I keep running into the same thing when I talk to leaders about AI. They’re excited and they’re exhausted… at the same time.
They see how capable the models have gotten, and in the same breath they tell me they’re starting to feel a little obsolete. Curious and anxious, sitting in one person, at the same desk.
I wanted to talk to Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy about exactly that, because they’ve spent their whole careers on emotions at work, and now almost all of that work is affected by AI. What you get in this one is the part of the AI conversation almost nobody is running: the feelings underneath the rollout, and what a leader actually does about them. Watch the full piece above.
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Outline
(00:00) – Welcome
(00:38) – Excited and exhausted: the leader’s double bind
(01:48) – Where emotions at work began
(04:01) – The full mix: amazing and existential, in one person
(06:03) – What a team really asked me about AI
(07:42) – The “AI optimists only” trap
(08:08) – Why emotions block learning
(11:49) – The stoic-leader shift
(17:33) – The change curve: anger to energy
(22:32) – Build trust before you measure adoption
(25:13) – Mandates fail, agency works
(27:13) – Inside their AI workshops, and where to find them
Main Takeaways
The full mix is the normal state. The thing I want every leader to hear is that excitement and dread aren’t two different camps of people, they’re the same person sitting in one chair, which is exactly why this is so hard to manage. Liz put it like this:
“Every single person contains this complete mix of emotion. At some level they say, oh, it’s amazing, it’s way better than Google, it can help me so much. But then of course, what does this mean for my job, for who I am?”
The leader who pretends only the excited half is real is usually the one whose rollout starts going sideways three months in, because the other half doesn’t disappear, it just stops getting said out loud.
You can’t learn while you’re scared. This is the line I’m still going over. Mollie walked through the neuroscience of it:
“When you are feeling anxious, when you are feeling scared, when you are feeling angry, you’re not in an optimal place to learn a new tool.”
Then she made it concrete.
“I’m here for the training on how to use ChatGPT, but I’m really worried about what it’s going to do to my job, and I’m angry about what it’s doing to the environment. I’m not really going to be giving 100% of my attention to how to click around the tool.”
I had a chat recently coaching a marketing group at a nonprofit, and within two minutes I realized they didn’t care about prompts or tokens. They were asking how they could use AI when it’s doing what it’s doing to the climate, and how a writer uses a tool trained on copyrighted work. There’s a whole foundational layer most of us skip, and the training slides right off when you do.
We don’t get to skip the steps. Mollie’s change curve is the frame I keep coming back to.
“We all have to go through anger, apathy, frustration, and your productivity drops. And that’s normal. Then when we move through that, we can begin to get engaged and excited and have energy around that. We don’t get to skip these steps as humans.”
The part that reframed it for me is that most leaders are already further along that curve than their own team, so they’re standing on the far side wondering why everyone won’t just cross. People hit the dip at different moments, especially on a big team, which means a leader is managing a dozen different curves at once, not one.
It’s okay to give some of the time back. This is where I admitted my own fear on the call, the one I think a lot of people are holding. If I start using AI and suddenly I’m producing two or three times as much, I’m afraid that just becomes my new minimum, and now I have to hold that pace forever. Liz met it head on:
“It’s actually okay if some of the time saved your team takes back for themselves. It doesn’t all have to be reinvested in work. Workforces are so burnt out. The average person, our nervous system, is completely fried.”
Saying that out loud, as the leader, is part of what makes adoption possible in the first place.
The play I’d actually run this week
Because this slot runs a little longer than my usual live recap, I want to leave you with something you can use on Monday, pulled straight from what Liz and Mollie laid out.
Name the mix out loud, briefly. Nothing elaborate. A short, honest recognition like “I’m feeling some of this too, and here’s the plan moving forward.” Mollie called it a brief recognition followed by the path, and it’s the tightrope between spewing every emotion and pretending you have none.
Pair a quick win with one real limitation. Liz’s most practical move. Help your team get a fast, obvious win with AI, then show them one place it falls flat. That combination lets people lean into the excitement and lower the anxiety at the same time, because now they trust both the upside and their own judgment about where it doesn’t belong.
Say the change is big, in public. In an all-hands or your enablement session, recognize out loud that this is a real change and that people are moving through real emotions at different speeds. That one sentence gives people permission to be where they actually are.
Build the trust before you measure. Liz was blunt about this. If you haven’t invested in trust up front, your survey just comes back “I feel great, it’s amazing,” and then weeks later you find out people aren’t using it, or they’re actively sabotaging it. Trust first, honest data second.
Give agency, not a tracker. Enablement, training, and time to learn, yes. Surveillance of daily usage, no. Let some of the time saved go back to people, and ask whether they’re using the right tool for the right job rather than how many tokens they burned.
Where are you on the change curve right now, and have you actually let yourself name it out loud, or are you the leader who’s been pretending only the excited half is real? Watch the full conversation above, and then go subscribe to Liz and Mollie. It’s one of the few places putting the human side of this moment first.
About Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy
Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy are the authors and illustrators behind No Hard Feelings and Big Feelings, two books on the emotional reality of work and life. Liz draws every illustration by hand, leads content work at Atlassian, and is deep in research on AI transformation. Mollie works in org and leadership development at Lattice. Together they publish the Liz and Mollie newsletter and run AI workshops for leaders and for whole teams, built around the change curve and grounded in research people can use the next day. You can follow them on Instagram and subscribe to their newsletter here.
About me
Joel Salinas is an Executive AI Coach for leaders at small and mid-sized businesses and nonprofits. 1:1 coaching, team workshops, and AI strategy work built around amplifying what your team is already good at. Creator of the AI Leadership Triad. He writes Leadership in Change. If you want help thinking through your own AI strategy or online presence, start here.
Written by a human, for humans.
