Development for Everyone: AI Coaching in Action with Kirsten Moorefield

CloverLeaf is an AI-driven coaching platform grounded in the validated behavioral assessments you already know and trust, like disk, anyagram, and 16 types, delivering deeply personalized, science-backed coaching that meets your people right where they work and drives real behavior change, trusted by 45,000 teams to help leaders improve communication, collaboration, and performance, with 86% reporting more effective teams in as little as 30 days. CloverLeaf turns talent data into practical coaching insights that scale across your organization. Learn more at cloverleaf.me/podcast Welcome to ATD's Talent Development Leader podcast, featuring monthly conversations with the greatest influencers in the talent development field. We cover the latest trends, hot topics, and future-focused ideas that current and aspiring TD leaders need to know. Learn more by visiting www.td.org and searching for talent development leader podcast. Today I'm joined by Kirsten Morfield. Kirsten believes the very things that make work complicated. Self-doubt, conflict, and relationships are the path to doing our best work. She is the co-founder of CloverLeaf, a psychology-powered AI coaching platform used by some of the world's largest brands to help people and teams thrive. Kirsten is a TEDx speaker, writer behind the substack relational curiosity, and bestselling author of Thrive, a collaboration manifesto. Hi Kirsten, thank you for joining me today. Hi, and thank you so much for having me. ATD has been at the forefront of so many good things in our industry, so I'm truly honored to be here. Thanks for having me. You're welcome, and thank you for that. Today we're talking about how to level the playing field when it comes to people development and the role of AI coaching in that process. I understand from conversation with many execs in talent development that democratization is the future of development. For a while we were talking about high potentials, when we think about succession planning and leadership development, how do you focus on those few people who are identified as the real thriving, successful potentials, then hope that it trickles down, right? With everyone getting back to us? Yes, exactly. Yeah, I'm glad to see that has shifted. I think it's a promising one. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, on the idea of development for everyone. I think that it makes sense why people did the hypo and the exec and focus there and hopes that it would transform culture, trickle down those leaders would then become good leaders to their leaders, who'd be good leaders to their people. That was what was resource available to people one to two decades ago, and all previous to that, right? Because you had to have people who were training and coaching those hypo's and execs and people are expensive, right? With technology, more and more has become possible for you to actually empower every single person. I'll share my personal story. I lived to the classic story of I was young, high ambition, so good at my job, and I was rewarded with keeping my job as well as getting additional management responsibilities. I had zero training and how to lead people. I was just really good at managing my clients, getting the work done, moving it fast. And I immediately became confused about why different people on my team responded differently to the same situation. Someone would feel empowered. Someone would feel hamstrung. Someone would feel seamrolled, right? People just had very different reactions, and it became very clear to me that I was not equipped to actually help empower and equip these folks, right? So I had everyone take disc and 16 types assessments and Clifton's strengths finder. And I thought, inside of this is going to be the answers for why my people are so different. And I was overwhelmed. They didn't understand the assessments. I was not trained. I didn't have anyone I could call on to help talk us through. And nothing changed. Nothing changed at all. I felt like a failure. I felt confused. I felt like, why can't I figure this out? But also at the same time, like all my people had their feelings of, I'm stressed, I'm overworked, I'm under resource. And so that is such a classic story of what most people in organizations are feeling. They have a manager who is well-intentioned, but not trained, not equipped, doesn't have capacity because they still have their full-time job. And managers are like the superheroes. We expect them to act that way, right? And then you have managers who are under resource. And then you have just large constraints that the organization is under where they can't individually come in and help everyone. In that situation, I knew there were answers out there. I knew everyone had done the research. I knew there were great coaches. I knew there was so much wisdom. I knew there was the research behind these assessments, but I just needed it broken down for me with what I needed in that moment before each meeting, before each one-on-one. After a sticky conversation that went poorly, I just needed it kind of spoon-fed to meet. And I knew technology could do that. And so some coworkers and I started talking about it and we said, this is antiquated. The solution is available. It wasn't as clear 10 years ago. We didn't have as much AI capability, but we knew that technology, even with how limited it was 10 years ago, that there was a solution. And I think that should be now the table stakes for organizations is if you think of my situation, if we just train the leader or even if we can get so far as training the manager themselves, the front-line manager is still overwhelmed and can't really say, hey, I went to this course, I learned all these things, so I'm going to teach it to all my people. They don't have the skill or the capacity to do that. You need their people also getting developed and trained alongside them so that their