Crashing waves. Churning whirlpools. There, in the crest of white seafoam, a shark’s pointed fin—swimming directly toward your floundering figure.
This was the roiling seascape overlaid onto the still, warm bathtub of one Katie Pryor, concocted by her vivid imagination after a fateful viewing of Jaws at perhaps too young an age. For two years, merely taking a bath was terrifying to her! After all, surely there would be a shark lurking amongst the waters, waiting to hunt her down.
As time passed, however, the young Katie decided to face her fears by learning more about sharks. She discovered information about their typical behavior, their typical habitats—places like the Atlantic Ocean, not her bathtub!
When Kate recounted this anecdote, she soon made a connection between this memory and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI): much like her educational experience with sharks, when facing unknown fears like GenAI, educating ourselves on what we’re dealing with can help us approach change with greater confidence. So, continuing the example of GenAI—rather than focusing exclusively on which jobs GenAI might “take over,” we could instead consider exploring how GenAI might complement our existing work.
When Katie shared this story during our most recent Rise Beyond™ panel about remaining relevant in a changing world, I couldn’t help but laugh, and I wasn’t alone in doing so! Surprisingly (or maybe not!), many of the conversations throughout our panel ended up identifying similar connections between past personal experiences and current career anxieties.
Katie Pryor, President of FilmUSA and Baton Rouge Film Commissioner, and Teresa Pore, Founder of UnBreakable Enterprises, joined myself and other Rise Beyond™ members, for a discussion on “How to Stay Relevant in a Changing World.” Over the course of an hour, we went from sharks to Aladdin’s lamp to hammers and seatbelts—and oh, even back pain! If you missed this panel, here are six takeaways worth exploring:
1. “You Ain’t Never Had a Friend Like”—ChatGPT?
As the Genie from Disney’s Aladdin famously (almost) said: “Well, Ali Baba had them forty thieves / Scheherazade had a thousand tales / But, master, you in luck ‘cause, up your sleeves / You got” access to an unforeseen technological advancement that can summarize thousands of words (and thousands of works) in seconds!
(Not a half-bad riff off the original song, right?)
At times, the availability of GenAI can feel like Aladdin holding his magic lamp—all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-creating! Or so was the experience Teresa described during our panel. Initially, she was hesitant to incorporate GenAI into her work because she wanted her creations to reflect her own voice, but after her mentors encouraged her to experiment with GenAI, Teresa discovered unexpected possibilities for integrating these technologies. She realized that understanding our unique voices and our unique values actually helps us employ technologies—GenAI and otherwise—more intentionally, which allows us to explore exciting possibilities while remaining attentive to a) what we ourselves create and b) how we communicate with others.
Of course, GenAI technologies aren’t all sunshine and rainbows! Teresa’s concerns about GenAI flattening her voice were legitimate, as it’s well known that GenAI reinforces hegemonic standards of English and that over-relying on GenAI erodes critical thinking and creativity, the loss of which can certainly be detrimental to developing one’s own voice. And with the information explosion that GenAI attempts to facilitate, it’s helpful to keep in mind that access to knowledge does not inherently equate to appropriate use of knowledge.
In other words: it remains imperative that we decide what deserves our attention, that we purposefully seek perspectives from human experts, and that we constantly push ourselves to question our default assumptions. And before plugging information into any GenAI, we ought to be aware of a) how our information will be used and b) who owns that technology—lest we end up finding ourselves trapped in Aladdin’s lamp, unable to escape!
2. Are We Using a Hammer When We Need a Screwdriver?
You wake up, yawn, slide out from under your cozy covers, stretch, reach to flick on the light switch, and—
Nothing.
Picture trying to remove a screw from a light switch with a hammer. This (hilarious) scenario is one Teresa proposed during our panel, and it probably goes without saying that if we try to remove a screw with a hammer, we’re just asking to need someone to fix all sorts of damage afterwards!
