I don’t know if it’s the fact that I’ve traveled to the East Coast for two funerals or that I’ve been navigating some pretty significant career decisions in my family but things have not felt light and fluffy in my neck of the woods this year.

I’ve been (mostly) enjoying this lil wake-up call, it’s reminded me of how powerful presence can be during difficult moments. When I was on the East Coast earlier this month, the funeral itself was actually a relatively small part of the experience – one hour in the afternoon, structured, contained, and over before I really processed it. The part that lingered inside of me was everything around it: being at your in-law’s grandparents’ house, sitting together with family, listening to stories, watching slideshows, just being in the same space while we grieved. It was a reminder that our pal, grief, is a linear gal: she ebbs and flows but being present with one another makes her visits more bearable.

On the flip side from reflecting after loss, my husband and I have processing our future. We’ve talking through what’s next for us career-wise, we’ve had long and messy weekend conversations where there wasn’t a clean answer at the end. And I’ve realized that the moments that feel most soothing aren’t the ones where we figure everything out, but the ones where we sit together – usually on a Saturday evening over homemade chocolate chip cookies or sourdough bread – and just chat. Progress still happens, but it doesn’t look the way I expect it to. It’s not a neat resolution with KPIs but more like a slow accumulation of alignment and the feeling that we’re in it together. That’s the real work – not forcing answers, but staying present long enough for something real to seep out.

That understanding has been creeping into how I think about work, specifically into a question I’ve been sitting with more than I expected: what am I actually freaking good at? Not what am I interested in, not what am I passionate about – because I have a lot of those things – but what do I consistently contribute?

We spend a lot of time, culturally, talking about passion. Follow your passion: explore broadly, become multi-hyphenate. And I do believe in that, to a degree. But it creates a lot of noise. When everything is interesting, it becomes harder to tell what’s actually core.

Contribution feels different. It’s quieter, and because of that, it’s easier to ignore. It’s less about what excites you and more about how you show up for other people. Where do you actually add value? What do people rely on you for? What patterns show up across the different things you do that point to something consistent underneath all of it?

I’ve found myself getting a little lost in that question. And in talking to other people, I don’t think I’m alone in that.

So I built a small tool that tries to make that a bit more visible, something to create presence during your process. It asks you 5 questions and maps you to an archetype based on your strengths and how you tend to contribute – not just what you say you like, but what actually shows up in how you operate. It’s not perfect, and it’s definitely not a final answer, but it’s a way of holding up a mirror when things feel scattered.

But the more I’ve worked on it, the more I’ve realized something slightly uncomfortable: tools like this – AI tools more broadly – are very good at elevating pain points. They can organize them, reframe them, make them sound sharper and more coherent than they felt in your head.

What they can’t do is find those pain points for you.

That part still requires being in the real world, paying attention, acting like a Sherlock Holmes in your own life. Noticing what actually feels hard, what conversations keep repeating, where things break down, where you feel stuck or unexpectedly useful. It’s being present enough – in grief, in relationships, in messy, unresolved decisions – to actually see what’s there.

If you skip that step, the whole system breaks. If you don’t have enough conviction to solve a real pain point, what’s the point? The output might look polished, but it won’t feel true, and it won’t hold up.

And I think that’s the tension we’re all going to have to navigate. AI can accelerate clarity, but it can’t replace experience. It can sharpen what you already see, but it can’t tell you what to look at.

Everything else – the tools, the outputs, the sense of progress – only matters if it’s grounded in that.