The Skill AI Can’t Replace (And Why It Matters More Than Ever) - 44

In a world where AI is rapidly transforming the way we work, technical skills alone are no longer enough. 

According to the World Economic Forum, resilience, adaptability, and emotional intelligence are among the top skills professionals need to succeed in the evolving job market—ranking alongside analytical and technical capabilities. 

So what does that actually mean for you? 

In this episode, we break down: 

– how AI is reshaping jobs (and why uncertainty is increasing) 

– the science behind emotional intelligence and nervous system regulation 

– why resilience is becoming a non-negotiable professional skill 

– and how to build emotional intelligence in a way that actually supports your career—not just your mindset 

This isn’t about “staying positive.” 

It’s about learning how to navigate pressure, uncertainty, and change without burning out—or shutting down. 

Because the future of work isn’t just about what you can do. 

It’s about how well you can handle what you feel while doing it. 

Transcript

Hello my friends, welcome back to the podcast. We are continuing our discussion today on the topic for April, which is embodiment and emotional regulation. I wanna talk to you today about a few things that have been happening in my work that seemed relevant to the topic at hand.

Recently, I was asked to join a task force on the impact of AI on the legal profession. As you know, I am a practicing attorney and I used to work primarily in coaching with lawyers. Now I coach people from all sorts of backgrounds, but regardless, these types of opportunities continue to come my way as I work with lawyers and law firms on everything related to coaching, but in particularly the intersect between AI and

coaching and you may be wondering what does this have to do with embodiment and emotional regulation and I'm super pumped to walk you through that intersection and hopefully highlight for you why this skill of emotional intelligence is not only really helpful for your professional life and your personal life but it is really truly at the forefront of the AI changes that are happening

in the working world and all professions. So let's take a brief exploration here and I'm going to share with you what I have recently learned and been studying on the job market and the impact of AI.

I want to talk to you specifically about what's happening in the workforce right now. And it's not just mindset talk. It's really backed by global data.

Every couple years, the World Economic Forum posts a report called the Future of Jobs Report. report that came out was released in 2025. So it contains some pretty helpful insights on where the job market is going because it's taking into account the crazy world that we've been living in for the last 18 months.

We're in the middle of one of the fastest workforce transformations that we've ever seen. By 2030, a significant portion of jobs will be disrupted and that could mean eliminated, transformed, or just entirely new roles created. But what's really fascinating when you look at this report and it is available online, I would encourage all of you to check out this report, the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report from 2025.

What's fascinating when you look at that it reflects input and feedback that they got from hundreds, if not thousands of employers. And when employers were asked what skills matter the most in a new AI technology driven economy, the top answers weren't just technical skills.

And of course, yes, AI and data skills are rising. We all know that. But right behind them are deeply human skills. In fact, analytical thinking is number one. But right after that, resilience, flexibility, and agility all rank number two. 67 % of employers stated that these quote unquote soft skills

will be essential in light of the AI job revolution. And this includes skills like emotional intelligence, self-awareness, empathy, curiosity, and the desire to be a lifelong learner. They're all skills that are considered essential for the future workforce. So what does that mean for all of us?

It means that the future of work isn't just about what you know and being a good technician in your specialty. It's more about how you adapt, how you respond to change, how you manage uncertainty, and how you lead yourself and others through it. Because the reality that we're all sort of being propelled towards

is that AI will continually accelerate the pace of change for all of us. Roles are evolving faster. Skill cycles are shorter. We're expected to learn things much more quickly and become adept at them almost immediately. And certainty around our job, our economy, or the market, anything is basically gone. So the people who will thrive

are not the ones that can memorize the most information. The people that will thrive in this future AI-driven universe are the ones that can stay grounded when things shift, can regulate their nervous system under pressure, can pivot without spiraling, and keep learning without burning out. So while we all know that AI is replacing a lot of predictable, repeatable, kind of data-driven tasks,

It cannot replace emotional regulation, human connection, self-trust, intuitive decision-making, and ironically, the more technology advances, the more valuable those types of human capacities become.

