battery. This is about just getting our brain working really well. So once we fired up that motivation, we've got to make sure our brain is working really well. That's our priority. So good sleep, good diet, good exercise. Then every day our brain is getting filled full of potential stresses, disconnections of meaning systems, kicking off stress responses in our brain and our body. It's unavoidable in the world we live in, even if we're very good at managing stress. So we need to be better than ever. We almost need to be like world-class at recoding the stress response, and that's habit three. And we have lots of uh ways to help you to build that habit. And then habit four is about recognising that as we go into the future, it's becoming more and more uncertain, and therefore, the things that have given us self-efficacy and self-esteem, in other words, confidence, um, because they're the two components of confidence, they may become less relevant. Um, so we're gonna have to keep very deliberately engineering our own robust confidence, and there are lots of things that you can do habitually to build up your confidence so you're not constantly questioning yourself and doubting yourself. Habit five is about preparing for pressure because we're increasingly under pressure, uh many, many people are, to do things really well that they've literally never done before. Run a team of people that are co-working with AI, extend my high charge uh hours that I'm able to do every day. Business is gonna expect me to be able to do more high charge, more high impact, deal it deal with more volume of uh feedback from clients, etc. And you can see there, those first five habits are really all about getting your brain working really well. Um, so again, dealing with that overwhelm and the high volume of stress we're experiencing, and then um habit six is about building laser sharp focus. So once we get the um the foundations of great brain function, then we can use that as the platform to really focus our attention on to what is most helpful for us and get into those high-charge brain states consistently. So by working through those six habits, you are gonna become brain state intelligent, you're gonna become healthier, you're gonna become happier, you're gonna be at your best more often, you're gonna thrive in the AI era, and if you want to, you're gonna be able to seamlessly build both agentic and generative AI into your workflows, just one tiny thing at a time. So rather than feeling overwhelmed, rather than worrying, we need to be proactive. We need to start taking control, and it starts with brain state management. So if you haven't already, or if you've picked up a copy and you haven't read it, go back through train your brain for the AI revolution because the success cycle is the cornerstone of us being healthier, happier, and at our best, but it's only the starting point, it gives you kind of the framework to make it easier to build other habits off, which is the six habits I'm talking about. And excitingly, well, you you already know that we are training coaches, and again, on my journeys over the last few weeks, and in fact, this was just yesterday, some very big sets of compelling data coming out showing that the growth opportunity, as I've been saying, don't want to be an oil, but as I've been saying, the biggest growth area right now in uh professional services is helping people to get AI ready. It's not the technical training, it's not helping them to build AI uh chatbots, it's actually helping people to adopt their behaviors so that they can get the most out of the technology the business is invested in. Um, but my senses and my my professional experience would say that the traditional change management systems, which are the ones that are starting to be rolled out, will fail because they're not they're not designed with the brain in mind, they're not designed in first principle insights, and that's why we're training people to become certified habit mechanic coaches, so they can train people in these six habits, which is the key to being healthy, happy, and at your best in the AI era. And whether you work in a business or you're um you want to set up your own business doing this as a coach or a consultant, this is the training that you can do to actually learn how to help humans thrive in the AI era. So we've got that, but then also excitingly, um my my time is very limited, but I know that human support is the best way to help people to be at their best, and therefore working with our head of coaching, Andrew Foster, who I've worked with for over 14 years now, and I've known for a lot longer than that. Um, we've created a new program, and the program is called one-to-one coaching for AI era success. So we want to offer people one-to-one coaching so they can turn the AI era into their springboard for success. So you want to flip that narrative. The AI era is not threatening, it's an opportunity, it's an opportunity, and the opportunity is moving quickly. Um, we've been deep into this now for nearly 12 months in the sense of I wrote the book about this, right? I started writing that about 12 months ago, where I started to get really deep into this. But we've been working with people with these methodologies for longer than that, uh, probably since summer of 2024. We've had, you know, that that's been premium um premium priced programs, really with top-level executives, but we've created a one-to-one coaching program now, which we think is a much more accessible um price point for people. It this is not uh a sales tactic, this is you get one-to-one coaching, um, and it's a monthly program where you don't just get one-to-one coaching, you also get a number of other things. So you you get to work with Andrew, um, you get a block of 60 minutes every month, which you can chunk down into half-hour sessions or 15-minute sessions, it's entirely up to you, and you get on-demand support with him as well. So he's there available for you, um, email, WhatsApp, whatever you want to do. So, literally, you're gonna get not just a coach but an accountability partner as well, who is the person that I would go to for coaching. And then I'm working with Andrew in the background, and I'm gonna be available every other week for group sessions. So, we're gonna do live group coaching and training where I'll be available for questions and to help uh you know guide people. Then, what we're also doing is we have a monthly challenge around the six habits, so there's a theme for the month, and we've got our um our app set up, so you've got that uh uh daily content that you can uh go in and and use. We've got the six habits program available, the six habits training as part of this membership. Um so you can buy the Six Habits program as a standalone offer, but also we've put it into this membership if you want that. Um, so you can actually get certified as well. There's a certified AI proof professional. We've put all of our training content into the membership, so you've got all our master classes and all our core resources and