I’m back on social media for a couple of weeks. And I could not believe how much content came at me about the same thing.

Career crisis. Identity crisis. Who am I, what do I want, why do I feel so lost.

Post after post. Person after person. And every single one of them — talking about pivoting, rebranding, figuring out what to do next.

Not one of them said the actual thing.

Nobody is connecting the dots to AI.

And that is my soapbox. I’m on it. Nobody is getting me off of it.

The Real Reason You Feel Like You’ve Lost Yourself

Here’s what I keep seeing with clients: they come to me feeling out of their own head. Out of their body. They used to be so intuitive. So motivated. So creatively led. And now they’re stuck and they can’t figure out why.

And then when I ask how they’re running their business — how they’re writing their content, building their offers, making their decisions — the answer is almost always some version of: AI does most of it.

I’m not here to tell you AI is evil. I use it. I’m going to tell you exactly how in a minute. But I am going to tell you this:

When you outsource your thinking, your creating, and your decision-making to a tool, you don’t just save time. You lose the muscle.

The decision-making muscle. The creative muscle. The trust-yourself muscle. And those are not easy to rebuild once you’ve stopped using them.

I Felt Myself Disappearing Too

I experienced this firsthand. And I’ll be honest about it because I think it matters.

I was using AI the way everyone else was. It was exciting at first. Fast, efficient, impressive. And then I noticed something: I would go to respond to an email and just… blank. I would try to write something and immediately think, let me ask AI if this is good. Let me see if it can be better.

I was outsourcing my own judgment. In real time. To a chatbot.

That’s when I started my daily writing practice. Stream of consciousness, every day, no editing. Because I realized I was losing my ability to generate my own thoughts — and that scared me more than any slow revenue month ever has.

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“AI isn’t the enemy. Outsourcing your identity is.”

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What Overconsumption of AI Is Actually Costing You

We tend to think of AI as a productivity tool. And it can be. But what we’re not talking about is what it costs at the other end.

I had a client send me her offer suite recently. She said she had some ideas and wanted my eyes on it. When I looked at it, I could tell immediately: this was built by AI. Complete offer suite, fully fleshed out, none of it coming from her actual strengths or her market research or her real audience. Just… what a robot decided she should probably sell.

She was about to go build all of it. Trusting the output of a tool that doesn’t know her, her clients, or her gifts.

That’s not productivity. That’s outsourcing your identity.

And the identity crisis that follows — the “who am I, what do I even offer, why does nothing feel like mine” crisis — makes complete sense. Because nothing is yours. You handed it over.

The Medicine Man and What We’re Willing to Believe

While I was back on social I came across an account. A medicine man teaching. You could tell immediately it was AI-generated — the smoke coming off his coffee cup moved in that uncanny way that gives it away instantly.

This account had 25, maybe 30 posts total. 375,000 followers. A Stan Store. A program called something like the Medicine Man Reset. Thousands of people commenting to get the link.

Someone built a fake persona, used AI to generate content, and is now selling something to hundreds of thousands of people who have no idea it isn’t real.

I’m not sharing this to be alarmist. I’m sharing it because this is the environment we’re operating in. And when we’re already feeling lost and disconnected from ourselves, we become more susceptible to exactly this.

A Privacy Note Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

I have to say this because I care about you.

There are currently no privacy laws protecting what you share with AI tools. None. My husband builds AI for lawyers. I’ve seen enough to know: everything you type into those tools can potentially be found and held against you.

Before you plug anything into ChatGPT or Claude or any other tool — ask yourself: would I be okay if the whole world saw exactly what I just typed? If the answer is no, don’t share it.

Your secrets, your confessions, your deepest fears, your emotional spirals — those are not for a chatbot. They’re also not going to get you the kind of support a real human who actually knows you can provide.

How I Actually Use AI (Without Losing Myself in the Process)

I said I’m not anti-AI and I mean it. Here’s the distinction that matters to me:

I use AI to pull ideas out of me. Not to replace me.

When I’m working on content or a podcast or even an offer, I’ll say: ask me six or seven questions to get to what I actually believe about this. Help me excavate the idea. Don’t write it for me — help me find it.

I’ll also take my own messy notes and ask AI to organize them into a content calendar I can print and cross off. Structure, not creation.

And sometimes I’ll write something and ask it to check for readability — not rewrite it. Just flag if something’s confusing. The moment it tries to rewrite in its voice instead of mine, I push back.

That’s the line for me. “Are you helping me think, or are you thinking for me?”

What Taking Back Your Mind Actually Looks Like

If you’ve been feeling the identity crisis — the “who am I, what do I want, why can’t I make a decision” version of it — I want to offer you a real possibility:

You might not have a career problem. You might have an outsourcing problem.

Taking back your mind is not complicated. It’s just uncomfortable at first. It looks like:

• Writing something without asking AI to check if it’s good
• Making a business decision based on what you actually know about your clients
• Sitting with an idea long enough to see what you really think about it
• Taking a break from the platforms that have been thinking at you all day

I took myself mostly off social media. Not forever, but enough to remember what my own thoughts sound like without the noise. It felt like a sacrifice at first. It wasn’t. Not even close.

You are allowed to want your mind back. You are allowed to be a human who uses tools without becoming one.

The pendulum swung very far in one direction. It can come back to center.

But only if we decide it will.

🎧 This is Episode 186 of the Shamelessly Ambitious Podcast. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

xx, Ash

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