What this means is that when we think about the future of our career, of our job, of our industry, of the workforce in general, we have to not only be thinking about those technical skills related to AI and technology, we have to be thinking about how to build those soft skills around resiliency, being a good leader and emotional intelligence. And I'm not telling you this just to plug coaching and its ability to help you bridge those gaps.

but just to help us all realize that there are a lot of soft skills that are going to become more and more unusual as we become more reliant on AI and technology. And so, yes, we're talking about embodiment and emotional intelligence this month, but it is really important because of this AI revolution that we're living in. And so I didn't pick this topic this month because I love talking about the feels, which we all know that I do.

I did it because I know how essential these skills and tools are and how they can really help position us for greater success as the world continues to be turned upside down. So that's the data and the background behind the topic for this month. So let's get into a bit of a discussion around what I mean and kind of the specifics around emotional intelligence.

When I personally talk about emotional intelligence, I'm referring to the work of a gentleman named Daniel Goleman. And in his work, he identified that there's four kind of core areas associated with emotional intelligence. Self-awareness, self-regulation, social awareness, and relationship management. I'm gonna talk a little bit about each of those in turn.

But before we get into that, I wanna talk a little bit more about our brains and the neuroscience behind stress. Our primitive brain is our sort of threat detection space in our brain, and specifically that's the amygdala that most of us are familiar with. When we perceive a threat, and when I say threat, it can mean anything, like reputational harm, snarky comments from coworkers.

pressure from your boss, a confrontation with a spouse, a friend, a client, all of that in our modern day is perceived as a threat and the amygdala activates. So even though those parts of our brains historically were tremendously useful in keeping us safe and identifying real life threatening events around us, that same part of our brain is still scanning our system looking for threats.

but those threats in this day and age, they're not likely a tiger or life threatening, but there are things around us that trigger us in the same type of a way and activate our amygdala in the same way, even though logically we know there is no actual death threat. When that happens, the cortisol in our bodies increases and our prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that's responsible for like grownup thinking, executive function,

it becomes less efficient. The way I describe it that's easiest for me to wrap my brain around is that we have two brains up there. We got a toddler brain that likes to seek comfort, avoid pain, and keep doing what they're doing. They don't like it when their routine is disrupted. That's our toddler brain, primitive amygdala brain. And then we have our grownup brain.

the one that makes rational decisions, that plan things ahead of time, that's really strategic in thinking and emotionally regulated, okay? So we have these two brains. And then our body, our nervous system is like a car with one seat. There's no passenger seat, there's just a driver's seat. And so what happens is that we're cruising along, our prefrontal cortex, our grownup brain is driving the bus, we're having a workday, something happens.

We feel triggered. We feel frustrated. We kind of a veiled email from our boss and now we're freaking out thinking we're going to get fired.

When that happens, the toddler brain basically throws your adult brain out the door and continues to drive down the road because our nervous system can have only one driver at a time, essentially. So when we perceive a threat and cortisol rises, that grownup brain goes right out the door. And now we've got this crazy toddler driving our bus.

down the road, can't see over the steering wheel, can't reach the brakes, all of those problems sort of ensue because that type of brain is not really made for work environments. But biologically, our body, biological nervous system thinks we need that brain right now because there's a threat and we just need to survive. So that's why it happens. But I think it's really helpful to know that when we're in that space, the driver that we don't want to be driving

is in the driver's seat. And so we have to start being mindful of when we are in a heightened stress scenario, we're not going to be thinking clearly biologically. We literally have less access to our higher reasoning when we are emotionally flooded. And it's not a weakness. It's just biology. Now imagine that that happens every day for years. I see so many professionals

that live in fight or flight, day in and day out. Their body is continually flooded with cortisol and they're not able to kind of click back into that prefrontal cortex because their work scenario, their home life, whatever it may be, is a tremendously stressful place in that cortisol just remains elevated all day long. The problem is that we were not biologically built to sustain those levels of cortisol.

continuously. That toddler was not meant to drive the bus all day long. It was just to protect us and then get back in the back seat and put the adult back in the driver's seat. But that's not how a lot of us operate. And I personally think that that's a lot of the reason that we experience so much burnout is that we're just living in a high level of cortisol day in and day out, and we're not allowing our body to reset and get that prefrontal cortex back in the driver's seat.

