The Most Disruptive Thing You Can Do Right Now Is Be Human
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Hello Friend!
Something is happening that I can’t stop thinking about.
We’ve built a world where machines can do almost anything... except make you feel seen. They can write your email. They can’t mean it. They can generate your content. They can’t care about your response.
And somewhere in all that noise, the person who shows up with warmth, curiosity, and genuine kindness becomes the rarest thing in any room.
Being human used to be the baseline. Now it’s the differentiator.
I spent years as a CIO convinced that technology’s greatest gift was efficiency. And it is… when it’s used well. But since leaving the role 10 years ago, I’ve watched something else happen, too.
I’ve watched teams trade emails composed by AI on both sides of a conflict. No one was actually talking. No one was actually listening. The arguments were humanless. And nothing… I mean nothing… was getting resolved. All that “efficiency” was creating mountains of rework, misalignment, and resentment.
Here’s the painful irony: when we remove the human from the experience, we don’t always save time. Many times, we lose it. We lose it to rework, to miscommunication, to the slow erosion of trust that happens when people stop feeling like people to each other.
There’s a principle I come back to again and again in my work and in my new book, Unignorable. Every time someone works with you, they’re unconsciously answering two questions:
1. Does this person know what they’re talking about?
2. Do I trust them?
The first question is easy to answer. Credentials, track record, results. Competence is legible. People can see it.
The second question is harder. And it’s the one that actually decides everything.
Competence gets you considered. Trust gets you chosen.
And trust is not built through automation. It’s built through presence. Through warmth. Through the willingness to actually show up as a human being in a world that’s making it easier not to.
For Corporate Insiders
Efficiency is the currency of corporate life. But here’s what I learned the hard way: when trust and alignment are missing, efficiency is an illusion. You’re not moving fast. You’re just generating rework faster.
The teams that move quickest aren’t the ones with the best tech stack. They’re the ones where people actually trust each other. Where someone picks up the phone instead of firing off a third AI-drafted email. Where a leader walks down the hall and has the conversation that needed to happen two weeks ago.
Try this: Find one automated or transactional exchange this week that would land better as a real conversation. This could be a Slack thread that’s going nowhere, an email chain with no resolution, or a decision being made without the right people in the room. Be the human who changes that. Watch what gets unstuck.
For Entrepreneurs
When your business runs on humanless experience like templated emails, automated follow-ups, and scripted everything, you’re not building a brand. You’re building a commodity.
Customers don’t leave because your process broke down. They leave because they stopped feeling like they mattered to you. And then you spend twice the energy finding new customers as it would have taken to make the original ones feel seen.
The most disruptive thing you can do in a market full of automation is to genuinely, consistently, unmistakably show up as a person. Curiosity. Warmth. Follow-through that feels personal. That’s not soft. That’s strategy.
Try this: Reach out to one current or past client this week with no agenda. Not to upsell. Not to check a box. Just to ask how they’re doing and mean it. Notice what happens to the relationship and to your own energy.
You don’t have to out-automate anyone. You just have to out-human them.
In a transactional world, that’s not a small thing. That’s everything.
Who’s someone in your life or work that makes you feel genuinely seen, and what do they do that creates that feeling?
Hit reply and let me know. I read every response.
Your coach, Chris
P.S. In a world full of automated everything, the businesses that win are built on trust. If you’re ready to build one — or rebuild one — The Unignorable Business Studio is where that starts. Click here to learn more.
