Build Resilience to Thrive in the AI Age

Mark Smith (00:11)
Welcome back to AI Advantage, where we discuss kind of the skills that you need to thrive in the intelligence age. And we're applying everything that we're learning to ourselves. So this is really us learning in public, a saying that we like to have and really using these skills in our own life to kind of put us in the best place. to adapt to whatever future we have that involves AI.

Meg Smith (00:42)
It really started with our, well, with, me, it was started with my own journey, feeling like I didn't know how to future proof my career, how to develop a skill that would be relevant in a world where we are asking AI to do more of our tasks for us or it's becoming more enabled. And there's the what it is now today.

And the how it's talked about is to the predictions of having agents who will work on your behalf to being part of teams that include AI agents as well as relying on software. I think the biggest thing for me has been to look back a year and to go, what was I asking AI to do for me a year ago? it's, you my habits are different, my skills are different, but what it can do is different too.

Mark Smith (01:29)
I like that. Today's topic is around resilience, wellbeing, and being a lifelong learner. And we feel like these three topics are kind of interconnected and impact us all differently. And so we wanted to take a stab at what they look like for us. And perhaps you have feedback and can share what they look like for you. But how do we build the habits and mindsets that allow us to adapt and thrive?

in the age of AI and I think adaptability is one of those key things and for me it's been an interesting year and I'm going to tell you a bit about how my year's gone but I'm interested in you know we're at the year end of 2025. Where are you at the end of the year? How do we stay relevant as we move into 2026? Particularly how do our skills that we sell in market whether you're working for somebody or

working for your own business, how are they relevant as we go into 2026? Do the skills that served you well in 2024 and 2025, are they going to be the skills that work for you in 2026?

Meg Smith (02:42)
My word of the year has been practice. I keep coming back to that because when I think about the different skills and the big ones we've touched on include communication, critical thinking, your data literacy, your technical depth, those skills for me are not just a one-off. I'm gonna do a training, I'm gonna read a book, I'm going to just do a one-time event. and then be able to say I'm skilled in that area. Every single one of them requires practice. And I need the mindset of practice to also take my tendency to try and get to perfection. You know, that perfectionism that has driven me to try and be, you know, get the A my whole life. I need this mindset of practice to go actually supposed to get it wrong. And a practice is where we can test things and learn things. And it also speaks to a regularity.

If you think about a yoga practice, someone who has a yoga practice, they're doing yoga a couple of times a week. And so that's what I've tried to hold in my mind and strive for in my learning this year is practice, not particular attainment.

Mark Smith (03:48)
Interesting interesting I've I Find that the word resilience has come up many times this year in in various formats whether it's content I'm looking at on YouTube or sessions that I've attended and this ability as a human to become resilience to be to be able to bounce back when life fires changes at us and

You know, as I reflect on my year, I've had a more difficult year than what I have probably had in the previous year. January started with a good friend of mine came and visited me and two weeks later he died. And that set off the course of events the following month. My father died.

And then I also found that I was in a job that was really focused on somebody else's vision and definition of success than my own. And it shook my confidence. And so it's been quite a difficult year for me across the board. And I come back to this concept of resilience and going, how do you bounce back after hard times, after hard things happen?

And for me, it's, I've had to go back to kind of what worked in the past for me, how was I operating in the past that enabled me to have a positive outlook on life. And so where I'm a person that wants to consume new and always be learning something new,

In the next four weeks, I've decided to go back to stuff that I have read, particularly reading is one of the ways that I learn a lot. And so I've gone back of queued up five books that I have read in the past, right back, you know, 10, 10 plus years ago. One book well over 25 years ago. And I'm going back to reset.

my mind because I feel like it needs to be reset in that I've started to look at life perhaps not as positively as what I used to and so therefore I'm resetting my mind and really getting back and building I suppose I'm in a phase of the moment of building resilience in the age of AI that is really going to set me up in 2026 I feel and it's a pattern of behaviors that allows my mindset to change and their physical behaviors so therefore fitness, workout, food, as well as mental and a lot of it you know I find if I can win the mental game I can win the physical and the other type of games in what I'm doing.

