I was scrolling LinkedIn last week and came across a conversation between Ryan Roslansky (LinkedIn's CEO) and Aneesh Raman (their Chief Economic Opportunity Officer) about how to become "irreplaceable in the age of AI."
It's smart. I liked it.
I also know that none of my career coaching clients would have ever made it past the second paragraph.
They're too deep in the rejection cycle to absorb a leadership talking point from their LinkedIn feed.
They're three weeks into silence from an employer who told them they were "a strong candidate."
They're staring at another job board at 11pm, wondering if the market has moved on without them.
That's the emotional reality we sit with every day as coaches. You know that reality because you're in it with your clients every week.
There was something that caught my attention, though.
The advice given in the conversation boiled down to five qualities: courage, curiosity, creativity, communication, and compassion.
Those qualities map almost perfectly onto the coaching work we already do.
We just call it different things.
We coach courage when we help a client stop saying "I'll take anything" and start naming what they actually want.
We coach curiosity when we pull someone out of the apply-and-wait loop and get them researching companies again.
We coach communication every time we move a client from "I'm a team player with strong leadership skills" to "I rebuilt onboarding for a 40-person department and cut ramp time from 12 weeks to 6."
We're already doing this work. The AI conversation just gives us a new way to frame it.
The "tasks, not titles" exercise from the LinkedIn piece is genuinely useful in session. I'd recommend trying it this week.
Sit with a client for about 15 minutes and have them list every core task from their most recent role. Write each one down. Then sort together: which of these could AI handle entirely, which could AI help you do faster, and which ones require a human being in the room?
I've found that the human column ends up being the longest.
Judgment calls, relationship building, reading a room, managing conflict, explaining complex things to non-experts.
Those tasks dominate most people's actual work.
Your clients just stopped seeing them as valuable because the market keeps talking about AI like it's replacing everything.
That sorting conversation can change a client's confidence in a single session. I've watched someone go from "I don't know what I bring anymore" to "oh, wait, most of what I do can't be automated" really quickly once they see this perspective.
This matters especially for your Gen X clients (and I say this as someone in that demographic). They've got 10 to 15 years left in the workforce. They've built deep expertise. They're also the most likely to panic about AI making them obsolete because they remember what happened when email replaced the communication system of their first job.
When you help a client in their late 40s or 50s see that their years of accumulated judgment are the thing AI can't touch, it restores their professional identity and gives them the confidence that they can thrive in today’s job market.
For younger clients in their 20s and 30s, the exercise works differently. They're often already comfortable with AI tools. Their gap is usually on the human side: they haven't had enough years in the workforce to recognize their own judgment as a skill.
I also want to name something for those of us who feel pressure to become AI experts overnight.
You don't need to teach prompt engineering.
You don't need to demo ChatGPT in session.
Your job is to help clients understand where they stand in relation to AI, and that's a coaching conversation, not a tech tutorial.
Susan David's work on emotional agility applies here too: when clients feel threatened by change, the most useful thing you can do is help them name the emotion and then look at the evidence. The evidence almost always shows they have more staying power than they think.
One more thing.
That AI conversation is worth having with yourself, too. I did the exercise on my own coaching practice last month. Turns out, about 80% of what I do in a session requires being present with another human, adjusting to their energy, asking the question they didn't know they needed.
AI can help me prep, draft resources, and organize notes. The actual coaching stays mine.
And yours too.
The world of work is shifting. Our clients feel it even when they can't name it. You're the person who helps them name it, make sense of it, and keep moving.
That's a job worth showing up for.
Talk soon,
Heather
P.S. Here’s a link to the article I mentioned.
P.P.S. I’m launching something exciting this month. Stay tuned for more updates…