people can solve some of their own problems or have a more informed conversation with that leader where they're not coming in from ground zero, but they're both on an equal playing field of, I have information available to me. I have support available to me whenever I need it. When you have that situation, your managers are way more capable of actually coaching their people. And every individual is able to develop regardless of the capacity of their manager. When it's so much less pressure, I think, then for managers, when you talk about these three personality assessments or strengths assessments and then just dealing that to your team and trying to figure out how to supply, but you pulled out a cool thread there about the real-time application. A lot of that is lost in translation when you're in just really the real-time work and how do you make that very clear to employees? So, equipping managers to do this in real time, I'm sure, is super empowering for them. And then giving employees ownership as well takes a little bit of that pressure off. I think it's the North Star that people in town development and learning development have always wanted, but felt wasn't available. And now it is. Nology makes it so possible, and I hope that leaders start to expect more from their tech vendors because we can do so much. We can actually achieve a personalized learning that goes so far beyond your level in the organization, right? If you can actually support people in the thing they're stressed about right now, not a concept that might apply later, but the thing that today is in their way, that's when they're going to apply it and actually change their behavior. That's when learning makes a true impact. We're talking about personalized learning here, but again, this has been a trend in recent years in talent development. And I hear TD leaders talk about this aim to create development experiences that are customized to everyone in their organization and to each unique situation. I hear it more in a philosophical level and they really struggle about what does that look like and how can we do that? And do you think it's possible, Kirsten, to think about every individual having a personal experience of learning and performance improvement and behavior change and what might that look like? I think it's not just possible. It needs to become table stakes because it is so technically possible today. I've talked to learning and talent leaders for a decade and they've said things like, yes, we have personalized micro learning in the flow of work, which looks like your manager level two, commonly manager level two struggle with time management. So here is a short five minute video that I'm going to push to you and hopefully it helps you on time management. I actually don't think that's very personalized or micro, right? Personalized is if you think of all of the data an organization has on its people, it knows who do you report to? What's the organizational hierarchy? It knows who you're meeting with. It's got your calendar data. It knows if you have taken any assessments in the past like behavioral assessments, it could potentially have that sort. It knows your latest performance reviews. It knows your tenure on your team. It knows all of this data when you add in what is becoming possible with AI coaching. On top of that, it can also know what you've struggled with recently, what you've gone to get coaching for. Then it knows your skills. There's just so much data out there that an organization has, but they're separated and siloed into different systems or into clunky ways that's hard to actually access. And then how do you actually plug it into match their day to day experience? The technology has made it so possible where more and more people are moving to platforms and there's MCPs and there's just so many more possibilities where all of that could come together. And you can know, Anne is walking into a one-on-one with her boss and this is her performance review three months ago was this. Her boss had conversations with her about that over. over this time and has really struggled with feeling supported. Here's an insight that can help and walking into that meeting. And it's three sentences with an invitation to go deeper if and wants to where you could role play or you could just process your thoughts or you could ask specific questions like, yes, in the scenario, I felt steamrolled and I'm really struggling to give feedback to my manager on how to lead me and it can give you insight into you versus your manager. What are your different styles? What's better way you could say that, right? That is highly personalized, micro, right? It could take you 30 seconds if that's all you have. And it is unique to you, the people around you, the situation you are feeling stuck in. That should become table stakes. I do that on my runs in the morning. I will play with myself to prepare for meetings. This will be so much more impactful for me. And if we're talking about AI, you should think of what are the strengths AI has? What can it do uniquely? And what it can uniquely do is crunch immense amounts of data and give you the right insight at the right moment. So when you're role playing with a situation you're walking into, all the information you have is your past experiences with the person, which is colored by your life experiences that help you understand those types of behaviors. But almost all the time, this is why my sub-stack is called relational curiosity because almost all the time we are wrong in our assumptions of what somebody else is thinking. There's so much research on this. Most of the time, even with your spouse, you actually are wrong in your assumption of their intention, their thought process, what they really mean to be saying. That data is actually available inside of a lot of organizations and people could be so supported with a role play that actually understands, hey, this other person or this group of