Meg Smith (06:41)
Yeah, I think there's a kind of secret in there about the resilience you already have, right? Because you're saying, I'm gonna go back to what's worked and I know I can do this. I know I can go from a place of feeling down and low to a place of feeling positive and high again because I've done this before in my life. And that's sometimes when I think of the resilience that I've had to build in my life.

I know I can do hard things because I've done them before. And that framing for yourself of some of the things that you've gone through as not only a terrible thing or the worst thing that's happened, but then being able to also frame them as, I got through that. then the next time I come through, come across a challenge, there will be a belief in myself that I can.

get up again. And you introduced me to a book by Angela Duckworth called Grit. It was really a popular, I think it was a best seller about 10 years ago. And it was about resilience. How can we teach resilience for our children? And this was long before we had children together. And it was thinking about how do you, you know, so often as a parent, your instinct is to protect and to prevent harm or to prevent pain. But

the kind of thesis of that book is that doesn't help your child have resilience. And if they get knocked down, your goal is to teach them grit so that they can get back up again and try again and try again. And the people that are successful, they look at some of the sort of traits of people and the outcomes, it's the people who will get up again, they'll get up one more time than someone else to try again. So I think that...

Yeah, when you said you were gonna go back to the books that have worked for you or that have really spoken to you in different parts of your life, I really loved it because you're always looking for the new thing, but I love, like, I'm a re-reader, I'm a comfort re-watcher. I think it's like, and I remember feeling, we were talking about that with like little kids as well, because they quite often want the same song or the same show or the same movie over and over again.

And I spoke with a friend of mine who's starting to be a psychologist and she was like, there's actually, it's a psychological support to be able to find comfort in the familiar. So I think it's a good thing to turn to at this time, which, you know, might not have been your natural thing to do as you look for something new, a new answer.

Mark Smith (09:11)
Yeah, totally. And it is part of that muscle memory, right? And I like what you said there about going back and what worked in the past. And that is as part of that resilience has been able to reflect and going, you know, the current situation I'm in, it's a time and but you can remember past events and experiences and that made you who you are.

and being able to bounce back into that and not even bounce back is probably, it takes work. It's not like it's just a stretched rubber band that bounces back reflexively. Is that muscle memory, it's developing what works well for you and it's unique to every person. And you've got to be able to identify what is it for you, I feel, and go on a journey of exploration if you're not sure what that is, what it is for you.

but you need to find out what it is for you. it's kind of like centering yourself to be able to move forward with that. And that takes us into wellbeing. So burnout, anxiety and depression are all things that we know are common in life. In fact, there's a bunch of research that's recently come out by Γüô Forbes and other publications that people are feeling a high degree of anxiety in the workplace.

that there is a sense of burnout and wellbeing is probably not on the forefront. And it was in October last year that Dario Amadei, who's the CEO of Anthropic, he put out an essay called Machines of Love and Grace. And it's worth taking a look at because in it he highlights how AI is going to help us in

various sections of our life and the two first sections were as around your health and around your mind in other words your mental health right and in those two areas he has a lens on how AI could potentially help us in those two areas so mental health and health and then he goes on to auto to economics so finances and

peace, in other words having peace in our lives and meaning. And I think meaning is one of those things that's going to change a lot in the next three years. Maybe shorter, who knows. And when I say meaning is what is the meaning of our existence? And a lot of us find meaning in the work we do.

I remember reading a book years ago by Viktor Frankl called Man's Search for Meaning and if you check that book out it's one of the most successful books, reviewed books of all time. It talks about a doctor who was in the concentration camps as part of Nazi Germany and how he looked at people that survived and their mindsets and their states and people that didn't.

and what was the differences and how post-war the effect it had on him and the importance of your ability to find meaning in life. But going back to Dario Amadei, what I like here and one of my challenges for myself is I want to build myself an agent for each of these areas of my personal life. So a health agent, a mental health agent, a financial agent.

