When people ask how I like the weather in Belgium, I often say: “Ideal for my career. It rains, I work.” That’s why, in my view, rainy Saturdays are underrated.
They interrupt the impulse to rush outside and quietly create space for something else: reflection, reading, learning. Last Saturday was one of those days, and by the end of it I had completed “Change Management for Generative AI” by Vanderbilt University.
The topic is obviously timely. Generative AI is evolving at extraordinary speed, but the real challenge organisations face is rarely technological. It is human. How people understand, trust, experiment with, and ultimately integrate new tools into their everyday work determines whether AI becomes transformative — or simply another unused system.
Change Management in the Age of AI
The course explored the organisational and behavioural dimensions of adopting generative AI. The central concept it introduced is the FASTER framework, developed by Jules White and Bob Higgins. It offers a structured approach to navigating change when introducing generative AI in organisations:
Foundation – Establishing clarity about the current situation and the purpose behind adopting AI.
Alignment – Ensuring that stakeholders understand the direction and feel part of the change.
Safeguards – Creating guardrails and policies that enable responsible experimentation.
Training – Equipping people with the skills and confidence to use the technology.
Evolution – Allowing the system to adapt as new insights and practices emerge.
Replication – Scaling what works and embedding it into organisational practice.
This framework resonated strongly with my own work. In projects such as AI Navigators and in initiatives exploring AI in mentoring, I consistently see that the real bottleneck is not access to tools. It is creating the conditions for people to adopt them meaningfully: psychological safety, clarity of purpose, and the ability to experiment without fear of getting it wrong.
Beyond the Original Purpose
The most interesting realisation for me came when I started thinking about the portability of the FASTER framework. Good frameworks often extend far beyond the context they were originally designed for.
For example, I found myself imagining how FASTER could guide something much smaller and more personal: planning the week ahead.
Foundation: Where am I right now, and how does this week align with my broader professional aspirations?
Alignment: Who needs to understand what I’m trying to achieve this week — my team, partners, collaborators?
Safeguards: What needs to be protected in my calendar and environment so I actually have the conditions to execute?
Training: Who around me needs context or knowledge so they can support the goal rather than unintentionally sabotage it?
Evolution: What other problems might get solved indirectly if this experiment succeeds?
Replication: If this works, where else can I apply this approach to learning and growth?
What starts as a framework for AI adoption can become a lens for thinking about change more broadly.
Generative AI Is Much More Than a Technology Shift
Generative AI is not simply a technological transition. It is a behavioural and cultural one too. Organisations will not succeed with AI simply by purchasing tools. They will succeed by:
Creating environments where people feel safe to experiment.
Investing in continuous learning.
Aligning AI initiatives with meaningful goals rather than hype.
Designing change processes that acknowledge uncertainty and adaptation.
This is precisely where leadership, coaching, and organisational development intersect with technology: change management.
A Sunday Reflection
Today the rain is gone and the sun is back out over Brussels.
The completed course is a small outcome, but the reflection it prompted feels like the bigger one: in moments of rapid technological change, the most valuable skill is not mastering every new tool. It is learning how to guide our people — and ourselves — through change.
There are days when reflection arrives as a gentle invitation, and days when it shows up as a non‑negotiable need, like thirst. In both, my way back to myself starts with slowing down enough to notice that I have drifted. What a reflective practice looks like in my everyday life and work?
Walking as moving thought
Long before reflective practice had a name in my life, it had a rhythm: my walking pace. As a teenager, whenever something felt tangled, I would leave the house and walk until the inner noise loosened and the essential thread of the question appeared. Later I read in a book by Julia Cameron has a phrase about my experience – “solved through walking” – and it mirrors how my thinking settles when my body is in motion.
Today, walking is a deliberate practice rather than an intuitive escape. I schedule it. Sometimes it is a long, spacious two‑hour walk in city-close nature, more often, it is a 15–20 minute circle around the building where I live, or a park near our home in Brussels. What matters is not the distance, but the moment when my breath slows down and my thoughts stop chasing one another and begin to walk alongside me instead: I recognize the systemic approach here, which I use a lot in my coaching work, this time– self-applied.
On these walks, I don’t listen to anything, no podcast, no music. The steps themselves are the metronome of reflection, sometimes enriched by a word, or phrase coming from a conversation of passing by people, horn of a car, wings of a bird or flock. Questions that felt heavy behind the laptop screen become lighter when they are allowed to move with me: How did that coaching session / important conversation / {anything else that I need to reflect on} really land? Where was I truly present today, and where was I half a step ahead of my client / my child / my husband / myself?
