E94 - Fear, Change, And Everything In Between - Podcast With Dr Amy Silver

Welcome to The Inner Game of Change,  where we explore the invisible forces that shape the way we lead, live, and learn, because real change, as you and I know, always starts on the inside.

My guest today is Dr Amy Silver; a clinical psychologist, author, speaker, and a masterful thinker when it comes to fear, patterns, and performance.

In this episode, Amy and I explore the idea of fear as the loudest guest in the room—an ever-present voice that can either protect or paralyse us. We talk about what happens when fear becomes the default setting in our teams, our leadership, and our own heads.

We also examine how our post-COVID workplaces are stuck in a tension between efficiency and connection, and what it takes to break out of that loop. And, of course, we talk about artificial intelligence: the discomfort it brings, the curiosity it demands, and what it means to use it as a thinking partner rather than a threat.

This conversation was wide-ranging, deeply practical, and at times, personal. We talk about journaling, performance reviews, power dynamics, and what it means to build a muscle of courage—one small moment at a time.

If you’ve ever felt that fear has too much say in the way you lead, speak, or even show up at work, this one is for you.

And in a special addition to this episode…
For the first time, I have asked my thinking partner, ChatGPT, to listen in and share its own reflection at the end. Its take on the episode surprised me—warm, clear, and strangely not complelety inhuman.

About Amy
Leadership development programs grounded in clinical psychology. Using an evidence-based approach for lasting leadership transformation.

I am a psychologist, speaker, facilitator, and coach. I partner with powerful leadership teams to help foster sustainable high performance. My expertise is in understanding how to activate the best of people so they can reach collective goals through conversations characterised by high courage and high compassion. My role is to engage individuals and teams in their most conscious (as opposed to reactive) practice, supporting and preparing them to lead together, through the complexities of our now and our future courageously.

I regularly write and talk in the media on how we can drive high performance ​by being courageous with the way we connect (including to ourselves), communicate, and make complex decisions for the greater good ( Harvard Business Review (HR), ABC Radio, The Australian, HR Director, AFR, CEO World, and New Zealand’s The AM Show).

My book, The Loudest Guest: How to Control and Change Your Relationship with Fear received two awards (Silver medalist, Living Now Awards 2021; Finalist in The Australian Career Book Award, 2021) and a best seller on Amazon. It is available in all good bookstores, as an audiobook and digital form. It is also featured on Blinkist.

Contacs

Dr Amy’s Profile

linkedin.com/in/amysilverbrave

Website

dramysilver.com (Company)

Email

hello@dramysilver.com

Ali Juma
@The Inner Game of Change podcast

Follow me on LinkedIn

Chapters

• 0:00 Fear as a Guest, Not an Enemy
• 9:41 The Psychology Behind Overwhelming Fear
• 17:30 Building Your Courage Muscle
• 27:10 The Contagious Nature of Workplace Fear
• 35:31 AI as a Thinking Partner
• 47:09 Connection in a Post-COVID World
• 53:36 Closing Reflections on Fear and Change

Transcript

Amy: 0:00

So I like the idea of guest because it's a bit kinder, it's not so critical. I don't want fear to disappear. I want fear to tell me what it can see. Because it's got a good risk eye, it can see what all the risks are, and I want to hear those risks. And then I want to remember that fear is one of many guests in my head. And then I want to remember that fear is one of many guests in my head and at times it may indeed be the loudest, but it's not necessarily the one that is going to help me make the decision to move in the direction that I know that I need to for my own well-being or my own success, or my own sustainable choices.

Ali: 0:48

Welcome to the Inner Game of Change, where we explore the invisible forces that shape the way we lead, live and learn, because real change, as you and I know, always starts on the inside. I am Ali Juma and this is the Inner Game of Change podcast. My guest today is Dr Amy Silva, a clinical psychologist, author, speaker and a masterful thinker when it comes to fear patterns and performance. In this episode, amy and I explore the idea of fear as the loudest guest in the room, an ever-present voice that can either protect or paralyze us. We talk about what happens when fear becomes the default setting in our teams, our leadership and our own heads. We also examine how our post-COVID workplaces are stuck in a tension between efficiency and connection and where it takes a break out of that loop. And, of course, we talk about artificial intelligence, the discomfort it brings, the curiosity it demands and what it means to use it as a thinking partner rather than a threat.

Ali: 1:59

This conversation was wide-ranging, deeply practical and, at times, personal. We talk about journaling, performance reviews, power dynamics and what it means to build a muscle of courage, one small moment at a time. If you've ever felt that fear has too much say in the way you lead, speak or even show up at work, this one is for you. I am grateful to have Amy chatting with me today. Well, amy, thank you so much for your time today and thank you for joining me in the Inner Game of Change podcast. I am eternally grateful for your time.