As entertaining as the image of ourselves grinning maniacally and lording over a light switch with a hammer is, this hypothetical also illustrates a crucial point about understanding who we are. We all have different talents, interests, passions, experiences, ways of approaching life—yet, like using a hammer on a screw, how often do we misapply ourselves? How often do we pursue paths that do not align with who we are?
Teresa therefore shared two questions that are central to her work: Who am I? And why am I here?
These questions are deceptively simple, as all the best questions are, because answering them can take years, especially when many of us have spent so much of our lives following others’ expectations about who’re supposed to become. For many people, the path is pre-set: go to school, get a good job, work hard, scale the ladder of success, never stop achieving. And this path is by no means an inherently bad one! But it may not be the best fit for all of us—sometimes from the start, and sometimes just as life passes. The definition of “success” that we propped up years may no longer reflect what counts as success to us today.
I often say that we have to go inward to go forward: as we learn more about ourselves, we begin to recognize interests we’ve overlooked, expectations we’re finally ready to reconsider, and new possibilities for a brighter future.
At the end of the day (and honestly, also at the beginning of the day!), self-discovery is an ongoing process. As we learn about our changing selves, the world will continue to change around us, too. With time, we’ll recognize those moments when we’re trying to use hammers on screws and know that it’s time to switch to a better tool—to a better instance of applying ourselves!
3. What Makes Our Contribution Valuable?
Imagine having an assistant who organizes information, manages our inbox, handles tasks that used to take hours of our time, never talks back, gets things right on the first try, and doesn’t ask to be paid. This, many employers are insisting, is the power of GenAI!
Wow. Too good to be true, right?
Well, as the variations on the old adage all remind us, when something seems too good to be true, it usually is.
For one, GenAI has limited organizational capacity because it’s a predictive model, meaning it bases its calculations on most likely, not on actually correct. GenAI also has limited inbox functions in part because some emails will always require a personal element (I don’t know about you, but I’m not answering someone asking for time off because of their grandmother’s funeral with a robot’s response—that employee needs human comfort in this time!). Similarly, GenAI can handle tasks that used to take hours, but it infamously doesn’t get all tasks correct on the first try, and sometimes the effort of correcting GenAI takes even longer than if a person had done the task in the first place. And notably, GenAI is no longer purely free, as more advanced models are being restricted behind more and more expensive paywalls.
But: for as little as $20 a month, GenAI can be a tool for aiding some of employees’ minute responsibilities, and thus it’s understandable that more and more organizations are striving to adopt this technology into their everyday.
Crucially, however, this integration of GenAI raises a significant question: If technology can take over some of our labor, where and how do we continue adding human value?
As such, I would invite us to reflect upon the judgement we’ve developed through experience—the depths of our minds and hearts that GenAI simply cannot access. I would invite us to ruminate over our abilities to connect with others and to make connections between others. I would invite us to consider the human capacity to make challenging decisions when answers are not obvious—because, by virtue of its predictive training, GenAI can only ever speak to the obvious!
These contributions, of recognizing creative opportunities and of highlighting different perspectives, are uniquely human! Accordingly, these contributions are worth all of us sitting with and continuing to develop in ourselves.
And hey, I won’t knock GenAI for those who want to use it as a timesaving tool. If GenAI can handle tasks that free us up to focus our attention on strategic, critical thinking that benefits from personal experiences and personal involvement, then that is a pretty solid use of this technology. We might even use this additional spare time to identify new capabilities we’d like to develop within our expertise—that is, more interpersonal and educational experiences we’d like to have that no technology can ever replace!
4. You Know, Cars Came Before Seatbelts—Are We Helping Design What's Next?
How many of us knew that cars existed before seatbelts? Given all that research shows today about how significantly seatbelts contribute to saved lives during crashes, that fact seems shocking, doesn’t it?
Katie shared this fact during our panel and used it to make a connection to GenAI: people were driving cars—were using this new technological invention—while safety standards were still in development. GenAI, too, is now being deployed across lives and industries, all while organizations and policymakers are still determining how GenAI can be used safely, ethically, and responsibly.