all our core tools, and then we also have a community membership uh or a community forum, you know, where you can post, learn from others, see what other people are doing, and we've we know that works really well. Um so we've made that available as well. So, yeah, excitingly, we have this new program. Um we're not accepting just anybody onto it, and we think the best way for you to see whether it's a good fit for you, and if you're a good fit for us, is um to to have a call with Andrew, our head of coach, and Andrew Foster. So Andrew's offering some free calls so you can see how this will be helpful for you. If you're a coach, this is a great program because it'll help you to kind of practice what you preach sharpen at what you're doing, you know, whether you're a certified avant mechanic coach, whether you're a certified avant mechanic coach in training, or whether you're you know coached, whether you're a coach in another methodology, this will be really helpful for you. And of course, Andrew essentially runs our coaching business, so you won't just get a behaviour change insight for yourself and your clients, you'll also see how Andrew is uh driving the business side of you know running a coaching business. If you're a leader, you're feeling pressure to get your people using AI, you're seeing your people are overwhelmed by all of this, but you see an opportunity if you can get really good at understanding how to make an AI a team, organization, business work, then there's massive opportunity for you. This is a great fit. If you're into professional forward thinking, you're seeing AI is in your business already, and there's pressure for you to use it to do more output, or you see that it's coming in. You know, we're going through phases here. Um, we you've seen it before, you know, with mobile phones, no one really used them, and then they did, and then they got better and then they got better. That window, the equivalent window for AI, is probably gonna happen about 10 times faster. So, what took you know, mobile phones 10 years to do, we'll see this in 12 months. So the next two years are gonna be massive. Well, the next 12 months, the next 24 months, and they're gonna be massive. So if you're just a forward-thinking professional and you're looking for not just a course, not just a community forum, not just a session, you're looking for that one-to-one coaching support, and that's what we're offering. We have never done this before, like this. So I'm I'm so excited because I know how powerful the one-to-one coaching is, then this is a great fit for you as well. If you're a parent and you're worried about your kids, thinking, right, what do they need to learn? What's what's the world of work going to look like? And I know even thinking about that is stressful, then this is also a great fit. Um, because if you really want to understand what it's going to be like for your kids and how to best support them, you need to get your head around this as well. And the six habits is the best starting place. And Andrew, as well as working with I mean, he works with hedge fund managers, senior leaders of big businesses, professional athletes, um, professionals who want to do better. He works with coaches, he's our head of coaching, he trains coaches up, but also he works in education because that's his kind of passion project. So if you do have kids, Andrew is arguably the world's leading authority on um habits, high-performing habits for the AI era, because literally he delivers the only program in the world that I know of that is actually teaching this to young people. So if you're a parent, this is a great fit for you as well. So I've got a frog in my throat, which AI can't cure, I don't think. Um, but um so I get that the world is overwhelming, and that's really been hit home to me, just how frightened. People are of this technology over the last couple of weeks. But we have the solutions we can help you using robust neuroscience, behavioral science, but through our practical brain state intelligence frameworks, and now our six habits for high-performing AIRA professionals, our four habits for high performing AI era leaders, and our five habits for high performing AI era teams. We've got you covered, and we're now you can get a one-to-one coaching support to do this at a ridiculously accessible price. Um, but I I just wanted to do this, so I wanted to make it as accessible as possible for people. So you may have seen an email from us that will offer you a free call with Andrew. Um you haven't seen that. I'll put the link beneath the podcast so you can have a chat with Andrew. You'll get a lot of benefit out of the chat, and you'll see if this is a good fit for you, if we think you're a good fit for the program, and then hopefully we get the chance to work together. Um, and not only help you to be at your best, and you're gonna help us to be at our best because you'll hold hold us accountable, but you're also gonna learn how to you know pass on the ideas that you're um learning for yourself to others, either just in a general way, or you can always also become a certified habit mechanic coach. We continue. We'll be offering some more uh training grants on that in the coming week or so. So, yeah, really, really exciting. So I think the takeaway here is that I understand why people are scared. I actually understand neurobiologically why we're scared and why this is threatening. Um but please believe me that this is the biggest opportunity that I think we've ever had for our health, our happiness, and our performance. We've got a, as one of my uh old bosses used to say, if uh football manager who won, I think he won uh four league, four or five league titles, or maybe maybe five promotions and three league titles, gotta control the controllables, John. So that's what we can do. We can't really control you know how much money NVIDIA and Google and everybody else is pumping into AI to build out the infrastructure, um to make it inevitable that this is just becomes part of how we live. What we can do is first of all understand how to build the habits to be at our best, and then understand how we can build on those foundational habits to thrive in the AI era, and we've got you covered on that. And if one-to-one coaching sounds interesting to you, then do book a call, do speak to Andrew, and we'd we'd love to hopefully see you as part of our of our of our group and as uh one of one of Andrew's uh coaches, but also part of the bigger community as well. And as all of these things, we only have a limited number of places. I don't say that literally. Andrew's got only so much time to deliver this programme, so he will only be taking on um a limited number of people. So yeah, that's good. Slightly different podcasts, a bit of a digest of all the things I've been working on for the last few weeks. But um, thank you for listening. Remember, you can book a call with Andrew below. And however you're feeling right now, however, overwhelmed or stressed or tired you are, remember you're only ever one branch that habit away.