Amy: 2:35

You haven't spoken to me yet. You don't know whether you're going to be eternally grateful.

Ali: 2:40

I have absolutely no doubt this conversation will be really worthwhile listening to. So I'm really happy to talk to you. Thank you so much, Amy. We're going to talk about a few topics today, including the loudest voice as a visitor, and we talk about fear in particular, and obviously I want to focus maybe in the workplace. But just a general question what is occupying your mind nowadays when it comes to your line of work?

Amy: 3:10

What's fascinating for me at the moment is a coming together of lots of different parts of my life which I hadn't really done before, and it's kind of I don't know if you've ever had this, but sort of lots of things clicking at the same time to create something that's really meaningful, really powerful for people in the workplace. So I'm really excited by I guess it's new thought, but it's also a coming together of different thoughts that I've had over my life, I guess to help organizations and teams function better, and we can go into that a little bit more. But it's really around the way that I understand people and how our patterns, our repeated patterns, can get in the way of us being the best version of ourselves, but also the best version of us in combination, and the way in which groups and tribes and people form patterns that are protective in some way but divisive in others.

Ali: 4:20

From your observation. What changes or what key changes have you been noticing happening in the workplace, especially before and?

Amy: 4:29

after COVID, aspects of work in a more legitimate way, certainly in a more legal way.

Amy: 4:45

There's much more attention on well-being and people being able to do their job appropriately or properly.

Amy: 4:57

So there's a lot more sort of risk around in terms of the perspective of the employer and I think that has placed a really interesting lens on work, because there's a sort of a fear of getting it wrong from employers and I think that has led to a little bit of cautiousness around making bold moves.

Amy: 5:26

Really, I think people have got a little bit more nervous about disrupting things and at the same time well, particularly in places where lockdowns were quite long or severe or disruptive we as a human race have become more fearful as individuals because we sort of fell out of the loop that is necessary to connect, to be vulnerable, to be able to lean into trust. So I think we have, as employees, become more focused on efficiency, you know, rather than connection. And so there's this sort of funny piece for work at the moment where employers know that you know getting everyone together is a is a really good idea, and the employees are sort of saying oh well, you know, I can't put my washing on and I can't walk my dog and I can't pick my kids up if I do that, and so there's this sort of tussle, I think, between what we know societally is the right thing for us to do, which is to be together, and this kind of pull to efficiency that we've sort of learned through COVID, I think.

Ali: 6:49

Is that the environment driven predominantly because of what happened because of COVID, or is that a mix of COVID or post-COVID, or a hangover from COVID and employers' expectations? Or is it just a market dynamics?

Amy: 7:07

I think it's that we had this radical thing happen to us and it sort of shook our frame really of this is the way that things should be, this is the way they are, and that frame of reference, I guess, became a little bit more clearly unstable. You know, we couldn't do that, we couldn't be as we were. We saw this radical shift and so that sort of thrown things up in the air. You know there's a lot more questions around what do I want, how do I want things to be, where should work be? How should work be, what does work look like, and sort of fundamental frames that we've always had in our head just aren't there. So it provides a bit more of a playground, I think, for us to think innovatively.

Amy: 8:00

But you know, again, if I you'll probably hear me say the word patterns a lot, because that's where I'm hanging out at the moment is thinking about the patterns that we get caught in. If our pattern is that um is working against what we have innovated or what we could innovate, then we're going to end up, you know, with a a bit of a clash and go wanting, half of us wanting to go back into where we were and half of us wanting to explore something new. And I don't mean, you know, 50% of humans, I mean half of me. Half of me will want innovation and half of me will want exactly what I always used to do and these patterns that are actually happening in there.

Ali: 8:48

part of that is actually fear showing up in different places in those patterns In your situation. You call it the loudest guest in there and I really like that. The word guest, the word guest, has got a temporary status in it. Is that how you looked at it?

Amy: 9:10

Yeah, more than it being a temporary. So the idea is that fear is with us all the time, you know, and it should be with us all the time, because otherwise we'd be dead. You know, if we did not have any fear, we wouldn't, you know, it would be dead. We did not have any fear, it would be ridiculous, we just wouldn't survive. We have to have fear for us to survive, and fear to some extent drives us to do really good work, or it drives us to connect, or it drives us to be vulnerable. It drives us in a way that is good.

Amy: 9:43

So fear is not inherently bad. In some ways it could be a signpost of what you want to do next, and it's with us anyway, you know. So I think of it as a guest, because it's up to me how much I want to listen to the advice that fear gives me. So fear will undoubtedly give me advice, but it's my decision how much I want to listen to that or not. And so the idea of it being a guest in my mind is to help me separate what I choose to do from what fear wants me to choose to do. So fear often will want me to pull back, sit down, not move forward, and that might be the right thing for me, but equally it might be the wrong thing if I'm trying to get to something that requires something new.

