Borrowed Confidence: What Asking AI for Every Answer Is Costing You
Should You Use AI for Personal Development? My Unfiltered Take...
I’m writing to you from vacation in Sevilla, so forgive me for keeping this one short :D!
I walked out of a Pilates class this morning where the instructor did his level best to fold me in half, and there’s a massage and a slow, aimless wander through this golden city waiting for me. Orange trees, tiled courtyards, nowhere I need to be. I plan to enjoy every last minute of it.
But I wanted to write to you first, because something has been on my mind since yesterday, and I have a feeling you’ll recognize it too.
Yesterday I was out on these same streets, headphones and videocam on, catching up with a dear friend who was taking her own morning walk.
And somewhere in the middle of the conversation, she asked me a question I’d heard twice in the past ten days. One time on a podcast. The other from a founder whose company I’m considering investing in, who happens to be in the personal development world.
“What’s your take on people using AI for personal development?”
I gave her my real, unfiltered answer, and it surfaced something much bigger than personal development. Because what I’ve been noticing is happening everywhere. And once you catch it, you can’t stop seeing it.
Let me walk you through it.
Borrowed confidence
Picture the last time you were stuck on a decision and leveraged AI.
You sat with it a while, felt that familiar knot of not-knowing, and then you opened AI (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT or any of their cousins), and asked.
Now let’s assume you prompted it effectively. It handed you a clean, reasonable answer, and something in you loosened.
Relief.
A small rush of certainty. So you took your action, and it felt real good.
I know that feeling. I’ve lived it too.
But stay with me, because there’s a catch tucked inside that relief.
Ask yourself for a second where the confidence came from. It didn’t rise up out of you. It came from the answer on the screen.
You walked away trusting the machine’s response, not your ability to make the call.
It happens subtly, one decision at a time, and we rarely catch ourselves doing it.
It shows up in everything
Once I caught it in myself, I began seeing it everywhere, and not only in the big, emotional stuff.
You hand the pricing decision to a chatbot instead of deciding what YOU want to charge for your work and intellectual property. That hard message to your team? You write it, second-guess it, then paste it into AI to be told it’s fine.
Or worse, to be told you need to refine it in 273 different places, and by the time you’re done, your initial message is not recognizable.
Even the idea you’re lit up about, you catch yourself running it past the machine for a little nod of approval before you’ll let yourself believe in it.
Each of those moments gives you an answer and a hit of certainty. And each of them shifts the confidence off you and onto the tool.
Now, re: personal development
When the decision is about your own growth, I believe the whole thing gets heavier.
We’re not asking the machine how to word a message anymore. We’re asking it how to live, how to feel about the thing keeping us up at night, whether the way we see our own life is even right.
That is a tender, sacred thing to place in the hands of a tool that doesn’t know us at all.
The good news
I want to be clear here, because I am not about to tell you to throw the tools out. I build them for a living. I love what they can do.
There’s a version of all this that’s healthy, and I use it myself once in a while.
Most of us walk around a little locked into one way of seeing, shaped by how we were raised, what we believe, the same story we’ve told ourselves for years. AI is wonderful for loosening that grip.
Ask it to show you three other ways of reading a situation you’re tangled up in, and it will. Your perspective widens. You might feel the tension drop. You now see angles that were invisible to you.
Like I told my friend, “if it’s going to keep you from chopping someone’s head off, use it!”
Then comes the part only you can do
But once you’ve expanded like that, once things have settled and you can breathe again, there’s one step you can’t abdicate to a machine. You have to come home to your own intuition.
That’s the step people are dropping.
They expand, and then, instead of choosing, they turn back to the machine and ask it to confirm. For every little thing. Then again the next day, and the day after that.
And little by little, the muscle that makes a real decision, the one that lets you discover yourself inside the not-knowing, atrophies from lack of use.
Go fail, and I mean it with love
Go try the thing, get it wrong, feel it in your body, learn from it, do the inner work, and come back sharper. That loop is how you grow, and there’s no way around it. The machine can’t run it for you.
Life is a dojo. Nobody earns their belt watching someone else spar.
We carry an intuition, a wisdom, a kind of power inside us that no model can copy.
So the next time AI gives you an answer and that lovely rush of certainty rolls in, pause for one breath and ask whose confidence you’re feeling. Chances are you’ve only borrowed it.
Take the perspectives it offers. Let them widen you. Then close the laptop and make the call yourself.
That is how you keep your power instead of signing it away.
And with that, if you’ll forgive me, Sevilla is calling, and so is that massage!
I love you,
xo Khaïry