Someone like you Marcus, 49
Dread → Resolve
Twenty-five years in: a principal engineer, a finance director, a senior consultant. He is the one people call when it is hard. He has watched AI do in an afternoon what took his team a week.
The story he told himself. "My value is what I know." His dignity came only from being the expert, the mood our mood board calls the Specialist. As the machines learned what he knew, he worked harder at the half that was leaving.
The turn. The coaching named the gap between knowing and being. He took on the conversation everyone in the room was avoiding, and grounded his judgments in evidence. Then he started making offers about the decisions, not just the problems.
Marcus is a composite, drawn from people we have worked with. To protect them, we have changed names, details and situations.