Silence before serving
As a coach, I think of reflection as a professional hygiene. Before each coaching session, I take a brief pause – sometimes five minutes, sometimes only one or two – to become aware and possibly “release” the inner “leftovers” I am bringing into the room. It can be as simple as standing by the window, staring at a tree or a distant rooftop, and letting my gaze soften until my thoughts do the same.
These mini‑rituals are what I call “prophylaxis of presence”. They are not dramatic or mystical. I might lean on the balcony railing, look at a dear drawing on my living room wall, if at home or staring at an object in a favorite color when in the office, or simply close my eyes at my desk. The intention is always the same: to notice what is buzzing in me – an unfinished email, a family worry, excitement about a new project – and allow it to move to the “background” so that the coaching client can move to the “foreground”. In these short silences, I am not analyzing. I am practicing “being” after hours of “doing”, and this shift is the doorway to reflective practice in the session itself.
From long pauses to micro‑practices
In the earlier years of my career, reflection mostly happened in long, infrequent doses: one-day trip; retreat; half day with my journal or notebook in a café. These moments were islands in a sea of busyness. When I became a parent and started building my own practice while navigating other professional roles, it became clear that I could no longer wait for perfect conditions in order to reflect.
The shift came when I stopped imagining reflective practice – in my own vocabulary I have always called it something like “pause to move” (спри за да продължиш in Bulgarian, my mother tongue) – as a special event and started treating it as a series of smaller, sustainable habits. Instead of “I need a quiet afternoon to think about my work”, it became: “I have ten minutes between two calls – what can nurture my presence right now?”. Walking shortened. The pauses before sessions became more intentional one-minute rituals. I began using transitions as tiny bells that reminded me to check in before anything that matter – coaching session, conversation, starting and/or wrapping up the workday: How am I entering this next moment? What do I want to bring, and what do I need to leave behind for now? This made my “pause to move”, the reflective practice something I could carry with me, instead of something I needed to escape to.
Simple structures that hold reflection
Even though my reflective practice is deeply personal, certain structures help it stay alive. One of them is a light version of journaling. I do not write pages every day, but I often capture short notes after a coaching session or workshop: one sentence about what worked, one about what I would tweak next time, and one observation about myself. These micro‑notes are not for performance review; they are there to help me connect dots over time. When I reread them, I can see patterns: where I tend to overprepare, where I am tempted to solve instead of coach, where my energy is highest.
Another structure is questions. As a coach, questions are my tools, but in reflection they are also anchors. A few of the questions that often accompany my walks or my pauses are:
What am I proud of in how I showed up today?
Where did I abandon myself or my boundaries?
What am I avoiding looking at, and what small step could I take toward it?
Sometimes I also borrow from solution‑focused and strengths‑based approaches that I use with clients. I ask myself: If I imagined a “slightly better” version of this situation, what would be different in my behavior, my schedule, or my conversations? What is one resource I already have that I am not using fully? These questions gently steer my reflection away from rumination and toward agency.
When reflection becomes a need
There are moments when my body signals that reflection can no longer be postponed. It shows up as irritability, difficulty to focus, or an inner heaviness even when “objectively” things are going well. This is usually a sign that my “doing” has grown louder than my “being” for too long. When that happens, the walk is not optional. The pause is not a luxury. They are the way I reconnect the outer pace of my life with the inner pace of my nervous system – I call this “from pieces of mind to a peace of mind”.
In those times, my reflective practice becomes more spacious again: I might take a longer walk in nature or through the city and intentionally unplug for half a day, or I might sit quietly with a notebook and let a messy, unstructured page of thoughts spill out. Often, clarity does not come as a big answer but as a small, honest sentences like: “I am tired.” “I miss playful work.” “I need help here.”
Reflection as relationship
After all reflective practice, for me, is a way of staying in relationship with myself first, but also with the people I serve as coach, and with the systems I am part of. Walking, silence, questions, brief notes – these are simply the languages in which that conversation happens.
When reflection is woven into everyday life like this, it becomes a quiet form of loyalty to my own truth. It feels natural. I do not force myself to “be reflective”; I notice that I feel off when I am not, and I follow that signal back to the practices that help me return.
At the end of a walk, or after a short pause before a session, there is often a sense of arriving – not to a solution, but to me. From there, the next step, the next question, or the next conversation is clearer.
An invitation for you
When was the last time you noticed that your “doing” was louder than your “being”?
If you gave yourself just ten minutes today – a brief walk, a quiet look through a window, a few honest lines on paper – what might you hear (see, feel) more clearly about your own life and work?
If you are about to establish a reflective practice, what would it look like?