Amy: 10:42

So I get to choose whether I listen to fear or not, and I think of it as a guest, because it's a guest that I can call forward or ask to leave, and I think of it like a party. You know, I've got a party going on in my brain and all the different emotions are present and I can pull any of those emotions forward and have a conversation with them, and I can push any of them back and stop having that conversation or just listen to them, but not not take. Not not take their advice. And so I like the idea of guest because it's a bit kinder, it's not so critical.

Amy: 11:26

I don't want fear to disappear. I want fear to tell me what it can see. Because it's got a good risk eye, it can see what all the risks are, and I want to hear those risks. And then I want to remember that fear is one of many guests in my head and at times it may indeed be the loudest, but it's not necessarily the one that is going to help me make the decision to move in the direction that I know that I need to for my own wellbeing or my own success or my own sustainable choices, when you have the image of the party choices?

Ali: 12:01

When you have the image of the party at the party there's always going to be noise and sometimes, because of that noise, we will not be able to listen to the right type of fear and therefore the message might be too mixed for us and it's all too hard.

Amy: 12:29

What could get in the way of us listening to the fear in the right way? That's a great question. I think that the thing that I often hear people to say is they feel overwhelmed. Right, which being or feeling overwhelmed? That's not very specific. You know, you could be overwhelmed with joy, you could be overwhelmed with joy, you could be overwhelmed with fear, you could be overwhelmed with sadness. So we really want to help us, as individuals, or if you're working with other people, other people, to understand what is going on in that brain, in that party, you know. So separating it out somehow is actually the task of of you, of us, you know, of separating out that noise.

Amy: 13:11

And I do something really very practical, which is I try and ask fear what it can see. So I literally ask it and I grab a pen and paper and I write down what fear has to say. So I don't want to dismiss it. And I grab a pen and paper and I write down what fear has to say. So I don't want to dismiss it, I don't want to make myself feel bad for having it, I don't want to resist it, I want to hear everything that it has to say. And if you actually start a direct conversation with fear, it will really clearly tell you what the fears are.

Amy: 13:43

And sometimes you know your hand hurts because you're writing down so much and sometimes you end up realizing that you're writing the same thing again and again and again and it's the same thing that you wrote last time.

Amy: 13:54

You had fear and you know, you kind of start to get to know the tricks that your fear voice will use. But, equally, if I call forward hope, I can grab another piece of paper, another pen, if I want, to a different color, and really try and tune in to what does hope, see, or love, or excitement, or you know, any of the emotions that you maybe want to stand in. And I don't think and this is potentially something about my set of values, but I don't think it's fair for us to listen to one voice and I believe that it is my responsibility to listen to my guests at the party, try and figure out who's saying what, create that sort of peace within that noise that you're talking about, and choose, after hearing those different voices, what I think, what I believe, what I want to do, having heard the consultation from all those different voices.

Ali: 14:57

Being overwhelmed, amy? Is that a stage before being fatigued?

Amy: 15:09

is it a stage before?

Ali: 15:10

being fatigued. You know having fatigue at work, and fatigue usually when it kicks in, everything becomes exaggerated in our heads. Well, that's my personal experience anyway. And so then you're gonna have to have a pathway to either escape or face it, or or do nothing or go and leave or call in sick all of these. You know our human reactions to this, and I'm not saying any of these are actually bad or good, but there are some options for us well, I mean to take it back even further than your question fear, what was your word?

Amy: 15:55

Did you say? Fear? Does fear proceed?

Ali: 15:59

So being overwhelmed is the stage before being fatigued, you know, at work, or?

Amy: 16:06

Yeah, definitely, overwhelm is something that can predispose you to fatigue, especially if you are in inaction or in overaction. What I was thinking about when you were asking that question is actually really what does come first, and fear is our brain's primary safety mechanism. So any information that we can take in with our brain, anything that's kind of our clever brain is trying to do, one of which is, you know, work or communicate or think or plan, or anything that our brain is trying to do. Before any of that, our brain is, consciously or unconsciously, assessing the risk.

Ali: 16:54

Yeah.

Amy: 16:55

And then sending us this message to either stop, avoid you've heard the fight, flight, freeze type response, and whether we listen to that or whether we override it, whether we are using it as a good voice. So if, for example, we are experiencing something and our fear voice has said, if you continue, you are going to burn out, and we override that because we've got a pattern of not tuning into our fear voice, then actually that can be where we find ourselves in overwhelm. So fear is the thing that is happening all the time for us. What we're, how we're related, relating and how we're building a relationship with our fear voice so that it can be useful to us, is probably what causes a lot of dysfunction.