So to monitor my personal finances, not monitor, but actually ratchet it up so I can get better in these areas as well as...

as meaning changes and I think it will change in time and we do a lot around the way we've set up our property and lifestyle and that we get a lot of meaning out of that. That meaning is not just our work. But I think AI can be a massive enabler of these areas. Also there's caution to be had because just last week was with a friend who's a psychologist in Auckland and

And we were talking about how AI therapists and the kind of wild west of what's going on in that space at the moment and the need for caution. And to her, I was saying, listen, I do expect that AI assisted therapy will be a massive part of what we go through in the future. Just like I said in healthcare.

I think a doctor with an AI support person working alongside that doctor is going to be able to diagnose a situations a lot better than a doctor that doesn't have the support of AI. And so I just think times are going to change in this space.

Meg Smith (13:51)
Yeah, and all of it, think we, in so much of the commentary, it's like, Γüô just move all towards AI. But I want to encourage people that are getting help from AI that they're also still getting help from trusted people, right? Like it's so often, if you just read the like case study or the highlights or the hype cycle, it's like AI will do this for us. And I'm like, yeah, it can help us do it better just in the scenario you described.

It should be more Γüô maybe articulate or informed when we're speaking with a someone who has done the hard yards. It's kind of like, it's both and. And the other big one that came up for me in talking about wellbeing of our teenagers, particularly with some people last week at an event I was at in Auckland was, are you talking with your teenagers? Have you found a way to explicitly talk about what you are and aren't doing with AI?

It's kind of not going to work just to be like, what are you doing? Show me as a, an authoritarian thing. But if you've, if you're demonstrating and kind of leading by example to go, Hey, this is what I'm doing. This is the kinds of things I'm asking and create a dialogue with them. Cause I can guarantee you that they are using AI in a way that you would never predict. So if you're not explicitly having these conversations, how can you guide them around the

ever shifting line between what you would share and what you wouldn't share. What's safe to ask, you know, these heartbreaking, horrible cases of AI companions that have, it seems in hindsight, spurred a teenager on to take their life, you know? So the explicitness, both from that point of view, but also just from a...

how are they learning? they using AI in their assignments just to get it done? Are they missing an important step that only later on you'll sort of say, I thought you learned that at school, but they never did because this was coming out and being available to them much faster than the curriculum was able to be updated. That's my kind of big thing. It's like, we just have to talk more with each other and listen, be listening for what you might hear that you might be able to start a conversation about.

So tell me a little bit about your approach, you know, to the learning element of it. Like what, what, what role does learning play in resilience and wellbeing for you?

Mark Smith (16:17)
So I think more than ever, the rate of change is only accelerating. We've just come off last week, Ignite happening in the Microsoft space where there was just a deluge of new content and new tools to learn and new ways that AI are doing different things. And I think even that can become overwhelming. And there's this need to move from learning, I feel,

being an event to becoming a habit. In other words, it's something we build into our lives and just like you would create a habit if you want to get fit at a gym and work out, it's the consistency that's important. It's not going and doing one massive set and going bang, there you go, I'm done for the month. It's the consistency. And yet so much of our training is done as this one massive rep and then you're done and

and you're expected to have learned what you needed to learn to carry on. think that there's a couple of things. One, each of us need to work out how do you learn? So rather than just having learning put on you by external people, sources, et cetera, how do you learn? What is the best model for you to learn? And then you start building a learning repetition and habit into your life. For me, I learn by,

a self learner. In other words, I like to direct my learning. I like to select what the topics I'm going to focus on. I like to do my research. I like to be quite diverse and where I bring that material in from, not from one particular vendor, not from one particular supplier or one particular voice or person. I like it to be diverse. And then I develop my skill around a particular topic. You know, recently I

I wanted to go deep on a thing called Varroa. Varroa is a mite that affects bees. So, you know, I've got a new book on handling Varroa mites in New Zealand. I understand the topic thoroughly and then I feel like I'm set up and equipped to work in that subject area for what we're doing on our property. But everything in life, I think that if you, when it comes to becoming a lifelong learner, it needs to be a habit.