people, they'll be more verbose because that's how they process information or they'll be more quiet because they're silently analyzing or they will ask more questions because they're actually excited about the idea and not because they don't believe in it or whatever it is. There's so many different ways that people show up and then we just make these assumptions of what that means. And so when we just role play on our morning runs, which good on you, I do the exact same thing, even though I have all of this on my fingertips. How can we stop ruminating? That would be amazing. But when we're doing that, we're limited in the information that we have in our minds. And AI actually can help us so much more to fully grasp the situation and adjust our styles and grow ourselves to meet the situation more effectively. That is cool. Can you talk a little bit about the data aspect? I'm curious. We have all this data at our fingertips as organizations. What if it's bad or speak to the imperative of good data or the role that data plays in all of this and how that's a consideration? When you say what if it's bad, do you mean what if it's incorrect? An accurate, reliable. I think that's such an, no one has ever asked me that question before. That's a really perceptive question. I'm going to step back for a moment. I think that AI coaching is going to become the technical interface for all things HR, talent, learning, development, the whole talent lifecycle onboarding interventions, all of those things. I think that in our not too distant future, AI coaching is going to be that interface, right? Every HRIS is going to have one. It's just going to be the way because it has access to all that information. And through that process, the most effective AI coach is have to understand that all humans are biased and flawed and doing the best we can with what we have, right? And so in that process, it should be able to help that manager who like my dad had a 30 year career at a global organization. And for, I don't know, five of those years, he was under a manager who always gave bad performance reviews to everyone because he was like the teacher who will never give an A. And he always believed that there's room for growth. I forget how their system was. Let's say it was on stars. Nobody ever got five stars. My dad often got three. Even though he was a top performer, his peer reviews were amazing. His 360s were profound. And his output was awesome. All of that stuff was happening. But his manager, who my dad is the most positive person, he says, oh, I learned so much through the process. But it thwarted his entire career because of this one manager who had this one philosophy. His pay was limited because then it was in right, your pay and your possibility for promotion, all of that completely changed for the rest of his career. Now, if you have an A. I coach that is the interface that has access to all of that data where you can also have 360s, you can have peer reviews, you can have performance data included, you can understand this person's output, you can understand the project management data, you can understand all of that. It actually helps. My dad's previous boss, who thinks everyone always has room for improvement. It actually helps overcome the gap that we have now where it depends on the capacity of the human. Their lives are just, their philosophy, their belief. But also what manager can actually look at all of your 360s. How much is 360 even in the performance review process because of just capacity, not just capacity of the manager, the talent leader, or the process of performance review, but of the people who are supposed to give the 350 feedback, right? Your performance review cycle can't be. Everyone stops for three days and just writes reviews on each other and on the organically, right? How do you make that stuff light? Wait, how do you actually have your AI coach being that interface to help aggregate that information and collect it in small doses over time? And in a way that is not big brother and controlling and just trying to monitor that people are being productive, but in a way that is built on the philosophy that all humans have the capacity for growth and all humans have a need for additional information, help to be curious instead of certain, all of that. Then you have not just these momentary processes, but the day-to-day operating where there is an interflow, an interaction with all of the data and all of the human moments at work where people are being supported where they are asking the questions they need, where they are solving their own problems. I feel like I'm starting to get very verbose here, but the point is I actually think back to your original question of what if it's bad data? I think that the bad data is because of human bias in a lot of situations. If humans are actually supported beyond their bias and if that data is supported by more data, then it can be equalized and I think you overcome that problem in a way that you can't even without the solution. Again, how the different platforms and systems are talking to each other and how AI enables that and in itself, just bringing together the different data sources to make these insights really clear, I think, is incredibly powerful. Let's talk a little bit more about behavior change and how we think about the point of all of this, so the point of learning, really, the point of coaching. And our listeners, when we think about what they're measuring in their organizations, really, what are we getting to here? And I think behavior change is a big piece of that. What do you think, Kiersten, are the critical factors that contribute to such change? There's a lot. I'll talk about two specific things. I think one, behavior change doesn't happen in a one-time learning. It doesn't happen in a one-time download because everyone we work with is very different. Let's say you're in a management training course or a leadership development course and