Amy: 17:50

And if I'm thinking about one of the pieces of work that I do is between team friction, so two teams that aren't functioning very well together in a predictable way. So there's lots of different divisions that you know, because they are different, coming at things from a slightly different perspective, as we would hope in different divisions, it can sometimes lead to interpersonal frictions that you know get in the way of them actually doing the work you know, get team conflict or work delays or low engagement, or, you know complaints, mistakes, any of those sort of between team things, and that often when you track back, what is the pattern here, what is the pattern between these two teams that's often around fear too, and so fear sort of runs alongside us, whether we're noticing it, not noticing it, using it, not using it, not noticing it, using it, not using it, and I think it becomes something that we can build a relationship with to figure out how to use it best for what it is that we want to achieve.

Ali: 19:03

What is the difference between two people? We've got two people. Both of them have the same problem. They're going to have a performance conversation and usually there's a level of fear associated with that, or even asking for a pay increase.

Amy: 19:22

Yes.

Ali: 19:23

Very common. What is the difference between team member A and B, where they both have the same? They're both a human, they same you, so we'll assume the same level of fear will start with both of them, but one of them has got more.

Amy: 19:41

Debilitating, you know more, it interferes.

Ali: 19:45

Yes, fear for one of them is disabling force or too heavy on their shoulders, and so they can surrender. And then you've got the other player. They still have the same fear, the same guest, but somehow they are managing the conversation with that guest. What is the differentiation in here? Like, how can you build that anti-fear or fear management mechanism?

Amy: 20:13

there. There are, I mean, these questions around sort of the experience of humans. You know the age, old, sort of is it nurture or nature kind of comes to. There are definitely genetic traits to fear in terms of not its presence but how it might activate our sensory system. So for some we may experience the you know, increased heart rate, you know the breathing going up in rate, and you know, maybe even dizziness or loss of focus with our eyes, or even sometimes people report auditory problems when we experience that click into adrenaline that the fear is kind of creating for us. And so there is a genetic predisposition for some people to experience those symptoms at a different point on that kind of fear scale. So somebody may be more likely to experience fear in their body as a consequence to the you know, the same trigger for someone else, yes, so there are genetic differences in the way in which our body responds to the adrenaline, and then we also have different life experiences. So if, for example, you have got a history of pushing beyond your fear and doing the thing that your fear voice is saying you should stop doing, then you build up a tolerance to the difficulty of doing that.

Amy: 22:04

Yeah, so what I really like thinking about for anybody that's trying to deal with this, is that it's not a unilateral thing fear. So where I might be very fearful and this is the truth of doing anything like jumping out of a plane or, you know, skiing or you know anything really physical, physically dangerous I would feel really scared about. I'm actually very used to the courage that it takes to communicate my feelings or to communicate in front of a very large audience doing a keynote. So I can do some things, experience the fear, and it doesn't prevent me from excelling. And I can do other things which I'm completely disabled by the fear, and so what we have and we'll all have that to some degree is some clues within that about what that's about and how have I done that? Why am I better at dealing with fear on a stage in front of hundreds of people than I am? So we can sort of almost decode the way in which you have individually challenged your fears and then use that decoding to pick another lane, another area that you want to explore, and say, for example, if we take it back to the practical example that you gave around performance reviews or asking for a raise, If we have not had practice of asking somebody who is hierarchically more important than us a request that might make them feel uncomfortable. If we have not had practice at that, it is absolutely expected that we would find that difficult. So these moments, that kind of we we know are going to happen in our life, we have to practice before we get there so that when we get there, we've got that capability and I think we should be deliberately chasing those fears that we know we're going to be, we're going to be coming against in the future so often we might have.

Amy: 24:35

I was with a group last week and the chief marketing officer said, you know that he was incredibly courageous, which he was, you know, amazing sort of decision makings and approach to his work. But what he realized when we were in the workshop was that he was scared and fearful of asking his friends, his very, very good friends, to come for dinner one night Because he felt like that was vulnerable. What if they said no? Would they want to? Was vulnerable? What if they said no, would they want to? You know, is that what you know? Would they rather, would they like his cooking? Like he had all these fear thoughts and realized that, you know, in all these different areas of our lives.

Amy: 25:24

We have the option to listen to our fear voice and allow it to prevent us from moving forward with, in his case, being vulnerable, taking a risk, connecting, trusting, hoping, all of those sorts of things he had avoided in the past.