Right. And you know, my most highly recommended book on if you want to build habits is Atomic Habits. Go check that book out. Incredible book. But just if you looked at how could I build the habit of lifelong learning, whether it's five hours a week, which there's been so many, there's so much written about this five hour model of five hours of learning a week. Consistently over time, how it sets your mindset up.

to absorb and learn new and then articulate it out. How does it apply? How can I use it? How can I advance in my skill sets by applying it?

Meg Smith (19:16)
Yeah, so how I like to learn is, for me, it's very connected to the purpose. So, if I know why I'm learning something, I can be quite adaptable in the way that I learn it, whether that's reading or watching. I'm probably more inclined to read. But the big thing for me is to be able to talk it through with someone afterwards, because it's only then that I can kind of chart the pathways in my mind and make connections with other ideas.

One of the big areas of learning for me over the last couple of years has been governance as I've stepped into board roles and have been able to start to learn about what is the role of strategy in an organization. And I love it. To me, I describe it as a bit of a puzzle. So I get to put my pieces together from what I learn by doing. So learn by fulfilling roles on a board.

what I learned from talking with mentors. So taking a scenario, a case study and being able to talk it through with someone who has that governance experience. And then of course there's, you know, podcasts and courses and, and books as well. But I think the most important ingredient.

for the way that I learn and retain information is to be able to talk it through. So maybe that's why I'm the one that keeps coming back to like, let's talk about it. You know, not everyone is gonna learn in the same way, but for me, that's a really key step.

Mark Smith (20:38)
Yeah. Just to wrap on this, think we need to focus on uniquely human skills like creativity, emotional intelligence, critical thinking and ethical reasoning. Those are some notes that I just wrote before doing this. And the other one is the byproduct of continual learning is self-confidence. Right. It gives you confidence. It gives you self-efficiency.

Right? Is that you can, it just, changes how you engage in whatever you're working on. So increases your wellbeing. It promotes your overall life satisfaction. The more you learn, particularly learning and application, and you'll be an interesting person to hang around.

Meg Smith (21:23)
So that's interesting you said that because when you were talking earlier, it reminded me about a story. I'm pretty sure it's from Chris Voss's book, Never Split the Difference, which is the one we recommend the most on negotiation. And he talks about having an experience on a psychological help hotline. he takes the call and essentially, I think it was a suicide hotline. And so he talks someone down and

And he thinks he's like just nailed it. He's come off this call and he is like, I guess had what he would describe as a successful outcome. And he kind of swagger's in to the team leader's office waiting for his praise that should be due, know, first time taking the call and he's just nailed it. And the guy absolutely reams him, says, have absolutely failed. You did that horribly. And the main kind of takeaway was,

you gave that person on the call, you gave them all the answers, but what you needed to do was let them, help them arrive at the answers themselves so that the next time they're in that place, they can look within and draw on that, draw on their resilience to, you know, survive the next crisis. And it was such a different reframe from this whole idea of I'm going to give them the answers and then that will help them and I will be amazing to my only role here is to help someone else know that they can do it themselves.

So thank you so much for joining us. If you've been listening to this podcast, there's also a video version. You can watch it on YouTube or on Spotify. We love your feedback. We love your comments. It's so amazing to have gone on this journey with you. This is the 12th of our 12 skills that we've been talking about over the last couple of months. This, you know, for us has been a piece of work that we've been working on for a while and we'll continue to work on.

And what we would love to do in the next episode, which will be the last before we take what for us is a summer holiday in New Zealand. We're to take a hiatus and then come back in February. before we do that, we would love to answer any questions you have. So we're to do an ask us anything. You can send us questions in our WhatsApp group, which you can join in the there's a link in the show notes.

Γüô And we will next week, so one week from now, we'll be recording those answers and love to sort of answer anything about the future skills that we've talked about in other episodes or things you have that you've wondered about AI. We operate on a no dumb questions policy. So fire them away Γüô in that WhatsApp group.

We're looking forward to that that ask us anything as a sign off and thank you so much. These these episodes live sort of in perpetuity on our site, which is Microsoftinnovationpodcast.com. head over there if there's any that you want to catch up on or send to a friend if they've been helpful to you. And with that, have a wonderful week and get ready to ask us next week.