you're learning about how to give feedback and your top of framework. Situation behavior impact, right? Very common one. Like, you give feedback, you say, "Hey, Anne, in this meeting we had yesterday, you kept asking questions." And I noticed that Scott didn't have a chance to ask his questions and Sam looked really disengaged. The impact of that is we didn't get to hear their viewpoints on this and so now we have limited information. Situation behavior impact. If I gave you that feedback, there's many different ways that you could respond based on you, based on how you receive information, based on what you think of our relationship, right? So I managed two very different people. One person, I would have to start that conversation with them, asking, "How's your family? How's your weekend?" Oh, I know that there was that soccer game and your dog went to the vet and make them feel comfortable, invested in, cared for as a whole human. And the way that I would word that would be with like, I understand your intentions are good and here's a better way we can go through this. Like, it would have to be with so much for both care. And there's another person I managed to have, I did that, that person would be very confused by my feedback. They would actually love it if I just came in and I was like, "Hey, let's talk about the meeting yesterday." And that was the beginning. That was the first thing I said in our meeting, right? Like the first thing I say, and then they understand where they stand with me, they understand what they can change, they feel invested in and they're grateful that I was to the point concise and extremely clear. In both situations I'm clear, but it's just in different ways of caring for that person. You asked about behavior change. So many times I hear managers get trained on the framework, they go and apply it, it didn't work, or it did work, at one time, but it didn't work the next time. And it didn't actually help them fully. And so they move beyond it. And they're busy and they forget, ebbing costs for getting curve, right? All of those things, we just can't retain all the information. So my first point in behavior change is that all change, all development happens relationally. Nobody works in a vacuum. Nobody achieves well in a vacuum. We depend on different departments. We depend on those who lead us, those we lead. We depend on our peers. We need to be equipped to develop relationally with understanding those nuances of the very different people around us. The second thing I'll say on behavior change is that, let's say that you are getting trained in a framework and then you don't have a need to give feedback for a few days, a few weeks. How much of that are you actually going to remember? Even if in the class, you probably practiced it, you roleplayed with another peer, it felt really equipping and helpful. Life goes on. We're very overwhelmed. We're busy. We're not going back and reviewing that information. Every TD leader knows this, right? So what people need for behavior change is for it to come to them for the thing that they need to apply. If you think of the 70 to 2010 model of like classroom and application, that's 70%. You need to give somebody the information in the flow of work when they need to apply it, when they are stressed out about my goodness, I need to give Anne feedback on this. I hate giving feedback. Maybe they save it for the end of the conversation, then they just don't get to it because you ran out of time, right? That's the thing they're feeling stuck by. That's the thing they're stressed with. That's when they need that information, when they can apply it. That's what creates behavior change. I'm thinking about all of these factors and putting them together. Looking for all personalized learning, looking at performance and how we use all of this to create behavior change. That is within an environment. That's relational and real time. So how does AI coaching do this? Tell me. I'm excited because I know this is a topic and an opportunity for our listeners right now and they're so curious about it. We talk about curiosity and they want to get it right. I think there's also this pressure. You said there are so many solution providers and vendors and emerging opportunities right now. We would just love to hear how can AI coaching really bring all of this together for people? I think that we need to be clear on what is it that AI can do that humans can't because I think there's a lot of AI coaches coming out that are just trying to act like a human. Be able to mimic exactly what an amazing human coach does, which I hear from learning leaders who have used those that people are not using them very frequently or they get frustrated by them because a really good human coach is going to say, "Anne, that meeting, you got that feedback from Kirsten that you needed to ask those questions." How does that make you feel? Can you remember a time when you've done that in the past? It's just going to ask you really thoughtful questions because a really amazing human coach knows that you already have a lot of wisdom within you. If they can lead you through your thought processes, you can actually be fully empowered to find the solution within yourself and go and apply it. A mentor is going to give you answers, help you with your technical skills, you know that kind of thing, but a coach is going to help you process your thoughts and help you come to a better way of thinking so that you own your next approach. So powerful, so amazing. When a robot is doing that to you, it's frustrating. I've heard this from a number of leaders. We need to look at what AI can do is search all of the world's information and give you three sentences that is powerful to you in the moment you are in and that is highly applicable. And then give you next steps if you want to go deeper, if you have time to go deeper. I think that is what we need to be looking to our AI coaches to do. I think that we