Don’t Let AI Take Away Your Confidence

AI can be a fantastic thinking partner. It can bring perspective, challenge your assumptions, and help you explore ideas you might never have considered.

It can also sound so damn confident that you start wondering whether it knows better than you do.

I’ve fallen into that trap myself.

I’ve asked AI about everything from business expansion to personal ethical dilemmas. And sometimes, without really noticing it, I started absorbing what it told me as though the answer carried some kind of authority.

AI starts sounding like the grand wizard.

And the grand wizard can be very convincing.

Can AI know what is best for you?

AI can know an enormous amount. It has access to patterns and knowledge gathered from an almost ridiculous amount of human-created information. That makes it incredibly useful when you want another perspective.

But it doesn’t have my life.

It doesn’t have my heart, my nervous system, my experiences, my relationships, my empathy, my emotional intelligence, my expertise, or all the weird little things that have happened over the course of my life that made me who I am.

Those things matter when I make a decision.

I began to notice moments when an AI answer simply didn’t align with me. Something inside me would say, “Wait a minute. I don’t think I believe this.”

That feeling became important.

What happens when you trust AI more than yourself?

For me, it feels a little like buying something on credit.

You get the thing immediately. Maybe it’s a watch, a car, or a house. You possess it, but there’s this little nagging awareness that you don’t completely own it yet. There’s a cost attached to it that keeps showing up later.

I think we can do something similar with AI.

We get the answer immediately. We get clarity without having to wrestle with the question as long. We get an articulate explanation that may sound better than anything we could have come up with ourselves.

Then a different feeling can creep in.

Have I given too much of this away?

Have I started trusting this thing more than I trust myself?

There can be a strange regret when you realize you’ve allowed AI to do too much of your thinking for you. I don’t mean some giant pit-of-doom scenario. I mean the quiet discomfort of recognizing that something you thought was helpful may have started affecting your confidence.

What is Soul Drift?

I’ve written before about something I call Soul Drift.

Soul Drift happens when you realize you have allowed AI to over-represent you, your soul, or the soul of your business.

It can happen with writing. It can happen with ideas. And I think it can happen with judgment too.

Maybe AI starts choosing the words you would normally choose yourself. Then it starts shaping the ideas. Eventually, you find yourself asking it what decision you should make.

That is worth noticing.

Especially when those decisions involve your business, relationships, mental health, ethics, or the direction of your life.

How should you use AI for important decisions?

I still think AI is a great thinking partner.

Ask it questions. Challenge an idea. Ask what you might be missing. Have it argue the other side. Explore possibilities. Use its enormous body of knowledge to expand your perspective. You can even have different models challenge each other’s answers: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini.

Then bring yourself back into the conversation.

Your experience matters.

Your expertise matters.

Your emotions, empathy, instincts, passion, love, values, and knowledge of the people involved all matter.

AI can contribute perspective. You still get to decide what belongs in your life.

Believe in the person who got you here

This is probably the part I most want people to remember.

Believe in yourself. Sorry if I’m getting all guru-life-coachy here.

You got yourself to this place in your life. You built the experience you have. You learned things the hard way. You made mistakes, figured some shit out, developed expertise, loved people, lost things, built things, changed your mind, and became the person you are today.

AI gets to help that person.

Pay attention if its confidence starts crowding out your own.

Use AI. Bounce ideas around with it. Let it challenge you and help you see around corners.

And every once in a while, pay attention to that little voice that says:

“Wait a minute. That doesn’t feel like me.”

It may know something the grand wizard doesn’t.

Cingularis. Helping organizations who do good do even good-er!