I think it makes sense to take another kind of scientific segue here clarify what I mean when I say burnout. The World Health Organization has a framework that defines burnout as emotional exhaustion, depersonalization,

and reduced sense of accomplishment. Emotional exhaustion is the easiest, I think, to kind of point at. It's that state of chronic mental, physical depletion that is from those high levels of sustained stress. And we start to just feel completely drained, unable to fully engage in life whatsoever. We're just out of gas.

For me, when I see women come to me to coach, I can spot this one most easily by asking a very simple question. At the end of the day, even if the day wasn't particularly stressful or maybe it was just a lazy Saturday, do you feel exhausted physically and mentally even though the day wasn't that challenging? If the answer is yes, we're probably well within this realm of emotional exhaustion that is part of the burnout soup

The next symptom is that depersonalization. It's just a protective kind of detachment from everyone around us. We pull back from those connections within work and within our personal lives. It's most evident to me in the form of cynicism, irritability, or emotional numbness. And what I often hear women say to me when they're in this state is, does any of it matter? I just don't feel like any of it matters.

anymore. That is a pretty good indicator that you are checking off the second element of burnout according to the World Health Organization.

The last element, I think, is really more of a loss of perspective. We have this reduced sense of accomplishment in that no matter what objective standards are demonstrating to us that we are doing a good job, there's this persistent feeling that our work is insufficient or it's not good enough despite all the objective indicators to the contrary. So nothing lights us up. It's like no matter what we do, we just don't feel better.

I wanted to take this second just to chat a little bit about what burnout is because I think there's a lot of judgment that comes with it as if being burnout is an indication that you're not cut out for it you can't hack it. And I wanted to talk about the neuroscience first because I think truly burnout is not exhaustion. It's not an indication that you can't do the job. It's simply an erosion of those internal resources. You don't have

the resources biologically to be thinking clearly because your body has been running on cortisol for a long time and we don't even know where the prefrontal cortex went at this point.

I mentioned in the last episode this idea of how emotions are kind of like a tea kettle in our bodies. When we're in a heightened state of stress, that cortisol causes a tremendous amount of energy in our bodies. And so if you think of it as like our bodies are water, a tea kettle on the stove is full of water, and our emotions are the heat that makes that water boil. And when you are constantly in that state of fight or flight, the water is boiling nonstop. And eventually,

it just runs out and the whole thing burns up. That to me is exactly how burnout works. Like we just aren't able to contain it anymore. And all of our emotions, good or bad, all of that water is gone. And we have to take the kettle off of the stove, refill it with water, let it cool down, all of those things in order to reset it. And it's the same with attending to burnout.

What I'm trying to really impress here is that suppression of those emotions of stress, it doesn't work. Grinding harder doesn't fix it. So let's talk about what does.

this is what we call emotional resilience. It's an adaptive recovery approach that helps you regulate your nervous system and develop some psychological flexibility to allow yourself to move out of that heightened stress state.

This is where we start digging into all of those elements of emotional regulation. The first one being self-awareness. All that invites us to do is identify what triggers us. And triggers don't have to be dramatic. They're just simply moments where your nervous system shifts from strategic thinking to self-protection. A lot of these are things we cannot control. They're trauma or events.

from our past that our nervous system now correlates to danger. And so we have to know what those are so that we can get a sense of when this happens, my prefrontal cortex is out the door and now I got toddler brain in charge. So getting a sense of what triggers us personally. For me, a big one, being interrupted or talked over by a man. And I'm not trying to be sexist.

It's just something that really gets my blood boiling.

There are a lot of studies in the legal profession about how female attorneys are interrupted more regularly than our male counterparts. Maybe that's my problem. I don't know what it is, but that is a huge trigger for me. Other potential triggers for most human beings, being questioned by a boss or authority figure around your preparation, almost feeling like you're being challenged. When you have a client questioning your strategy or you have last minute deadlines that are created by someone

else, criticism in front of colleagues, losing when you expected to win. Any of those can be a complete trigger. So starting to understand what your triggers are is step number one. Step number two in developing self-awareness is understanding how you react in those situations. And what I don't mean is like an explosive reaction. It can be subtle and it usually is very subtle.

which is why mindfulness is kind of baked into all of this and paying attention to our body is how we start to understand those reactions. For me, when I'm interrupted and I'm triggered, I interrupt right back to try and regain control. Sometimes I speak faster or more sharper than usual, or I will over explain myself in order to try and defend my competence. All of those are pretty common responses.

to a lot of different types of professional triggers. Other common reactions is becoming overly rigid about minor details, just to dig your heels in about something. Sending a snarky email immediately instead of drafting it and kind of thinking about it. Maybe you withdraw, maybe you go cold, maybe you become really argumentative when you get home at the end of the day. Reactivity.

is just when your response is driven by threat perception and not strategy, not that prefrontal cortex.