could talk features, there's so many features, there's table stakes things you should look at with security and privacy and of course those things and ways that are going to make people feel like they can trust the AI coach. But I think that we should look first and foremost to our AI coaches to do things that humans can't do. You look at coaching more holistically, right? So what's the role of a human in coaching and what's the role of AI? Because I do think a lot of people now are like, oh, AI coaching, okay, so I don't need humans anymore. I can completely outsource this or I can replace what I was doing with a robot. And I think that's really good insight that actually know you can't and you shouldn't. And here's why. And I think that's how as a profession, we should be thinking about AI overall. Again, there's a lot of noise out there, a lot of solution providers, a lot of opportunities for AI coaching. It would be really helpful for listeners to understand you referenced what are the features to look for, what IT security considerations should they be thinking about, maybe some red flags to consider. That's a great question. So table stakes, like we don't even need to talk too long about it, it's just all thing security, right, sock to ISO, like data privacy. I'm talking about how all of the data should be connected. And to be fully frank, today that makes procurement a bit of a bear, but it is worth it because the outcome makes the talent leader the most strategic they've ever been able to be. That I believe will start becoming easier as there are new gold standards established and all of that. It's not an option that it needs to be able to pass through all of those processes, right? So, you need to be thinking about what is going to make the individual comfortable using this. Do they understand where the data is going and who has access to it and how confidential it is? That individual needs to be the one controlling that, especially if you look at what I've talked to you, our philosophy is relationships are everything for your growth, right? They are critical. You cannot remove relationships from your growth. And so we have the ability to share a lot of data with your peers, with your organization, we also have the ability for you to choose not to do that. And you choose because you need to become comfortable or else it's not going to be helpful to you because you won't be fully open with it, right? Now also for the talent leader, you should be able to have the most data you've ever been able to dream of to prove that behavior change is happening and that the impact of your work is game changing to your organization's ability to compete in the market. You should be able to say, hey, crucial conversations are happening more. Managers are coaching their people more. Employees who didn't feel recognized are feeling recognized. Whatever it is that is critical to your initiatives, you should be able to prove that in the data. And like I just said, it's all highly private, right? So it's aggregated and it's anonymous. All of those things I said should just be table six. So then when we go into different features, there's different ways that learning and talent leaders are looking at AI coaching. I've talked to a number of people who say just in their leadership development course, they just want the role play available. They want someone to be able to use that. That has become a norm across all AI coaches. I actually can't think of a single AI coach that doesn't have a role play available. And so then you just want to look at what is it within the role play that matters to you? So for example, there is a training company called Udly and they have gone very niche on sales and customer calls. So if you want to train that team on how to handle difficult customer calls, you can, because you can upload your past difficult customer calls, it can break them. That kind of thing. It's gone very niche in that training direction. Whereas us, we've really gone all in on the fact that it is about actually being able to role play with understanding what the other side or what the other people are most likely to think and need from you and need from your communication, along with the best practice frameworks of how to give feedback and you can customize it to you train an SBI and that's important to your organization, right? Like you can customize it to your organization's language. There's other role play things out there that you can look into, right? So be clear on your needs, but everyone's going to have a role play. I think also beyond that is the philosophy of talk to an AI coach, right? Every AI coach has the ability for you to just chat with it, whether it's written, whether it's verbal conversation. And with that, of course, you want to make sure that it's backed by the best coaching practices, I/O psychology, all of that. That again, that's just table six. I'd be shocked if any of them aren't doing that because part of you in this game, if you not doing that. And then from there, you just want to look at usage. Are people actually using this? And it still blows my mind that we started doing this in 2018 is when we came up with our first commercial product. We had some beta and individuals we were working with before that. When we came up with our commercial product, we called it AI coaching and people freaked out because they thought that's so unethical. AI cannot replace, cannot be used in coaching. The world was scared of it. Fast forward to today. And it's become a norm, which is great. It's wonderful. So what you've got is a lot of now companies that have done coaching or who are just coming out with coaching, who are slapping on AI. And they're saying, hey, we've done your employee engagement service for you in the past. Now we have an AI coach on top of this. And really all that AI coach is a way for you to come in and chat and ask, where is recognition hard in our organization or something like that? It's