Motivation has been on my mind lately. Not as a burst of energy, but as the deeper question behind our choice to engage or not: why we do what we do, why it matters, and the impact it has.
The constant debate about AI taking our jobs is certainly demotivating. For many, it calls into question the years, and for that matter, lives, spent pursuing a career path that offered a sense of participation, contribution, and value. And now we face a future that might dictate what we are worth as humans.
Technology has changed how we live and work, often making things easier, smarter, and faster. The thing is, we humans are essentially professional problem solvers, drawing on our ideas and discernment every day, often without naming it. That means progress is not only about what technology can do, but also about what we choose to do with it.
So when did keeping up with technology begin to matter more than the future we are shaping? In the rush to adapt to AI, we risk outsourcing not just the work, but our decisions about what is worth doing.
That’s where we need a bridge between the two AI conversations: one about what technology makes possible, the other about why our human advantage matters. What is technology for if not to help us grow as human beings, and how do we bring these conversations together to shape the future through the quality of our human participation?
Participation Begins with Choice
We tend to look at participation as an activity: showing up, doing the work, contributing something others can see. But activity alone tells us little about what makes us want to engage.
Participation begins from the inside out, initiated by what we care about and why something matters to us. That makes choice the entry point: not choosing whether to keep up with technology, but choosing how we bring what we care about into what we do. The question, therefore, is not simply how to get people to participate, but what gives them a reason to want to.
That also means the conversation about our human advantage must go beyond naming empathy, judgment, and connection, because the words are already wearing thin and sounding more like slogans.
AI is already learning to generate language that sounds empathetic and help us weigh options. But sounding empathetic is not the same as caring or sharing a person’s experience, and responsibility for our decisions still rests with us. Yet we still find ourselves arguing for humans to be in the lead, not just in the loop, and the conversation becomes us versus AI instead of AI for us.
The useful question, therefore, is how we actually practice these capacities in our everyday lives, not how well we can describe and argue for them.
Our Capacity to Care Needs Space to Become Action
It reminds me of how the wellbeing conversation has been stuck for the past ten years. We keep arguing that it matters, but confuse supporting it with offering policies, programs, and perks, rather than making the systemic changes that allow people to be and feel well at work. We risk doing the same with AI: defending the importance of empathy, judgment, and connection while leaving the conditions for actually practicing them in our work unchanged.
Calling these capacities “essential human skills” doesn’t get us far enough. Our human advantage lies in how we relate, what we sense, and our capacity for complex thinking. Our human traits are at the core of how we make sense of our experience, relate to one another, choose what deserves our attention, and make better decisions. Yet we have spent years undervaluing these capacities, suppressing emotions as though they were behaviors to control, and relying instead on rewards and incentives to motivate people to show up and care. To care is emotional.
What often gets missed is that people already care, though not always about the same things or about the work they have been assigned. Someone may care deeply about doing good work, notice a problem, and still have no time or influence to address it. Others care deeply about helping people do their best work.
We say we want people to contribute and invite them to use their judgment, then tell them what to do when we don’t agree and reward them only for speed. The engagement challenge is that people can keep working while withdrawing from participation, not because they have stopped caring, but because their desire to care has nothing to impact and nowhere to go. We end up encouraging people to do what they are told rather than use their critical thinking to keep improving how they solve the problems work keeps handing them.
What if people do not lack motivation, but we keep asking them to participate in ways that leave little room for what they care about? Looking inward matters, but it cannot substitute for room to act.
When the AI conversation becomes a contest over who can adapt, perform, and move faster, we ask people to prove their value once again instead of helping them recognize what they care about and how they can contribute. Starting from the assumption that people are a problem to fix keeps a system built on control in place. Recognizing people as an untapped advantage lets us design a system where our true capacities are not just supported, but given room to shape the work. That is where innovation begins.
When we frame the choice as humans against AI, we risk losing sight of what bridging the divide makes possible: people shaping what the work is for and taking responsibility for its impact, while AI supports the execution. If participation becomes a test of outperforming AI, it turns into performance rather than contribution, and we are once again letting the speed of technology set the terms.
Wisdom Is a Different Way of Knowing
Instead of scaling a broken system, we need to recognize that speed is no longer our advantage; our capacity to care is. Under pressure to prove our value, we reach for expertise instead of exploring what we don’t yet know, and fear of not being good enough drives our decisions and stalls participation. But how do we know what contribution a situation calls for when we are more concerned with having an answer than with understanding what is needed?
Wisdom asks something different of us: it asks us to pause.
