As we embrace the close of another year we face the question “What will 2025 bring for me?” Some of us use this as a chance to set New Year’s goals, commit to resolutions, or decoupage a vision board so appealing you proudly hang it on your wall.
Some (evidently) have turned to our new friend Chat GPT to help turn their 2025 dreams into a reality. The “day in the life” trend on Instagram and Tik Tok has got us life coaches thinking about our own future, and the future of life coaching. Sure it’s a cool activity (and I’d be lying if I said I haven’t tried it myself) and it certainly added some color and depth to my Dream… however, for the real work, for the week by week, day by day, inch by inch progress, I much prefer the human connection of a live coach.
In our work as an educational life coaching company, we champion the power of human connection—a connection that no algorithm or machine can replicate. We have identified a pattern among the educational communities in which we are coaching: the lack of capacity or skill for human connection and empathy. Turning to AI to run your life will not equip you the required competencies for human connection and thriving in society.
Artificial Intelligence, for all its impressive capabilities, can never replace the role of a life coach. A life coach’s unique superpower lies in her ability to perceive what her clients cannot—to see past the obvious. AI, by its very nature, operates solely within the bounds of what it has been told. It can analyze, predict, and even advise, but it cannot intuit, empathize, or truly connect. A coach can look at you as a whole: your long-wired belief systems, default personality traits, inner dialogue, past experiences and help you tie them all together to become the best version of yourself. Success, and thus the value of live coaching, is a lot more fulsome than just a dream and a map with which to get there.
As Atul Gawande says in his Ted Talk, “If you want to get good at something, get a coach.” As a surgeon, he was already very good at something. His coach was not a surgeon at all, but could see things that Gawande could not. His coach was an objective pair of eyes who made observations about breathing, elbow angles, and the temperature of the room.Life coaching can provide an irreplaceable value of human insight in guiding individuals toward the direction of their dreams. Next month, we look forward to sharing the beautiful story of a former Life Design student participant, Nika Šeblová, and how one question from her coach led her to make a decision that changed her entire life trajectory.