not actually truly coaching you. And so it's not a surprise then that it's not really getting used. You want to discern what is truly providing value based on just how many people use it. Start with a few hundred users and do 25% use it, then that's probably not great. We should blow our LMS usage standards out of the water. That's just the incomparable to what we used to expect from training or content tools. If it's really helpful, people will return to it and use it. But another feature that I think is critical then to look at in that, if you want it to be truly helpful to people, we all know people are busy. We've been talking about that. It can't be on the sidelines behind another login waiting for somebody to come to it. It has to be in the flow of work. And not just, hey, when you think about it, you can go into your Microsoft Teams and ask a question, but it has to be prompting you. It has to be saying, hey, Anne, how that meeting with your boss go, hey, Anne, you know, this was in your performance review. Here's a tip on how to incorporate that today. It needs to be prompting you because everyone wants to grow, but people, it's not our first thought, right? Maslow, Sireg, you have needs. I need to keep my paycheck so I need to get this work done, right? Okay. So, I'm going to say, which we've been talking about this whole time so I don't need to elaborate on long, but it's just what is the data behind the AI coach? How much do you think it's going to be? is it based on just what the individual experience is and what the individual tells them, because then it is not able to coach on the full scenario. And how much is it actually able to connect into the other data points? For us, with our organizations that are very locked down on their HR data, they can at least still have behavior data on their co-workers, right? Because we partner with the leading assessments, disk, anyogram, insights, discovery, Clifton-Strainsfinder, those are our partners, and so you still have that data, right? But then, of course, the more an organization can open up their data, the more informed their AI coach can be, and the more behavior change, game change, that can happen inside the organization. That was so helpful. Yeah, so helpful, Kirsten. For me, even, the part-- and I'm sure many of our listeners know this, but I didn't. The part that users can choose what data is-- Because I often wondered that. I was like, this feels like big brother-ass. You know all of this about your employees, do they know what you know about them? But they do, and they have choice in that. So that was reassuring to me to hear. That's critical. Yeah. Yeah. And I just love the features you talked about the prompting in real time. You know, that it's not something that you, as a user, have to remember to go to, but it's integrated in your flow of work. And just the relationship aspect to me, that's been a big aha today. Again, that roleplay scenario we talked about, where you have insights and data about the people around you, your co-workers, how they're thinking, how they might respond, that really helped to move the needle for you. That's really cool. Before we start to wrap up today, curious for what you would suggest are some ideal use cases for AI coaching, and how listeners might be able to start to think about that when they're thinking about incorporating this in their own strategies? Yeah. I think that there are two things that are really important for that. One is just look at your normal processes. And what's one thing you're coming up with soon? Are you about to roll out a new onboarding program of new college hires? Because that's going to happen in the next few months, right? Or are you starting a new hypo program, new director training program, new leadership development? Like what's about to kick off for you in the next few months? It performance reviews. What's happening in your talent lifecycle? And incorporate it there. Because that's just a natural starting point where people know they have to do something and they need help with it. So just start it there. And then another critical thing with that is make it fully open. Let's say, for example, it is the leadership development program. You don't want it to only be accessible to those leaders. You want them to be able to take it back to their team and their team can use it too. So that goes in, however, you do your contracting on it. But you want it to be something that is democratized, truly democratized, and can therefore have a top down and bottoms up grassroots growth path that it can be on. And what about for our listeners today? So those talent development leaders who are listening to this probably because they want to think about how to make this part of their L&D strategy. What about for themselves in their own professional development? How might they start to consider using AI coaching? Oh, I strongly recommend that you start using it. I would say you should use it and be very honest with yourself about how much you actually use it. How much is it helping you with whatever situation you are in? Because if it's not actually helping you and you're not returning to it, it's not going to be that helpful to your people. I think that we have a free trial. I don't know of another AI coach that has a free trial, but I assume it's going to start happening. I think that all the AI coaches are going to start to do that, where you can just go in and test it out yourself. What a great way to get started, where you don't even have to talk to a salesperson. You can just fiddle around in it and you do turn to it. Is it really helpful to you? And if so, that is proof in the pudding that this is something that your people will use. And I think that us as leaders, like me, if I'm not using my own AI coach, then what am I building? Talent leaders, if we're not using our own things we're giving to our people, what are we building? If it's only for a one-time use in a program, that's