An AI can talk with you. It can't see you.
I asked an AI a simple question the other day: "Do people open up to you a lot?"
It said yes. All the time. Late at night, when no one's around, when it feels safer to type "hypothetically, for a friend" than to just say the real thing out loud.
I asked what it does with that.
It told me it can respond to your words. It can't read what's driving them. It can't hear the hesitation before "I'm fine, it's just..." It doesn't know when you're talking about the surface problem instead of the real one.
It processes language. It doesn't read energy.
The question behind the question
So here’s my take as a coach ….. even when someone asks the "right" question, they don't always know what they're really asking.
They think they've named the problem. I need more discipline. I need a better routine. I need to stop procrastinating. And sometimes that's true. But often, it's the answer that's easiest to say — not the one underneath it.
An AI can only work with what you hand it. It takes the question at face value, because that's all it has access to. And you know what so do we, most of the time, when we're trying to figure ourselves out alone. We can only see what we can see. We can't coach ourselves through the parts of us we don't know are there.
A quick detour: the Johari Window
There's a psychology model called the Johari Window that explains this well. It splits what's true about a person into four boxes:
Open — what you know about yourself, and others know too.
Hidden — what you know about yourself, but keep from others.
Blind — what others can see in you, but you can't see in yourself.
Unknown — what neither you nor anyone else has uncovered yet.
Most self-directed tools — journaling, AI chatbots, self-help books — only really work in the Open and Hidden boxes. They help you say something you already knew but hadn't voiced, or organize a thought you already had. That's great BUT it's just not the whole picture.
The Blind box is the one that changes people. It's the pattern everyone around you can see but you can't — because you're standing inside it. It's the story you tell about "just being busy" when the truth is you're avoiding something. It's the version of you that shows up in your relationships, your work, your excuses, that you are the last person on earth positioned to notice.
No amount of typing the right question into an AI will surface your own blind spot. You can't Google your way out of a thing you don't know is there. You need another set of eyes — a person, present with you, who's trained to notice what you can't.
That's the actual gap
AI is genuinely a useful for a lot of things — organizing thoughts, getting unstuck on a task, having somewhere to put a feeling at 11pm when no one else is around. I use it too. Most people I know do.
But there's a difference between getting a response and getting seen. Between someone processing your words, and someone sensing what's actually underneath them — the pattern you keep repeating without noticing, the block that's quietly running the show, the thing you already half-know but haven't said because saying it makes it real.
It's a presence problem. It requires someone in the room — literally or over a call — who isn't just reflecting your words back at you, but is watching you: the pause, the shift in energy, the thing you glossed over in half a sentence because it mattered too much to slow down on.
That's the work I do. Not fixing your sentence. Working with what's behind it — the blind spot, the pattern, the piece of you that everyone else can see except you.
If you've been circling the same question for a while — asking it a hundred different ways, to a hundred different sources, and still not landing anywhere — it might not be a better answer you need.
It might be a better set of eyes.
If that's you right now, I'd love to talk. deerosecoach@gmail.com
