AI is over-riding your instincts | Why You Can't Trust Your Own Judgement Anymore

Is AI making it harder for you to trust your own instincts?

In this episode of Success Redefined, Ms Bella St John explores a growing problem many business owners, professionals, and leaders are quietly experiencing: AI is making it harder to trust your own judgment.

AI can be incredibly useful for writing, planning, brainstorming, and decision-making, but what happens when using AI as a second opinion slowly turns into relying on AI for validation? In this thoughtful episode, Bella shares real client examples of experienced professionals who began second-guessing their own instincts because the AI response sounded more polished, more certain, or more authoritative than their own thinking.

This conversation is not about avoiding AI. It is about using AI wisely, without allowing it to undermine your confidence, your professional instincts, or the judgment you have built through years of lived experience.

You will hear why AI often sounds confident even when it is wrong, how dependency can creep in through everyday decisions, and why there is a major difference between using AI to challenge your thinking and using AI because you no longer trust your thinking.

Bella also shares practical ways to notice whether you are checking your work or deferring to the tool, along with a simple way to rebuild confidence in your own decision-making.

If you use AI in your business, your writing, your client communication, or your leadership decisions, this episode will help you think more clearly about where AI supports you - and where it may quietly be taking over more than you intended.

To book a one-on-one AI Focus Session, visit:
🔗 https://bellastjohn.com/aicoaching

Topics covered in this episode include:
AI and decision-making, trusting your instincts, AI confidence, business judgment, human-centered AI, AI dependency, professional confidence, AI in business, using AI wisely, and how to work with AI without losing your own voice.