not really supporting our people throughout their careers. Then get an experiment. And part of the pilot is using it for yourself. I like that. Kirsten, as we conclude today, I like to ask many of my podcasts, guess this question, just to see what your jazz about today, what in your recent readings, research, thinking, meditating has really made you excited, optimistic, curious that you'd like to share with listeners. That's such a good personal question. About a year ago, I started reading a book that's actually over 10 years old. It's called The Body Keeps the Score. It's about our brains and how we deal with trauma. And it's about major trauma, which thankfully I've not experienced. But everyone has experienced minor trauma. Like you're in that meeting, you're giving that pitch, and it's not going well. What is happening inside your brain? So this book goes into the neuroscience of the different parts of your brain and what's happening. And that has totally transformed the way that I view so many things. And I just keep chewing on it because, you know how you'll be giving feedback to somebody, and it's not going well. And then afterwards, you leave, and two hours later, you come up with the perfect thing to say. And you're just kicking yourself that you didn't do it, right? That's actually neuroscience. Why that happened? And the unlock is that if you want to get out of fight or flight, and you want to get out of a scarcity mindset, and you want that for your organization, and you want people to be imaginative. You want people to be reinventing the future. Now that all this wave of AI has come, and we've got new constraints with tariffs or whatever it is, constraints are going to happen in the macro economy. And you want people to take all of that in and invent new ways. The key to that happening is igniting the frontal lobes of the brain. And a hack for that happening is actually relationships. When people feel safe in their relationships, I think of it like a toddler is screaming and crying. You don't just yell at them. You give them a hug, and they feel that relational connection and it brings back on their frontal lobes, right? They're prefrontal cortex. It's the same for us grownups. You're in a meeting. It's not going well. You're working on a project. It's off the rails. It's the true relational connection with accountability and with finding new ways forward. That is what reopens our ability to be creative, to be innovative, to be able to handle the challenges that are thrown at us every single day. How the brain works and the hack of relationships to actually make us productive, more capable, more competitive in the marketplace. It's interesting. At the second person, that's recommended that book to me. So one of my intentions this year is to read more. I'm going to get it. This is my sign. And I've been told there's so much more information available now. Not that anything is incorrect, but there's just so much more information. But I feel like it was just a seminal piece of work. The brain is the final frontier, really. And we don't understand it. My husband was just telling me he's reading a book where they said, "All of the information in our brain is smaller than a fingerprint." And that actually our brain has the capacity to hold all of the information in the world. It's more just how we use our brains, right? Isn't that crazy? That's crazy. And what's crazy to me is we'll keep having more and more research emerging to learn about how the brain works and how we're evolving. I'm so hopeful of what that will help us understand in terms of grit and determination and finding new solutions and finding our inner fortitude and being able to overcome situations that right now put a lot of people into scarcity or like siloed thinking or departmental disagreements. Oh my gosh, of course, sales is always doing that thing where they sell the impossible thing. Or, oh, of course, engineering is saying it's impossible or whatever. We could get away from that blame, that finger pointing, that comes from us just not having open-minded curiosity. And we could find our ability to relate with each other, to understand each other, to care for each other, to, at the same time, have high accountability, high curiosity, high standards of expertise and work ethic. And all of that can come together instead of being thwarted by some default ways our brain works can actually understand how to overcome and how to move into a more human future that is also high-performing. That's wonderful. Thank you so much, Kirsten, for your time today. This has been a wonderful conversation, super energizing and also really practical. I know our listeners are going to get a lot of it. So thank you for spending time with us today. I take that as a high compliment because I want it to be practical. I want people to be empowered with moving forward and actually digging into this world of AI coaching. So thank you so very much for having me in. And you're a wonderful conversationalist. You're so good at asking curious questions. Thank you. I appreciate that. How might folks get in touch with you if they want to learn more? So of course, if you want to learn more just AI coaching, we have gobs of information on our website, which is cloverleaf.me, as in me, myself, and I. And then personally, I'm on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn. Send me a DM. I would love to be able to answer questions. People have understand your situation. Be helpful, however I can. Whether or not cloverleaf is helpful to you, I think that this is the time when we can truly support all people in an organization like never before. And I'm happy to have conversations with people about how technology can help that. Whether or not it's with my product or another one. Thank you to our sponsor, cloverleaf. Thank you for listening to the this podcast by the Association for Talent Development. 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