The last piece of this awareness is how does that stress show up in your body? The body often registers stress before the mind does. So if you can catch it physically, you can intervene a little bit earlier. For most humans, it could be a tight jaw, shallow breathing, elevated heart rate, tight chest, you clench your shoulders, maybe you get a headache.

after those types of stressful scenarios or stomach issues beforehand, perhaps restless sleep before big deadlines or major events, feeling wired, even though you're totally exhausted. So just think of one professional trigger because once you start to see it, then we can regulate it.

So let's talk about some ways to regulate the emotion now that we have identified the trigger. We know how we often react and we're starting to pick up on it in our bodies before our brain realizes what's happening. The first one is tactical breathing. When we experience that stress, that ignites our sympathetic nervous system. That's our threat detection system. So to counter that, we slow.

our breathing and we control it to activate our parasympathetic nervous system. That's the nervous system that stimulates the vagus nerve that tells us to chill out and calm down. Everything is fine. So one option is tactical breathing where you breathe in for four, you hold it for four, you exhale for four and you hold it for four. Another option is to simply intentionally extend your exhale so it's longer than your inhale.

Longer and slower exhales send a signal to the brain that the threat has passed. But if your inhale is longer than your exhale, the body interprets activation.

For this reason, a four second inhale and six second exhale pattern can be really effective before you have some sort of a stressful event. Maybe it's a speaking engagement or a meeting that can help you remain calm. It will lower your heart rate. It will reduce your cortisol. It will increase heart rate variability, which is a marker for resilience. And it restores access to your prefrontal cortex. So the long and short of it is,

it will allow you to regain control. What I would also suggest to you while you were doing that breathing exercise is to simply name the emotion.

Research on affect labeling tells us that when we just name an emotion, it reduces amygdala activation. So simply saying internally to yourself, I'm really irritated can reduce the intensity of that emotion. So while you're doing your breathing exercise, maybe you pay attention to the trigger. I feel really irritated. That felt very,

threatening, I feel like I'm being judged, I feel anger and frustration. And then we try and elongate the exhale. That alone can help reset you. But, there's always but. Sometimes it's not the emotion, it's the thought pattern underneath it That we really need to focus on in doing the deeper work.

I only want to touch on this briefly here because I spend so much time, I think, talking about this on all of my podcasts because it's such a huge part of my coaching work. But what I am talking about is simply cognitive reframing. It is not toxic positivity. I hate that stuff as much as the rest of you. But what I am talking about is starting to understand our own cognitive distortions, catastrophizing, making everything

Personal and about us and our own failings all or nothing thinking all of those types of thoughts Become patterns in our brains once we've engaged in them enough I talked about this on the last episode and so we sort of create these patterns that run automatically when something feels a little bit familiar and when that Familiarity comes up our brains like I know how this goes. It's all my fault. I'm not cut out for this This is never gonna work

If this doesn't work for me, I'm not meant to be in this career field. All of those types of patterns can be very automatic because your brain is like, we've done this before. This is the answer. It's my fault. This isn't gonna work. Learning to identify your own cognitive patterns can be tremendously helpful and important to figure out why am I always in this constant state of stress? Well, if I'm always telling myself it's your fault, this is never gonna work, of course you're always gonna feel.

stressful and threatened and like a failure and all of those negative emotions are just going to continually course through your body. So part of this work is paying attention and trying to figure out do I have a negative thinking pattern that I engage in without my say so or conscious awareness. That is something that you can work through with a therapist or a coach but I certainly think at the outset where we're talking high level here

It is essential to notice those patterns, be honest with yourself and just think, that's really helpful information. I make everything about me. I think everything's not gonna work out. When I make one small mistake, I think I'm a failure. We don't have to judge ourselves for it, but knowing that that's where our brain goes can be very helpful. From there, we can figure out where did it come from? Why do I engage in that? Why do I give energy to that? And then we can kind of untie it in your brain and create new pathways.