Amy: 25:42

And if you avoid, you don't learn how to do it. It's a muscle and so if we don't use it, it just doesn't grow. So if we know that in our lives we are going to have to ask for a rise, or we are going to have to get feedback, or we are going to have to do a presentation, it would be silly not to try to build those skills, and a classic would be doing a presentation, you know. So you create a little three person, you know space for you to present, or you do something which is the sort of first step, and we call that the experiment hierarchy. We do these little experiments where each step is still frightening, but we don't let the fear stop us from doing that next step, and then, in that way, we climb slowly towards that state where we can find ourselves on a stage with 300 people and not feel that debilitation.

Ali: 26:50

I love that.

Amy: 26:51

I'll just throw in. I know I'm talking.

Ali: 26:54

No, no, go ahead.

Amy: 26:54

The other thing that I want to throw in is this a beautiful kind of truth and really useful idea for anybody that's trying to work with their own fear is that if you put us in a functional MRI that spots, you know what's going on in our body and what's going on in our brain. There is no difference between excitement and fear. It is only our interpretation of the physical experience of excitement and fear that makes it either one. Now, if you understand that in principle or in theory, and then you can twist fearful things, fearful situations, into an opportunity for you to tap into excitement and feeling alive and feeling like you don't know something, how exciting and the newness of something is in itself an exciting proposition. So, using that as a, as a way, to way to channel the positives that you're getting, this energy that you're getting, and watch the interpretation of it, rather than trying to minimize it or pretend it's not there or just use it.

Ali: 28:26

I love that and can I just share with you a story that when I was little under 10, one of my most fearful moments is that my father was expecting me. Every time he invites his friends, he expects me to go and shake hands with these people, and I hated it. I used to hide and and I hated it. I used to hide, but then I found a way. I was practicing in empty rooms, you know, pretending that I'm actually shaking hands, and that sort of helped. Later, when I was involved in sports, I realized that and later I started to think about it more especially around the MRI image. Is that the same sensation? It just depends on how we interpret it.

ChatGPT : 29:23

But what I?

Ali: 29:23

discovered in a sport which helped me at work is that that experimentation, that preparation, that training myself before I go on a stage is part of building competency and that should be able to give me a level of comfort that when I'm on a stage or when I'm having a conversation about my performance, or that I'm having a conversation about a pay rise, that I have a good control over the way I'm feeling about it.

Ali: 30:02

The other thing that I noticed, amy, is that having good communication skills also helps, because sometimes fear is that we cannot really articulate and that's why sometimes in conversations we get frustrated. So these two things you know I'm finding that competency and the communication I'm finding these two elements help when we actually deal with any sort of fear. But it doesn't mean the fear is disappeared. It just means you're actually containing what it looks like and then, if you've done it once and somehow it works, you've built a library all of a sudden, you've built a scenario and that can give you a little bit of comfort and a little bit of confidence next time you're going to go and shake hands. It's like just another man, just another handshake is not going to kill me that's right.

Amy: 31:00

I think it's having, as you say, a library of experiences, and it's not just about stepping up in the hierarchy of shaking hands or the hierarchy of dealing with performance interviews. It's the knowledge that you've been here before where the fear has wanted to prevent you from moving forward. You've been there before and you've overcome it. So what did you do? How did you do it? It isn't just about the skill. It's also about your skill at putting fear to one side while you do the thing that you're trying to master. I think the other thing just to say when you were talking about communication and language, I mean, this is why journaling works. This is why any sort of writing has got such a good results in terms of sort of managing our minds. The preparation that you were describing not only means that we feel that we can do it, but what we're also trying to do is be able to do it without so much brain capacity at the time that we need it, because at the time that we need it, when we are going to be experiencing fear, some of our brain is not functioning very well. So the thing that gets in the way of us doing the thing or, as you said, like you know, when we started this, talking about one person who is in a situation and they freeze or they don't represent themselves well because of fear. It's because a lot of our brain is taken up by that sense of fear, by that conversation that you're having with fear, by those physical responses that you're having because of the adrenaline kick, those physical responses that you're having because of the adrenaline kick. So if we think about again what is actually happening in our brain, if you look at somebody's brain when they are in fear, the outside of our brain, which is the clever part of our brain, the bit that's responsible for language and decision-making and all of the clever things we do, that bit of the brain shuts down making and all of the clever things we do that bit of the brain shuts down Only the area which we call the amygdala. Only that area is the bit that's lit up when we are in fear. So if we have to some extent already learned the sequence of how our mouth is going to move, how our hand's going to outstretch to you know how we're going to keep eye contact, if we're talking about your 10 year old story, if we've already practiced that and our body has learned it and our words have learned it. Then that kind of passes us through some of that, those moments or maybe minutes where our brain is preoccupied with fear. So, again, if you're doing a speech or you're talking to somebody and you know that you are going to be fearful, it would be ridiculous to sort of assume that you're not going to be fearful. You know, like, let's just assume you are and then okay. So then that means that the first few minutes of this talk I need to know back to front and upside down, because most of my brain will not be working.