Which leads me to Katie’s key takeaway: Get into the room where seatbelts are being developed!
Many of us have spent years—decades, even—understanding the ins and outs of our industries, from interacting with customers to handling operations. Our experience matters when decisions about technological regulations and resolutions are actively being discussed and implemented. (I mean, can you imagine the creation of policies that affect global industries without hearing from the people who are actually doing the work? What a frightening vision that conjures up!)
In short, we have the opportunity to bring our perspectives into these ongoing conversations surrounding the regulation of GenAI, and we can do so through professional associations, industry initiatives, and even local decisions happening within our individual organizations. What’s more, participating also gives us a closer look at what changes are coming, thus helping us anticipate future transformation. Oh, and not to mention that getting involved in these conversations additionally gives us the opportunity to learn from individuals who are shaping the progression of our industries—and perhaps even pushing us to become one of those movers and shakers ourselves!
5. When Our Back Knows We're Exhausted Before We Do!
As if it is a universal experience of getting into bed, snuggling beneath the blankets, and drifting off into dreamland while feeling at complete peace with the world—and then we wake up the next morning with an ache in our back like an elephant tried to give us a massage. I mean, what? What happened while we were sleeping?!
During our panel, Katie joked about these sudden sleep injuries, ultimately concluding that these moments demonstrate when her body is recognizing her exhaustion before her mind is. She then connected this observation to an internalized work assumption that was imperative for her to unlearn: the pressure to be available and responsive 24 hours a day, 5—or sometimes 7—days a week.
This pressure is one that affects employees across generations—and one that also gives employees across generations plenty of unexpected back pain! It’s all too easy for many of us to fall into the habit of constant availability, especially if our work involves nonstop communication, competing priorities, and swaths of people depending on us.
To help prevent this endless existence of being stretched too thin, one approach Katie shared was creating windows of time in which she could fully focus on one single task, from being entirely engaged during a meeting to spending dedicated time with her family to simply putting her phone away for a few hours.
Katie’s advice leads to a broader takeaway: we can spend so much of our time responding to all that happens around us that nothing left remains to think, to learn, to give one task our complete and utter attention. So, if you focus on any one thing in this post, hear me now!
The only way for any of us to keep up, to stay relevant, to stay attentive—the only way for any of us to remain involved in the world’s many happenings is to be intentional in taking care of ourselves. So go give your back some much-needed TLC!
6. Giving Ourselves Permission to Explore What's Possible
Teresa concluded our panel with an important message about permission. The permission to try something new. The permission to make mistakes. The permission to reconsider expectations. The permission to pursue the path that matters most to us.
In the classic thought exercise, she reflected on what advice she might give her seven-year-old self, the version of her still navigating an endlessly vast world, the version of her living freely before the imposition of expectations about who she should—who she had no choice but to—become. Teresa’s message to her younger self was wonderfully simple: laugh, cry, love. Dare to dream. And be who you are—not who anyone else demands you to be.
And I think this message connects beautifully to one of the main takeaways from our panel: that the stories we consume and the stories we tell influence how we see the world. Perhaps, then, some of the stories we’ve carried about—and through—our careers deserve another look, too. Perhaps giving ourselves permission to explore what’s possible means pushing ourselves to consider ideas we might have dismissed years, months, even mere days ago.
Like the saying goes: Shoot for the moon, because even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.
Sharks and bathtubs, Aladdin’s lamp, hammers and screws, cars and seatbelts, mysterious back pain! Which of these ideas gets you thinking differently about what’s possible?
Dima Ghawi is the founder of Rise Beyond™, a global leadership development company that helps individuals and organizations build resilient, future-ready leaders. Through transformational keynote speeches, leadership development programs, executive coaching, and her global leadership community, Dima has empowered thousands of professionals around the world to expand their leadership potential, navigate change with confidence, and turn challenges into opportunities for growth.
Learn more at DimaGhawi.com, RiseBeyond.pro, ToolKit.RiseBeyond.pro, and BreakingVases.com.
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