End of the year is approaching and it is the perfect timing to re-search within ourselves what is that we want to accomplish in the next months and in the next year. It is an opportune time to reflect instead of react towards the mountain of work that is waiting for us in the great new projects ahead. Last but not least it is a good time to employ intention and purpose in our work planning for the next year.
BEFORE GOALS
Whether consciously or not, every day, we strive to achieve something. Some of us move directly to make our desires reality, others are just meandering and happy to explore – or just the opposite: blaming ourselves for wasting valuable time. In fact, the pace we give ourselves to clarify our goal is almost half of the success.
Before we formulate something as a goal, it is just a desire in our head: ‘I want to be more confident ‘, ‘I want my startup to make it to the next level‘, ’I want to take better care of my health’ are not goals and not even desires. They are thoughts that cross our minds for a micro-moment, under the influence of a situation. For instance, a billboard advertising sportswear or healthy practice, news of the launch of a new venture fund”, etc. In order for a thought to become a desire, you need to concretize it for yourself. ‘I want to be more confident’ turns from thought to desire when you specify that you wish, to be confident when communicating with people who can influence positively your business or career.
DESTILL THE DESIRE TO A GOAL
Unraveling a desire and what lies behind it can create goals in several ways:
Behind the request to be more confident may be the realization that in order to “impress people of power” you need to be able to offer more – that is, you need additional qualifications in your professional presence. And then your goal would be to improve your expertise and acquire specific skill within a certain period of time.
Behind the request to be more confident may be the realization that you are an introvert, and it takes a serious effort to have a conversation with a person you have just met, no matter how beneficial could it be for your business or career. Then your goal would be to find out what you value in communicating with others, what is unique that you, although as an introvert, can offer, and build on it a strategy to increase your comfort in communicating with new people.
Behind your request to be more confident may be even the realization that focused on your business routine, you now weigh 8 kg more than a few years ago and that you tie confidence to appearance and to how you perceive yourself, not only how others see you. In this case, your goal would not be to accept yourself as you are, but rather would be to address a health problem, to overcome resistance, laziness, apathy, and eventually change the way you look.
WHEN WE FORMULATE SOMETHING AS A [FUTURE] GOAL
Once formulated, a goal is more achievable because of its clarity.
If you have to hit a ten, it will be much easier when there is a target in front of you. Dividing it into circles 1, 2, 3,… 9, 10 is important: not to get angry when you hit 7 or 5, but to arrange the pictures of what is around and before your goal. With the example above, we can say that in zone:
1-3 resides your desire to be more confident;
4-6 is the clarity in what situations or which aspect of your life you want to be more confident and why you need to;
7-8 is clarifying what this confidence will give you when you develop it, and
10 is the brief moment of joy and celebration of success, after which you must move on. In a way that has been grounded for you by the goal you have just achieved. Keep the pace and continue walking the walk!
WHAT GOALS ARE WORTH THE EFFORT?
Achieving our goals is a process of materializing our intentions. There are goals for the sake of goals. Such a goal leads to nowhere and the joy and benefit of what has been achieved is too short-lived to be worth the effort. What are the goals that move us forward? Those connecting us with the better version of ourselves, with the people we want to be. To be connected to ourselves means to be in harmony with ourselves. And we are in harmony with ourselves when our desires and reality coincide.By pairing the two layers – desire and reality, we achieve what we long for. Consider it from the perspective of something I call a “journey from goals to tools.”
FROM GOALS TO TOOLS
Our goals yesterday should be our tools today. Our goals today will be our tools or means to achieve new goals tomorrow. You can easily imagine this with the aim to learn a specific technical skill or another language. Chinese for example. This are goals that, once achieved, automatically become tools for you – and a means by which you achieve your further goals – entering new professional field or the Chinese market with your product.
This transitional moment is the starting point of the path to ourselves in achieving our desires – when we look at our desire as a bridge, rather than as a ladder. A bridge that leads us to the next important thing we want to accomplish. The benefits of seeing our current goals as future tools, are at least two:
it reduces the stress of achieving goals at any cost; we start perceive success not as the act of climbing a steep path but as a way forward;
the perception of achievement as a bridge we cross to move forward is also something that reminds us that joy is not necessarily in the arrival, but most often – in the journey itself.
WHAT IS NEXT FOR YOU?
So, what do you want to achieve for yourself, for your startup or your career in three or six months? Is it to close a deal, to shift in your business, is it to create more “me” time for you, to recharge, or more time to think strategically about your business? Or maybe what you want is new quality of the relationships in your work or private life?
Think of the goal you are pursuing as a future tool, identify what is the tool that this goal will transform in, when achieved. Once you are able to look at accomplishments that way, you will be astonished how this mindset shifts your energy and grit to make it all happen.
