When ChatGPT first appeared, many coaches became nervous.
After all, who needs a coach when AI can give you everything you need to solve your problems and optimise your life, instantly, any time and for free.
It can help you set goals and create personalized plans.
It can track your progress.
It can answer all your questions.
It can listen to your concerns.
It can even provide encouragement when you feel stuck.
All things that coaches have traditionally charged money for.
And AI never gets tired or impatient. It’s never hard to get hold of. You don’t need to wait anxiously for your next appointment or email reply. It’s like having a team of the world’s best experts on hand just for you 24/7.
But there’s something here that doesn’t add up - and maybe you’re experiencing it yourself:
With unlimited information, guidance and support, why haven’t you solved your problems?
Why are you still stuck?
Why are you not experiencing a transformation in your life, along with millions of others?
This leads to an uncomfortable thought:
Maybe information, guidance, support and accountability were never the solutions to problems at all.
Which leaves two possibilities: either some problems simply can’t be fixed - or the real solution is found somewhere else entirely.
What Coaching Taught Me
I first began noticing this many years ago in my marriage coaching work.
People would come to me desperate to save their marriage. They were highly motivated and would often say to me “Liam, I am willing to do anything to save my marriage. Just tell me what to do.”
But here is what is interesting. Most of them had already read a ton of books, taken other courses, watched endless YouTube videos, and spent hours with counsellors and therapists.
If knowing what to do and being motivated to do it were enough, they should have solved the problem long before they got to me.
But for most of these people, even with my information and support, their situation didn’t change.
Often they either stayed miserable in their marriage or the marriage ended.
At first I assumed my advice simply wasn’t good enough.
But they had already received advice from plenty of other experts before they had ever spoken to me. So if I didn’t have the solution, neither did anyone else.
It used to puzzle me:
If information and effort were the answer, why weren’t they getting results?
Then I noticed something else.
The people who were struggling the most weren’t doing too little thinking about their situation.
They were doing too much.
They analysed every conversation and every argument they had with their spouse.
They thought through every possible outcome.
And they constantly tried to work out what the other person was thinking.
They weren’t confused because they hadn’t thought about the problem enough.
They were confused because they couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The Real Problem Wasn’t the Marriage
After a while I began to see something that changed the direction of my work completely.
The marriage wasn’t the real problem.
It was simply a reflection of a deeper problem:
Confusion and fear caused by overthinking.
They were so caught up in thinking about their life that they couldn’t see the wood for the trees.
And they were thinking about their life so much that they weren’t really living it.
It was only they people stepped back from all the analysis and mental noise that something interesting happened:
They started to become clearer about their life, what they really wanted and how to achieve it.
And when they did, strangely, the right actions tended to follow.
Not to solve the problem they thought they had (saving their marriage).
But to solve the problem they really had: not being honest with themselves.
Let’s face it, today we’re not short of information - we’re drowning in it.
We don’t have a lack of plans - we have more plans than ever.
We don’t suffer from a lack of goals - we have goals stacked on top of goals.
And now AI can provide an endless supply of all three.
All of this leads to an uncomfortable possibility:
What if more thinking isn’t the solution?
What if thinking itself is the very thing keeping us stuck?
You probably have a friend or someone you know where you see this clearly.
They’re struggling with something in their life, perhaps in their career or relationship, and they think about it constantly. Every conversation becomes another analysis of the problem, another explanation of what they’re trying, and another plan for fixing it.
But talking with them leaves you with a feeling of frustration and even impatience:
“Why can’t they see what is obvious? Can’t they see that all this talking, thinking and analysing isn’t helping? They just need to do X.”
We can see this so clearly in others. But it is much harder to see the same pattern in ourselves as we face our own issues.
AI Makes the Trap Easier to Miss
So this brings us back to AI, and why it may not be the solution to solving our problems that we hope it will.
The real danger is that AI allows us to become even more sophisticated at staying trapped in our stories. What I call the Story Trap happens when thinking about life gradually replaces living it.
AI helps us describe our life in more and more fine detail. But it doesn’t help us to actually break out and live it.
Here’s what’s really going on when we’re caught in the story trap using AI:
With AI, we create even better and more elaborate plans.
We develop better strategies. And we understand more about the problem.
All of this makes us feel productive, because it gives us a sense of certainty about what we need to do.
And all of this makes us feel good. So we take action. And things happen - sort of.
The thinking mind loves to find answers. It loves to analyse situations and create plans. It loves to understand more. Hone in on the details.
And, thanks to AI, it can do this forever.
We get lulled into the perception that we’re making progress - but are we really?
Are we less stuck than we were 6 months ago? A year ago? Five years ago?
If we were to step back a bit, and be honest with ourselves we would realise that we’re not.
The Assumption Behind Modern Self-Help
AI is a powerful mirror. It doesn’t just answer our questions, it reflects back and reinforces the assumptions and beliefs that we hold about them, even if they’re not true.
In other words, AI doesn’t break the cycle of struggle - it perfects it.
And one of the biggest assumptions many of us have about life is this:
If I can just think about this problem enough, I will finally solve it.
That belief is the silent driver behind most of modern self-help.
But what if the real breakthrough comes when we stop trying to solve life through more thinking?
What if the problem isn’t that we can’t find the answer - it’s that we’ve been looking for answers in the wrong place?
Perhaps the greatest gift of AI is not what it teaches us, but what it shows us.
For the first time in history, we can access almost unlimited information, guidance and support whenever we want.
And yet many of us remain stuck.
More information doesn’t help.
More thinking doesn’t help.
So what, if anything, will?
Perhaps the answers start showing up when we stop looking for them in thought.
If this article resonates, I built something for exactly this moment.
It’s called Nextla. And it works on a completely different principle to anything else you’ve tried.
Most tools give you more to think about. Nextla does the opposite. Using Reality Filtering technology, it strips away the mental noise and identifies the single most important action for you to take right now — not a plan or a strategy, just the one real next step.
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