Well, I was good. In fact, I was working towards my Master Certified Coach credential — the highest accreditation the ICF awards, via peer review.

It takes over 2,500 hours of coaching and the assessment of multiple recorded sessions to pass, all to demonstrate the transformative impact a coach can have with a client.

And I'm still worried. Because, like so many of us, I'm living that future now.

I left that table more certain than I'd arrived, not less.

I was now more motivated than ever to deliver not just good coaching, but great coaching.

And I was also flummoxed by how many people seemed to want to put their heads in the sand!

Nine years on, every coach I know is having that conversation, whether they ever wanted to or not.

And here's what I didn't expect: what I feel looking back isn't vindication. It's empathy.

I know exactly what those colleagues are sitting with, because I'm sitting with it too.

Being early to a hard question doesn't exempt you from it, it just means you've been uncomfortable for longer.

The upside, which is what I work on with my clients, is that you can also get comfortable with uncertainty.

And that's a resilience we're all going to need as AI changes every industry, whether we're coaches or not.

What I've come to believe is that proactive curiosity is an active choice, not a personality trait handed to a lucky few.

The people who handle uncertainty best are not the ones who saw it coming and felt clever about it.

They're the ones who saw it coming, felt the fear, and chose to keep looking anyway.

In the years since, I've gone whole-hog; reading extensively on how we humans might interact with AI and what it means.

This won't make me any less affected; it just means I'll understand more as its happening.

And for me and my clients, 'knowledge is power'. More than a bumper-sticker platitude, it's a real-life choice.

A senior HR leader I've long admired once told me, after my second book, Female Breadwinners: How They Make Relationships Work and Why They Are the Future of the Modern Workforce, came out, to let her know when my next one did.

She remarked that I always seemed to have my finger on the pulse of something before other people were talking about it, or even thinking about it.

It took a decade for that third book to arrive, but her comment filled me with pride.

In fact, it kept me going through all the years I was plodding along getting my workplace games off the ground and attending conferences like this one.

As we all turn over the question of what next?, I've been thinking about her remark more than usual.

If you're a senior woman in a technical field, you've sat at your own version of that table.

Everyone discussing the small, manageable thing; the tool, the process, the reorg, while the larger wave builds just out of frame.

You can see what might be a tsunami, and you're not sure whether saying so will make you "the difficult one."

But say it! Lord knows they already see you as a bit of a departure from the boys' club.

That instinct to look, before it's comfortable, before anyone thanks you for it, is worth more than being comfortable ever was.

If this is the kind of thing you think about, my newsletter is where I write about it first, usually before I've worked out the tidy version.

You can subscribe on the front page of this website.

(And if you're somewhere where the looking has turned into something heavier; a decision you keep circling, a room you've stopped speaking up in, that's the work I do one to one. There's a free chemistry call you can ask me about, no pitch attached.)