An hour after I closed a two and a half hour session yesterday, a single message arrived from someone who had been in the room. It read: “I went home and actually listened to my daughter tonight.” That one line told me everything about why we had spent the afternoon together. On Sunday, around forty leaders from across Mauritius, India and beyond gathered online for a live workshop on emotional intelligence in the age of AI, accredited by the International Coaching Institute. It was never a lecture about machines. It was a quiet, practical conversation about how to stay human, connected and influential while the world around us speeds up.
A quiet crisis we could all feel
We did not begin with technology. We began with a question, written by hand in private notebooks: where in my life or work am I becoming more productive, but less present? The honesty was striking. People who run teams, raise children and answer messages at midnight were quietly admitting the same thing, that their efficiency had been climbing for years while their presence had been slipping away.
I have started calling this presence debt: the small, compounding cost we pay each time we choose productivity over presence, repaid later, with interest, in our relationships and our nervous systems. Like any debt, it stays invisible until the bill arrives. In a room of capable, accomplished people, the bill was clearly coming due. I opened with the story of Garry Kasparov, beaten by a computer in 1997, who responded not by surrendering but by discovering that a human and a machine working together could beat the machine alone. That is the paradox of our moment. The more capable our machines become, the more our humanity becomes the advantage.
To set the tone, we did something that surprises people online. We wrote everything by hand, agreed five simple ground rules, and took two slow minutes to breathe and arrive in the body before touching a single idea. A settled nervous system, after all, learns better than an alert one.
The inner work: catching the hijack before it catches you
The first movement turned inward. I drew a line between three things we tend to blur together, intelligence, emotional intelligence and emotional maturity, a distinction I have explored before in IQ and EQ. Artificial intelligence now holds the first in abundance. Our enduring edge is the other two.
To make it real, we went to a football pitch. In the 2006 World Cup final, Zinedine Zidane, one of the finest players ever to play, was provoked by a few words and answered with a headbutt that ended his career in disgrace. He is not a violent man. For a few seconds, a small, ancient alarm in the brain, the amygdala, simply took the wheel. We talked about the science of that hijack, and about the ninety-second rule, the finding popularised by neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor that the chemical wave of an emotion clears in roughly a minute and a half. Anything still running after that is the story we keep telling ourselves.
Then we practised a simple tool, Name, Slow, Choose. Name the feeling, to take its charge. Slow the breath, with a long exhale, to calm the body. Choose, by asking what the moment actually needs. One participant, a father, described shouting at his young twins after a brutal day, then noticing the heat in his chest and the story beneath it, that his work somehow mattered more than their need for him. He went back and apologised. That is emotional intelligence in the age of AI in its most ordinary and most important form.
Trust, and the lost art of listening
The second movement turned outward. I told the story of Captain Chesley Sullenberger, landing a powerless plane on the Hudson with a voice that never rose. His calm was not only his own. A nervous system is not sealed inside one body; a steady one spreads to everyone nearby. The most useful thing you can bring into a tense meeting, then, is not a clever argument but a regulated nervous system.
We mapped trust to three signals, care, competence and consistency, and then turned to listening, the most underrated leadership skill there is. Most of us listen only to reply. Real influence begins one level deeper, where we listen to connect, hearing the feeling beneath the words. When I asked who in their lives deserved a better quality of attention, the answers were tender. One person committed to truly listening to her mother. Another resolved to stop cutting conversations short with her husband to rush back to work. A parent of a small child admitted she had been hurrying every bedtime, and decided to slow down.
Before you read on, sit with three questions. Where are you most productive and least present? Who has been receiving the most efficient, and least present, version of you? And what might shift if, for one conversation today, you refused to be anywhere else?
Staying human as the machines accelerate
The final movement named the pressures we all feel, speed, noise, automation, and the quiet ache of identity, the question of who we are if a machine can do what we did. I was careful to be fair to the technology. AI is extraordinary, and pretending otherwise is not leadership. But some things it cannot touch, because they were never information to begin with: presence, attunement, meaning, judgement and care.
The real danger, I suggested, is not that machines become human. It is that humans become mechanical, abandoning ourselves to match the pace of the machine. We borrowed an old idea from the Bhagavad Gita, full effort and a loose grip, giving the work everything while releasing our hold on the result. Then people wrote their line in the sand. One chose to protect her kindness while reclaiming her peace of mind. Another decided to reclaim her relationship with herself. A third, a mother who had spent years meeting everyone else’s needs, simply wrote that she would reclaim her own life.
The machines will keep getting faster. Your task is not to race them, but to deepen what they can never touch. In a world that worships speed, your steadiness is the contribution.
What they carried home
We ended where we began, with the body and a single line. Each person completed one sentence: in the age of AI, I will stay human by, and then their own words, small enough to begin this week. I left them with a sixty-second reset to use before anything that matters: one slow breath, name your state, ask what the moment needs, then begin.
No afternoon rewires a life. But that message an hour later, about a daughter finally being heard, told me the work had begun. If any of this stirred something in you, that is your own presence debt asking to be repaid. You might start this week by keeping a notebook and reflecting honestly on paper, a habit I have written about as structured reflection. And if you would like to go deeper, in your leadership or your life, you are warmly welcome to begin a conversation about executive coaching with me. One honest line, written by hand, is often where it starts.
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