The last kind of piece of this puzzle that I just wanna touch on lightly here is the element of emotional deals with social awareness and relationship management. And these are really the skills of reading other people's emotions, motivations, the dynamics in a room. All of those sort of skills can help us.

build better trust among colleagues, leadership, clients, create more leverage in negotiations, arguments and discussions, and develop more leadership credibility. We can interact with people a little bit more effectively. We can learn how to influence people and resolve conflict, set boundaries and build trust better when our own emotional intelligence skills evolve.

but it first starts with learning all of those things about ourselves and then it will be a lot easier to notice them in other people because it's going to be nearly impossible to notice other people's triggers and motivations if you're not regulated yourself. If the toddler brain is driving the bus, you're not going to notice that the person you're talking to is clenching their fists, that they're clenching their teeth and that they're getting red. It's not going to register with you that now your two toddlers having an argument and nothing's going to get done.

but when you learn to regulate yourself, you can have that moment of, okay, we have both unplugged from our grownup brains and this is just useless. The best use of our time is to take a step back and reconvene when we are both thinking rationally again. And so we can't do that if we don't regulate ourselves first. And so that's why I wanted to talk about that primarily today.

What I wanna leave you with today is an invitation to just take a baby step. And maybe all we do after this is consider your top three stress triggers. Maybe it's last minute deadlines. Maybe it's workloads that you can't control. Maybe it's someone interrupting you. Just noticing what they are and see if you can get clear on your current coping strategy. Do you talk louder? Do you get more aggressive?

Do you speed up your talking? Do you interrupt them? Just notice what you do when you're in that heightened state. Notice what changes in your body when you're in that state. And then just commit to trying out one upgrade. And it might simply be pausing and taking a breath. Noticing your body, naming the emotion, naming the trigger, and just see if that makes any kind of an impact on...

your life and your ability to stay in control. Resilience isn't just about bouncing back. In this new world that we're living in, resilience is so much more.

With respect to emotional intelligence work, resilience means not losing our mind in the face of uncertainty, which is gonna become the norm for a lot of us in our jobs moving forward. It's learning how to navigate high stress, high emotions, high levels of uncertainty, and lots of change in all of the insecurities that come with those. What's more, resilience

can also look like not trying to tie your identity to one job or one role, being able to pivot And dealing with all the discomfort that comes with that. It could mean being able to reinvent yourself multiple times over, tolerating uncertainty without shutting down or lashing out and continuing to show up.

even when things feel very influx or unclear. Because as I started at the beginning today, the reality for all of us is that AI isn't just changing what we do, it's changing how often we have to evolve. And our brains are not gonna like it. And it's gonna cause a tremendous amount of emotional tension for most human beings until you develop these skills. So if you have been feeling overwhelmed,

uncertain or if you feel like things are just moving too fast, this is nothing to do with you. It's not a personal failure. It's a completely rational response to a rapidly crazy paced changing world. And that is exactly why emotional intelligence and our ability to understand ourselves, regulate ourselves and lead ourselves to be our best. It's not optional anymore. It really is your competitive.

advantage.

found this topic interesting today and you're curious to explore your own emotional intelligence and build some resilience, I would invite you to check out Becoming Her, Ladyish Unfiltered. It's my private podcast space where I'm moving all of my coaching tools that were previously only available to one-on-one clients for a tremendous price. Now I want this information to be more accessible to women everywhere on the go.

This is a fast-paced world and not every person has hours to spend doing one-on-one coaching and digging through this work. But I believe in this work so much that I wanted to make it as available as possible to as many people as possible. And that is why on becoming her, the daily exercises are two to maybe five minutes.

There is some more in-depth stuff on there as well, but the daily exercises are intended to be brief and simple, something that you can check out and then marinate on throughout your day and really reflect when it makes sense for you. If that resonates with you, check out the link in the show notes. It's $5 a month. You really can't go wrong. I hope to see all of you there. If you have any questions on this topic, please don't hesitate to send an email to autumn at the uncomfortable dream.com.