~ Bella

MS BELLA ST JOHN
Achievement Strategist, Writer, Artist

*     https://BellaStJohnInternational.com
*     https://ArtByBellaStJohn.com
*     https://www.linkedin.com/in/msbellastjohn/

~~~ Success Redefined ~~~
PS:  🐹 No animals were harmed in the creation of this video.  Made with recycled data. 🌼

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Is AI making it harder for you to trust your own instincts? Just think about that for a moment. Someone who's actually now a client of mine told me something a few months ago that I want to share with you and get your thoughts on. She'd written an email to one of her clients, nothing complicated, just a follow-up after a meeting, uh, but before she sent it, she pasted it into an AI tool that shall remain nameless to check whether or not it was quote unquote good enough. And I asked her why, and she said she wasn't sure anymore whether her own writing was up to standard without checking. Now, this is a woman who's been communicating professionally for I don't know, probably 10, 15, 20 years. Writing is part of how she built her business. But after about a year or so, I guess, of running everything through AI, she'd lost confidence in her own voice. And this is a bigger problem that I think most people consider. So, welcome to Success Redefined. I'm Bella Saint-Jean, and today let's talk about something I think is affecting more and more people, and that's that AI isn't just helping you make decisions in a lot of cases. For many people, it's slowly undermining your confidence to make them on your own. Here's where it usually starts. You use AI as a second opinion, which seems perfectly reasonable. I do that all the time. You've written something that you run through AI, and AI suggests some improvements, you take the ones that make sense, you throw away the ones that don't, and that's cool. But then you do it again next time, and then you do it again the next time, and after a while you stop trusting the version that you wrote before the AI weighed in. You start assuming the AI version is probably better, and eventually you stop finishing your own thoughts before checking what AI thinks. Now that's not productivity, that's a confidence leak. And this client that I mentioned, she has she's a background in marketing. She's really good at what she does, and she has strong instincts about what works and what doesn't. And when she first started using AI, it was genuinely helpful. She used it to speed up and to brainstorm angles and to organize her thinking. But somewhere along the journey something shifted, and she started running every strategic decision, pretty much every life decision through AI before she committed to it. Not just content decisions, not just business decisions, but life decisions. She'd form an opinion and then she'd go, oh, I need to check this with AI first. And if the AI suggested something different, she'd second guess herself almost every single time. And I asked her very point blank, when AI disagrees with you, who do you think in most cases is correct? And she thought about it and said, honestly, I usually just go with what AI says. Now think about that. This is a woman with industry experience, with life experience, with a successful business track record, deferring to a tool that sounds confident and produces well-structured reasoning, but a tool that is essentially just pattern matter matching, sorry, based on general information. And she was overriding her instincts so often because the AI's answer looked more polished and put together than hers, felt. And that's a big difference. The feeling part of that. And this is what people really, oh, I so wish people would understand. AI is always going to sound confident. That's how it's built. It will even tell you it is 100% certain about something that is a 100% fabrication and bold-faced lie. It doesn't hesitate. It doesn't say, I'm not so sure about this, although I must say Claude is getting better at saying, I'm not so sure about this. But it doesn't tell you, you probably know better than I do on this one. It presents everything with the same smooth certainty whether it's right or wrong. And that's a trap. The more you check yourself against AI, the more your own thinking starts to feel inadequate by comparison. Not because it is, but because AI presents itself with such a certainty that we human beings rarely feel, even when we're right. How often, even when you think, yeah, I'm right about this, you don't tend to usually have the same sort of certainty that AI presents. Nobody talks about this because from the outside it looks like you're being thorough by checking with AI. It looks like you're using technology wisely. Who would criticize someone for double checking their thinking? But there's a difference between using AI to challenge your thinking and using AI because you've stopped trusting your own self. The first one makes you sharper, the second makes you dependent. And this dependency creeps in fast. I had another conversation not so long ago with a business owner, and he said that he doesn't send a proposal anymore without running it through AI first. And that might sound fantastic on the surface, but he doesn't do it for proofreading. He does it for validation. He wants the tool to tell him his thinking is sound before he puts it in front of a client. Now, this is a man who's closed deals worth six, maybe even seven figures, but I certainly know of six-figure ones, on the strength of his own expertise and his own instinct. But now he questions that and he feels that he needs this tool to give him the green light before he trusts his own work and his trusts his own instincts. And I pushed him on this a little bit, and he admitted it wasn't really about making the proposal better. It was about anxiety. He said that knowing AI had reviewed it now made him feel less exposed because he felt he'd be less likely to be wrong or less likely to look foolish. And I asked him in the past, before AI, how often was he wrong and looked foolish? And he said, Oh, it happened from time and again. And I said, Well, did you learn anything from it? And he actually told me about one instance where he was wrong with a proposal, and as a result of the consequences of that, he actually landed an even bigger deal because the company really appreciated the way that he came back with them. AI isn't necessarily fixing a quality problem in that instance. That's just managing an anxiety problem, and it's managing it in a way that often makes the anxiety worse over time because every time you check, you're reinforcing the belief that your own judgment isn't enough. So, alright, I'm very practical focused. So, what do you do about it? First of all, notice when you're checking versus when you're deferring. If you use AI to stress test an idea, then make your own decision, that's fantastic. If you use AI because you don't feel confident enough to decide without it, that's worth paying attention to and looking into and addressing. Also, second, practice making decisions without checking. Not the huge ones where a second perspective obviously genuinely helps, but everyday calls. The emails, the pricing decisions, the client communications. Try doing those first entirely on your own for a week. My guess is that your instincts are actually a lot better than you've given them them credit for. And at the moment they're just feeling they're feeling a little hurt because you're not paying any attention to them. And third, remember that AI doesn't know what you know. And it doesn't know your clients, and it doesn't know the conversation you had last week about how you changed how you think or feel about a project. It doesn't know that a particular approach won't necessarily work because you gave that a whirl four or five years ago and it fell apart for reasons that are still sound, but they're not in any data set that you've fed into AI. You may have fed it a lot of information, but the moment you start treating AI's opinion as more valid than your own, you've handed over something that's very hard to get back. So let's have a one-on-one focus session, if that sounds like you. Just one session to nail down whether you're using AI effectively, give you some additional tips and some prompts, etc. But above all, to help you see whether you really are using AI to support you or undermine you, because the difference can be amazing when you see it. The link's just bellasaintjohn.com/slash AI coaching. So I hope that's been helpful. I'd love to hear what you think about this particular topic. So please leave me a comment below. As I said, I'm Bella St. John. This is Success3 Defined. Thank you so much for being here. Until next time. Bye.