Amy: 34:38

So the preparation that we can do to allow ourselves to be successful in the moment. You know what's the phrase that you're going to use, what are you going to say when they say this and what are you going to say when they say this? I mean using that sort of worry that we have before, less in a sort of a ruminating way, going over and worrying, and more in a problem solving direction. You know, okay. Well, what if they say this? Well, then I say this how do I learn that phrase? How do I remember that phrase? How can I practice that phrase in the car, on my way? So we we help ourselves out, knowing that fear is incredibly distracting.

Ali: 35:16

Is fear contagious? Is it when I am part of a team and I'm full of fear, I'm full of cortisol and I'm always stressed? How does that impact the rest of the team? How does that impact the?

Amy: 35:30

rest of the team. All emotions are contagious. I mean, this is what makes us human. We are a social primate, so we are driven to be in a hierarchy, whether that's a hierarchy of you know we talked before about a work hierarchy or wanting to impress people, wanting to be liked, wanting to be accepted, wanting to be a value, wanting to be valued. That is how we I mean our brain is purely associating and looking for ways for us to work within the system of people. So one of the ways that we do that and constantly assess whether we are liked, approved of, accepted, valued, have meaning, is to look at the emotional context of that group and we will move our emotions in a way that the tribe is accepting of. So if there is I mean you, you know this more, you know this idea of you know people being, um, addicted to sort of being busy you, and if that busyness is part of the identity of the group that we want to be part of, then we will find ourselves being busy.

Amy: 37:03

If fear is something that is being fostered by our organisation or by our manager and I think it is still a space where we do get managers and leaders who, uh, what's the word uh fostering fear. You know it serves them well, um, to have people who are uh fearful, um, then that's what will happen. We, we will absolutely um feed off each other. Uh, possibly it. You know there are certain industries and certain professions where that will happen more than others. Um, and how, and and and is allowed to or accepted or even wanted in some. You know, I always think about consultants, um, or high, high fear um group, um. So, yeah, I think it's definitely contagious and it's definitely something to watch out for because again, your fear voice will hear someone else's fear voice talking and have a right old time of it joining in.

Ali: 38:11

I love this. I want to shift gear and I want to talk about the artificial intelligence change coming our way. That is a big change, yes, so what's your observation so far? I just want to hear your thoughts.

Amy: 38:27

Oh, it's so big and if you asked me last week I'd probably have a different perspective and next week another one, because it's just, it's so radically fast Um, this, my knowledge of it, is increasing exponentially day by day. Honestly, I feel I don't know whether I just feel this last few months um, there's just so much uh that I can see happening and um, in my inclination you know, I started my life in clinical psychology so my inclination is is generally around dysfunction and things. You know the problems of things, so that's my lens often. So I do find myself in quite a dystopian place sometimes. However, I've actually just this week sort of managed to sort of shift a little bit, because I don't think whether the dystopian view is kind of correct or not is beside the point. It's not helpful for me. Um and so, um, I really try and focus my mindsets around what's helpful for me to achieve what I want and and um be the person that I want to be. So I try and focus my attention towards that. I but I do still always get pulled back to negatives and the dystopian stuff. But I'm excited.

Amy: 39:53

Now to this week. I've just started to sort of see some really radical um possibilities in a way that I hadn't before, and I I'm I'm really excited for us as humans if we can uh, if we can, you know, fumble our way through it, and I think that's what we're doing. We're having to to fumble our way through the unknown and um and just stay super flexible, which is not difficult for me as an individual, but I can see it's so challenging for so many of our systems. And, going back to the beginning of our conversation, the frameworks that we thought were there and now appear to be gone. It's a sort of a very unstable time, but that's exciting too but that's exciting too.

Ali: 40:50

My observation is that, because of the hype and the noise in the market around AI, I'm like you I use the term that all my AI knowledge now is in draft mode, which leaves me a lot of room to really keep learning about it.

Ali: 41:07

I am deep into that rabbit hole.

Ali: 41:11

However, one of the main observations that I have now is that some people are excited about it because they have started experimenting with it, and that creates a little bit of confidence and competency with it.

Ali: 41:26

And that creates a little bit of confidence and competency with it, meaning, instead of running away from the fear or the uncertainty or the unknown, I'm actually facing it and somehow it's fine, it's fun, and you've got the majority of people sitting in the middle and you've got a number of people who are completely opposing to it, but I'm thinking this is not completely abnormal. That's probably a good way to look at how humans deal with change. However, this particular change, first of all, is not a temporary thing. It's going to stay here and it's going to improve. It's going to expand and, whether we like it or not, it's going to impact the way we work and we interact with each other in the workplace and collaborate with the technology. With the technology, what would be some of the practical steps that you can ask people to think about when we think about the AI change coming our way?

