Here’s where this conversation started. I keep hearing the same thing from the leaders I coach, and what they’re asking about on the surface is strategy or tools or timing, but the thing underneath it, almost every time, is fear.
Here’s where this conversation started. I keep hearing the same thing from the leaders I coach, and what they’re asking about on the surface is strategy or tools or timing, but the thing underneath it, almost every time, is fear. Fear of not adapting to what’s coming, fear of getting left behind, fear of letting their team down when they’re not sure how to prepare them.
I brought Janice Burt on because she’s spent the last fourteen years walking straight into fear on purpose, one a year. She’s a two-time TEDx speaker, author of Kicking the People-Pleasing Habit, and host of the One Fear Per Year podcast. What I didn’t expect was how cleanly her work maps onto what AI leaders are actually wrestling with right now.
Outline
(00:00) – Why this conversation is different
(01:55) – Janice’s origin and the prison of fear
(03:00) – Year one was a marathon
(07:00) – What 14 years inside fear taught her
(08:30) – Fear of not being good enough
(12:30) – Writing Kicking the People-Pleasing Habit
(14:50) – The through-line for AI leaders
(19:25) – Caring vs. people-pleasing
(21:30) – Awareness, choice, community
(32:00) – Dropping to her knees on stage
(34:00) – One fear per year, your turn
A Few Things That Stuck With Me
The through-line nobody names. About fifteen minutes into the conversation, I realized the leaders I coach almost never use the word “afraid.” They talk about strategy, vendor selection, team readiness, timing. But the avoidance pattern is the same one Janice has been studying for fourteen years. Here’s how she said it:
“I would say an underlying thing is just the fear of not being good enough. And then there’s the fear of change. Or the fear of the unknown. None of us know what’s going to happen.”
That’s why a CEO keeps deferring the AI conversation with their team, and why a director quietly pushes the rollout one more quarter. The tool is the easy thing to talk about. The harder thing is sitting in the room and saying out loud that the team isn’t ready, or that the leader isn’t sure they’re ready either.
Fear lives in the future. Janice made a point that stopped me in the middle of the live. Fear is always anticipatory, which means you can only fight it from a place you’re not actually standing in. Her words:
“Fear is always this anticipated thing in the future. What’s going to happen? Worst case scenario. To lay in bed last night worrying about this conversation, that’s the fear. Coming back to the present moment is taking your power back.”
Read it again with AI in mind. Most of the AI anxiety I see in coaching is about an imagined version of next year, which is also why it’s almost impossible to act on. You can’t fix a future you haven’t reached yet.
Year one was a marathon. I want to come back to this part. Janice went straight at the one thing she was certain she couldn’t do, ran 26.2 miles, and learned the lesson that turned the whole project into a fourteen-year practice:
“Accountability is where it’s at. Community is where it’s at. We can do so many things and go so many places with the right people around us.”
That’s a leadership lesson dressed up as a running story. You don’t walk through fear alone, and you don’t push your team through AI adoption alone either.
The on-stage moment. A couple of years ago, in front of a room of CEOs and professional speakers, Janice had a physical fear reaction mid-talk and dropped to her knees on stage to keep from running off. Afterward, she described it as a spiritual experience, a moment of surrender where the facade dropped and the audience saw the actual Janice for the first time. Her line right after has been in my head since the live ended:
“There’s nothing worse than being held back by your fear. Not even this.”
I told her on the live it was the strongest line of the conversation. I still think so.
(If you’re a leader sitting with one of these fears right now and the AI piece is the surface story, this is exactly the conversation I have in 1:1 executive coaching. Sometimes the strategy work starts with naming what you’ve been avoiding.)
One Question to Sit With
What’s the one fear you’d walk through this year, on purpose, if you knew you had three hundred and sixty-five days to figure it out?
Watch the full conversation above. Then go subscribe to Janice at janiceburt.com and grab her book Kicking the People-Pleasing Habit.
If you want help thinking through your own AI strategy or online presence, start here.
Written by a human, for humans.
