Walter Calvo
Friday Note: Behind a Curve You Didn’t Know You Were On
Camino Institute™ - A Transformation Practice
A while back, something quiet started moving through coaching circles. Coaches were uneasy about AI, not the tool itself but what it seemed to say about them. If a machine could ask a good question and hold a conversation that felt personal enough, what exactly had they been the irreplaceable part of?
Most of them worked it through, and what they found on the other side surprised them. The part of the work a machine could copy, the technique, the framework, the process, was never actually what a client came back for. What could not be copied was being known by someone who was fully there. The relief wasn’t that their job was safe. It was discovering that what they’d assumed was their value had never been the whole of it.
I don’t think this was really a story about coaches. I think it was one profession getting an early look at a confrontation almost everyone eventually has, on a schedule nobody gets to pick.
Here is the part that’s easy to miss. The change had already happened. It had been happening for a while, quietly, in small increments; nobody had to look at them directly because nothing forced the looking. Then something does. A layoff. A role quietly folded into someone else’s. A skill that used to be scarce turning ordinary overnight. And what actually gets discovered in that moment isn’t only I need a new skill. It’s the ground that already moved, and I didn’t notice, because nothing required me to notice until now.
That gap, between when the change happens and when someone finds out it happened, is where the fear actually lives. Not in the layoff itself. In finding out you were behind a curve you didn’t know you were standing on. And underneath that is a sharper question than “Will I find another job?” If the thing I built myself around can be moved without my permission, what does that mean about what I actually am?
This is why the fear rarely announces itself as fear about the future. It shows up first as fear about identity, because most people are raised to answer “who are you” with what they do, the two questions were never separated in the first place. A role that keeps showing up to be pointed at makes that arrangement feel solid for years. It only reveals itself as an arrangement, rather than a fact, once the role moves and something underneath it has to answer for itself.
Coherence is what determines which experience a person actually has when that moment arrives. A person without it experiences the reset as a threat to who they are, because who they are and what they do were never distinguished. A person with coherence experiences the exact same reset as information, real, sometimes hard, but not existential. The reset doesn’t change either way. What changes is whether it arrives as an ambush or as something a person already had the footing to meet.
That is the actual argument for naming this, planning for it, and teaching it before it arrives rather than after. Not because the change can be stopped or slowed down for anyone’s convenience. It can’t. But because the gap between the change and the noticing is the only part of this that’s actually optional, and right now, almost everyone is left to discover it alone, usually at the worst possible moment, with no one having told them it was coming.
The photograph above has not changed. You have. What is it saying now?
Walter Calvo, LCSW, DBA, Founder and Clinical Director, Camino Institute.