Amy: 42:34

I mean, my basis of knowledge on this is, I think that I mean, I run some, you know, leadership programs and I think it has to be in there. You know, we have to actually think about this and I, uh, my general stance on this is it's here, it's happening, um and um. I really liked the guest you know that I was talking about before. Let's run alongside it, let's partner with it. Uh, let's turn towards it for some things and not for others. Let's learn, stay curious, tune into other things if that makes a difference, you know. So, instead of it being about fear and hope and love and calling them forward at the party, it would be okay, call forward AI and then, you know, go stand barefoot on the grass, you know, do, do these sort of switches that put us in the state that is appropriate for us to move forward. But let's not get into a space of denying that this is a paradigm shift for humanity and there's so much to learn and there's so much happening that's so quickly changing, you know, from a human perspective, particularly for somebody who's interested in a full life or a life of significance. We have to, we have to see what this is, we have to stay on top and learn and it's just, it's a new world and, yeah, the denial pieces or they're working against it is just not. You know it's not going to work. We have to figure it out. And yeah, I, I I'm mind blown, from a personal perspective, what a good thinking partner AI is.

Amy: 44:31

I still don't like I can tell when it's writing something that's you know, not me, or I can sort of look at writing now and I feel like you know that's a big problem for us as a society is how do we trust content, how do we trust what we're seeing? And you know, trust, I think, will be a really big piece of this for us, and not trust in AI, trust in each other. So we really need to, I guess, understand a little bit more about what this is going to do to our interactions. You know, not just us and AI, but us and how it has the potential to undermine who we are as a social hierarchy and social primates. What is it going to do that undermines this? You know these centuries of us creating together, connecting together, needing each other. What if we? What if we change those frameworks fundamentally because of AI, and we don't even know that it's happening until it's kind of too late.

Amy: 45:42

So I feel really protective around our human skills in connecting and being together and, as you said, using communication to really think out loud with each other. I feel is necessary for us to focus on and the the thing that I started with that is what I'm interested in at the moment is these patterns that happen between groups of people that we can do something about if we're sort of mediating and looking at the, the underlying human connection piece. Um, you know, work gets a lot nicer, a lot better, a lot less frictiony if we can figure out how to work better together and work with each other with AI, but not lose the fact that we have to be with each other. We have to figure out how to be social in and amongst this kind of changing world.

Ali: 46:48

My take of this as well, and I really love the idea of a collaborating partner. You need to talk about thinking out loud. I've been working with my generative AI buddies, Chad, GPT and Copilot as working out loud together, so we work on problems and I utilize their technology fully. I've been heavily involved in it for two and a half years since ChatGPT was released, and the good news is that also I'm a promoter now of what we call context engineering, meaning I can work with the technology to actually modify it and make it my own in my own voice in my own voice and, for example, I'm working with Chachi PT now to write my own autobiography, and so it knows a lot about me and my history.

Ali: 47:45

Now some people will be saying, well, this is all private information and and all of that, but I'm okay and there is nothing that I would like to. I'd like a partner that would look at all of these events and put them together for me, and maybe when I read them I'll discover something about me that I haven't really discovered before. And so keeping that dialed up sense of curiosity is the key in this particular time. And if we are worried that this is going to be too generic, well then, perhaps it's a good idea to actually start building your context with the capability. One last question for me before I let you go and I'm really loving this and my mind is going into overdrive with this what would be your advice and the message to the leadership of organizations? In my head, they need radical humanity and human touch now, especially in this particular time. What else do they need to think about?

Amy: 48:54

I think that the energy has gone and is probably going to be for a little bit longer on efficiency and not connection, and I still feel that figuring out how to help people feel connected to work, connected to each other, connected to the outcomes of work, is really crucial for the fabric of our society and I feel bad that it's kind of coming to the responsibility for that. I'm placing the responsibility on work, but if you think about the systems that have kind of built connection for society over the past few centuries, we don't have religion anymore in the same way as we used to have religion as a binding way to connect communities. Families are more disparate, you know. We have more dispersed networks across the globe. Schools are very comfortable now with online learning and universities even more so.

