You Cannot Outrun a Storm by Running Inside It

There's something nobody tells you about storms.

The most dangerous place to be is at the edges. That's where the wind is fastest, where the debris flies, where things get torn apart. The further out you go, the more violent it becomes.

But at the centre, the eye, there is stillness. Not emptiness. Stillness. The kind that holds everything together while the world around it spins.

I've been thinking about this for months. Not because of the weather. Because of what I keep seeing in the people I work with.

The Speed Trap

Last week I delivered the first live session in the AI for Coaches Mentorship with Coaching.com. Coaches from around the world on screen. Smart, experienced professionals who care deeply about their work and their clients.

I opened with a line from Nietzsche:

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."

Not a prompt. Not a plugin. Not a list of the ten tools they should be using by Friday. A question about purpose.

And something shifted in the room. The nervous energy settled. Not because I gave anyone reassurance. Because I gave them an anchor.

This is the pattern I see everywhere. In coaching. In corporate workshops. In conversations with founders and leaders who are trying to navigate the most disorienting technological shift most of us will experience in our lifetimes.

The people who are struggling the most are not the ones moving slowly. They're the ones moving fastest. They're consuming every tutorial, subscribing to every newsletter, attending every webinar, downloading every tool, and somehow feeling further behind with each passing week.

They're running at the edges of the storm. And the faster they run, the more the wind tears at them.

The Exhaustion Nobody Talks About

There's an exhaustion that comes from trying to keep up with something that was never designed to be kept up with. AI is evolving faster than any individual can track. New models every few weeks. New capabilities that render last month's workflow obsolete. New opinions about what you should be doing, building, learning, implementing.

The honest truth is that nobody is keeping up. Not the experts. Not the developers. Not the people posting confidently on LinkedIn about the latest release. Everyone is making sense of this in real time, and anyone who tells you otherwise is proclaiming certainty they don't possess.

So the question becomes: if keeping up is impossible, what do you do instead?

Most people answer that question by running faster. More tools. More tutorials. More tabs open. More anxiety about the gap between where they are and where they think they should be.

But speed is not the same as direction. And motion is not the same as progress.

What the Machine Itself Told Me

Earlier this week I asked Gemini, currently one of the most capable AI models on the planet, a question that had nothing to do with productivity: "What will always remain human, no matter how advanced you become?"

Its answer was remarkably clear. Lived consciousness. Genuine emotion. Intentionality and purpose. Moral agency. The things that come from having a body, a finite life, and skin in the game.

The part that stayed with me was this: the machine described its own advancement as becoming a better tool, not becoming closer to being alive.

Think about that for a moment. The technology itself is pointing us back to ourselves. It's saying: I can process, synthesise, generate, and analyse at speeds you'll never match. But the thing that makes any of it matter, the purpose, the meaning, the felt sense of what's true and what's right, that's yours. That will always be yours.

And yet most people are spending their energy trying to match the machine at its own game. Trying to learn faster, produce more, keep pace with something that was built to operate at a speed human beings were never designed for.

That's what running inside the storm looks like.

The Eye of the Storm

In every workshop I lead, there's a moment I've learned to watch for. It happens when the group stops trying to absorb information and starts to settle into something quieter. A shift from grasping to grounding. From "what should I be doing?" to "who am I in relation to this?"

That's the eye of the storm.

It's not a place of inaction. It's a place of clarity. The stillness at the centre isn't passive. It's the most powerful position you can occupy, because from there, you can see the whole picture. You can feel what matters. You can make choices that are aligned with something deeper than the fear of falling behind.

The coaches who activated their presence before touching a single tool in our first session produced work that was sharper, more authentic, and more useful than anything that comes from chasing features. Not because they were more technically skilled. Because they were grounded. They knew their why. And from that foundation, the how became almost effortless.

This isn't theory. I've watched it happen in corporate boardrooms, in training sessions beamed across continents, in one-to-one conversations with leaders who were drowning in options until they found their centre. The pattern is consistent. Presence first. Then tools. Always in that order.

The Inversion

Here's the part that feels counterintuitive, and I think that's exactly why it's true.

The fastest way to move forward with AI is to stop moving entirely. Just for a moment. Long enough to remember what you're building and why. Long enough to feel your feet on the ground and your breath in your body. Long enough to reconnect with the thing that no model, no matter how advanced, will ever replicate: your lived, felt, conscious experience of being alive and doing work that matters.

From that stillness, everything changes. Your prompts get clearer because your thinking is clearer. Your outputs improve because your inputs carry intention rather than anxiety. Your relationship with the technology shifts from desperate consumption to conscious partnership.

You stop trying to outrun the wind. And you realise you never needed to.

The Real Competitive Advantage

We're in a moment where everyone is talking about AI strategy, AI fluency, AI readiness. And all of that matters. But underneath every strategy, every system, every framework, there's a human being. And if that human being is exhausted, anxious, and disoriented from running at the edges of a storm they can't control, no amount of tooling will save them.

The real competitive advantage in the age of AI is not technical skill. It's the capacity to be present. To think clearly when everything around you is accelerating. To know what you stand for when the noise is deafening. To trust your own judgment when the machine offers a thousand alternatives.

That's what I mean when I talk about human-first AI adoption. Not human-first as a slogan. Human-first as an operating principle. The human grounds. The human decides. The human leads. And the technology amplifies what that grounded, clear, purposeful human is capable of.

This is why Rosario Londoño and I built HumaneBusiness.ai. Not to help people use AI better. To help them protect the empathy, purpose, and agency that make their work worth doing in the first place.

You Are the Eye

Here's what I want you to take from this.

You are not behind. You are not failing. The feeling that you should be further along, that you should know more, that you should be doing more, that feeling is the wind at the edges of the storm. It's loud. It's convincing. And it's not where you belong.

You belong at the centre. In the stillness. In the place where your purpose lives, where your values hold, where your experience and wisdom and humanity are not liabilities to be overcome but foundations to be built upon.

The storm will keep spinning. The technology will keep advancing. New tools will arrive. Old ones will become obsolete. The pace will not slow down.

But you don't need it to slow down. You need to find the place inside yourself that the storm cannot reach. And from there, with clarity and intention, meet whatever comes.

You are okay. Not because the chaos has stopped. Because you were never the chaos.