It is not simply a matter of seniority, expertise, and more knowledge. It is a way of knowing that is perceptive, sensory, and attentive to the whole situation. That’s also why we need to look at multi-generational participation: wisdom draws on experience, but the mental accumulation of experience alone is not enough. Wisdom is human, not a title or a role. It brings what we have learned into conversation, explores what we observe and notice now, includes what we care about, and aligns with our hopes for a better future.
Learning to discern the difference between emotion and knowing is one of the challenges we face. Some call it intuition or gut feeling. If you ask a scientist what makes them look elsewhere, it might just be “an urge” that calls on them to pause and wonder. The real challenge is trusting the signals and cues we feel and sense, because we have been trained to ignore this part of our inner wisdom code.
What we sense is not automatically the answer; it might just be the doorway to pause, reflect, and explore through questions, experience, and the perspectives of others. This is why meetings focused on problem-solving or innovation need to be listening labs, not just traditional brainstorming sessions.
Pausing as a practice also helps us stop reacting and start responding from a deeper alignment with purpose. A reaction can look like participation, but without discernment, it may be automatic and habitual, shaped less by care than by a need to protect who we think we are or what we fear losing.
So how do we learn to trust this way of knowing?
Outward confidence can often be confused with internal self-trust. Trust from the inside out comes from learning to trust the cues and signals within ourselves. Can we listen with empathy and exercise discernment without dismissive judgment? Can we stay with not knowing long enough to connect with conscious self-awareness (also called metacognition) and remain present to others, even when we do not yet have an answer?
When workplaces reward quick certainty over thoughtful questioning, admitting doubt can feel like failure rather than the start of a new discovery or a different understanding. The more honest and courageous practice is to treat doubt as an invitation to listen, not a moment to offer criticism.
What if AI gave us more room for thoughtful questioning instead of rushing us toward an answer? Not to make us sound certain, but to help us explore what we have not yet considered. What does good judgment ask of us here? What might empathy ask of us as we listen? What are we not seeing from where we stand?
Our human capacities matter not just because we can define them and use them as values on the wall, but because of how we practice them every day. That means designing the conditions where we can pause, listen, and question ourselves and one another.
What We Care About Gives Participation Direction
I have been spending time back home in Denmark over the summer and fall, researching human participation for my upcoming book on wisdom and how we can flourish with AI. I firmly believe that AI transformation must include human transformation, but not in the sense of becoming someone else to keep up. I’ve spent my life exploring how humans change, since before I knew that was my work, and I have come to believe that change is about becoming more fully ourselves. That is what interests me about this moment: not only what technology makes possible, but how we might bring our human capacities more fully into play.
In the conversations I’ve been part of in Denmark, people pause together over coffee, put their phones down, and engage with attention and presence. These conversations have felt deeply meaningful because we exchange thoughts, ask questions, and explore what we each care about. We make room for not knowing and for sharing doubt, rather than shaming or fixing it. There has been less focus on achievement and more on hopes and dreams and on generously sharing ideas about how to move toward them.
A young man asked me what I would say to young people about staying motivated. I told him that if you know what you care about, you can find your way forward, even when things do not work out. I think we are always looking for ourselves, but often look outside for answers rather than learning about ourselves and continuing to grow.
Status, money, and titles can matter, but they are not the key to happiness. Agency matters, as does finding meaning and purpose in the small things that may not bring recognition but matter to us.
A friend has volunteered for many years with the youth program at the Copenhagen “ball club.” She continues to show up because she sees the impact on the young people, who support one another as well as compete on the tennis court or soccer field. Her care has somewhere to go, and she can see what her participation makes possible.
That is different from constantly looking outside ourselves for validation that what we care about matters. When we are thinking we are not good enough or doing enough, we can confuse hustle with motivation. We may look engaged, but how does it feel to keep going from that place?
What we care about gives participation direction, while agency and a visible connection to impact give it somewhere to go. The opportunity with AI is not simply to get more done, but to make room for people to bring more of themselves into what they do. That asks us to build workplaces where care can become action and where technology supports our contribution rather than becoming the measure of our worth. We don’t have to compete with AI to have a part in shaping the future, but we do need to choose how we participate.
Power-Pausing: From Reflection to Choice
Power-Pausing™ is an ongoing practice. We can notice opportunities in the everyday moments we tend to rush through: reaching for AI before asking what the work is for, preparing our answer while someone is still speaking, or moving to the next task without noticing the impact of what we’ve just done.
Pause on This
What do I care about when no one is measuring it?
Where am I looking outside for what I could learn from inside?
When did I last stay with not knowing long enough for something new to come up?
Where could I make more room for someone to act on what they care about?
Let’s pause and align our intention, attention, and actions.
For more practice, my book The Self-Care Mindset offers questions and tools to help you find clarity, agency, and a way forward through uncertainty. It’s a practice of learning to think, engage, and act with care.