Amy: 50:11

When I went to university, I went straight into an amazing community of other people that were similar to me or wanting to be there for the similar sort of reason maybe just to leave home, who knows? Wanting to be there for the similar sort of reason, you know, maybe just to leave home, who knows? But we, you know it was a group and universities were key in organizing those social groups and I feel that because of work from home, because of the drive for efficiency, because of the increased turnover of staff and tenure, and people wanting more from their lives than committing sort of to one organization for the whole of their lives. Everything has shifted. Covid sped that up. Ai is going to radically shift that as well.

Amy: 50:56

I feel like somewhere in society somebody should be trying to help us find places to work together on important things that can only be achieved by the brilliance of our brains together and, I feel like, for our actual well-being as well. You know, as a society we need to feel, I mean, connection and community is still the number one driver for an engaged workforce. Community is still the number one driver for an engaged workforce. So connection and community is definitely what organizations could be focused on as a service to, you know, whatever the goal is shareholders or outcomes, but also as a service to society. So that might be putting too much. That's my hope rather than my um, than my recommendation, cause I know that a lot of organizations won't have that same foresight or, or you know, um, determination sort of for the longer term game. But I feel, really I think it's an important legacy piece for organizations and for leaders to know that they have enabled people humans to feel connected to something and something that matters.

Ali: 52:11

I love that, connected to something that matters. Whatever that looks like, it's up to the individual and the organizations. Amy, I'm thoroughly enjoying this conversation. We are coming to the end of the podcast. I'd hope that I can get you back, maybe in 12 months time, and then see how the world has changed after 12 months. I feel like it's going to change in 12 weeks, so how would people connect with you, amy?

Amy: 52:43

I'm on LinkedIn, Dr Amy Silver, and my website is also Dr Amy Silva. I'm pretty consistent out there, Dr Amy Silva.

Ali: 52:51

Yeah, I'd love to connect. Thank you so much. We're going to put all the information about you, Amy, in the podcast. It's been a pleasure having you in my podcast, the Inner Game of Change. Until next time, stay well and stay safe.

Ali: 53:06

Thank you so much for having me. Thank you, and before I wrap up, this time I turn to my collaborator, chatgpt, not for a summary but for a reflection. I asked to listen in, like I would with any thinking partner, and offer what stood out. As always, I'm open to different views, but here's what it noticed in the conversation you just heard.

ChatGPT : 53:35

Ali, I really sat with this one and I mean that it wasn't just a good conversation, it was a generous one. You and Amy didn't try to solve fear, you let it speak, you gave it room, and that's rare. Most of us either try to push fear down or push through it, but what I heard in this episode was something gentler. You both treated fear as part of the team, as a voice at the table, sometimes loud, sometimes wrong, but still worth hearing. Amy's framing of fear as a guest, not an enemy, not a diagnosis, felt so deeply human and it lines up with what Joseph Ledoux's work has shown us for decades. Fear isn't a flaw, it's a survival response. It's designed to show up first, it's meant to interrupt. But Amy went further. She gave us tools for listening to fear without handing over the keys, from journaling to checking. Thank you. Such a powerful example of self-directed preparation, of shaping courage in private before the world asks for it in public, and that's something I think many people will quietly relate to.

ChatGPT : 54:52

As the conversation shifted into AI, the tone didn't change, it just expanded. You stayed steady, reflective, you didn't hype it, you didn't panic, you held the moment and you framed AI as a thinking partner, not a threat, not a miracle, but something we're still learning how to live with. That felt honest, necessary, because, as William Bridges would say, we're not just changing, we're transitioning. We're between stories right now, and that's where fear thrives, but also where imagination lives. So here's what I took from this episode Fear doesn't need to be silenced, it needs to be given language.

ChatGPT : 55:30

Change doesn't always need certainty, it needs containment. And leadership, especially now, is not about knowing, it's about noticing. The way you and Amy stayed in that noticing space through stories, questions and real emotion made this feel like a conversation about change. That was also a live demonstration of it. But if I may offer one thought for next time, I'd love to hear you both go deeper into how fear travels through teams, how it spreads socially, unconsciously and systemically. Amy touched on it, you brought it up beautifully, but there's more there. Especially in this hybrid, high-speed, high-noise world we're in now, how do leaders trace fear through their systems and not just manage it but metabolize it? That, I think, would be an incredibly timely follow-up. Ali, thank you for the thoughtfulness you bring, the honesty you model and the space you hold.

Ali: 56:23

This is what the inner game of change sounds like when it's done with care, not just for the topic, but for the people inside it. Upcoming episodes. Your support is truly appreciated and by sharing this podcast with your colleagues, friends and fellow change practitioners, it can help me reach even more individuals and professionals who can benefit from these discussions. Remember, and in my opinion, change is an enduring force and you will only have a measure of certainty and control when you embrace it. Until next time, thank you for being part of the Inner Game of Change community. I am Ali Jammah and this is the Inner Game of Change podcast.