How Technology Can Amplify - not replace - Human Wisdom in Coaching
What happens when a coach gets brave enough to turn the lens on themselves? The REAL, sometimes messy human underneath the expertise? That’s the question at the heart of this episode of the REAL Eyes Realize podcast, and the answers surprised even me.
I sat down with two friends and co-creators, Marco Lamina, a 15-year Silicon Valley software engineer turned AI builder, and Michael Shehane, a 10-year executive coach and linguist, who have teamed up to build something that challenges everything most of us assume about technology in the coaching space. Their platform, JourneyLoop.ai, doesn’t try to replace the coach. It tries to make the coach better. In a world flooded with tools promising to automate human connection, that distinction matters more than ever.
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Two Cultural Awakenings That Changed Everything
Both Marco and Michael trace their transformational roots to the same unlikely source: cross-cultural awkwardness.
Marco, originally from Berlin, moved to Silicon Valley in 2011 for an internship. Every morning, his boss Keith stopped by his cubicle and asked, “How are you doing, Marco?” True to his German upbringing, Marco answered fully and honestly. He kept noticing Keith’s confused expression. It took a motorcycle ride through the California hills for an epiphany to hit: the question wasn’t literal! It was like a cultural handshake. That single realization, his thinking needed to shift to match his environment, set a lifelong transformation into motion.
Michael had a parallel experience. At 20, he moved to Germany to study at university and quickly discovered how American assumptions about motivation (via monetary prizes) didn’t land the way he expected. Later in Japan, being publicly scolded on a train for talking too loudly became another pivotal mirror. These friction points weren’t failures. They were invitations to look inward, to examine the stories he was telling himself about how the world worked.
What strikes me about both of their stories is the pattern: discomfort creates awareness, and awareness becomes the doorway to growth. That’s essentially the coaching process in miniature form. It’s also the vulnerable area these two have built their technology to support.
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The Moment AI Became Personal
Here’s where the episode looked more inward - something I didn’t expect.
Michael shared a story about coaching a client named Theresa, a brilliant woman preparing a presentation for 2,000 people. They had been working together for several sessions, building out the structure, the stories, the through-line. Michael was in full strategy mode. Tactics and skills being discussed and practiced!
Then one evening, on a whim, he uploaded the session transcripts into an AI tool and asked it a question most coaches would never ask: How am I showing up? He took a leap of asking How can I be better for my client?
The feedback was simple: across three sessions, every time Theresa had expressed fear or vulnerability about the presentation, Michael had brushed past it. “You’ll be great.” “Don’t worry about that.” He was moving to solutions when his client needed to be heard first.
That single insight changed the next session entirely. Michael opened by telling Theresa what he had questioned and asked, “How are you feeling about this presentation?” The conversation that followed went deeper than any before it. Theresa didn’t just prepare a better presentation. She began to own the belief she had value to bring to that audience.
This is the kind of transformation that happens when we use technology not to perform coaching, but to examine it.
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Key Takeaways from This Episode
AI is most powerful when turned inward, not outward. The real promise isn’t an AI that coaches your clients for you. It’s an AI that helps you see the blind spots in how you coach. Michael’s willingness to examine his own patterns, not just analyze his client’s words, is what made the technology transformational.
Amplify, don’t replace. Marco and Michael are clear-eyed about a dangerous trend: the rush to create AI coaches that simulate human connection. AI creates an illusion of connection. If you build a virtual coach on that illusion, you’re asking people to trust something that can’t be trusted in the same way a human can. Their approach is fundamentally different. The AI stays in the background. The human stays in the room.
Stories over statistics. One of the most provocative ideas in this conversation is the deliberate move away from KPIs and progress bars. The old model of measuring human development (reduce a person to numbers, track the numbers, reward the numbers) doesn’t feel good because it isn’t good. JourneyLoop takes all of that data and turns it into narratives. Nobody wants to be a number in a system. They want to see themselves reflected in language that resonates.
Trust is built through evidence, not assumptions. Every insight the platform generates comes with reasoning. Here’s what we noticed, and here’s why. This matters in a field where vulnerability is the currency. If technology is going to hold a mirror up to someone’s patterns, those patterns need to be grounded in something verifiable.
The coach grows alongside the client. The platform doesn’t just analyze the client’s experience. It analyzes the coach’s performance, surfacing patterns across sessions that would be nearly impossible to catch alone. That feedback loop, where the coach is also being challenged and growing, creates a kind of partnership that raises the bar for everyone.
Community and accountability are the real accelerators. Both Marco and Michael credit their martial arts practice at Quantum Martial Arts in San Francisco as the proving ground for these ideas. The dojo taught them that mastery isn’t about attacking. It’s about keeping the other person safe while they work through their triggered moments. That same philosophy infuses their coaching and their technology.
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The Dojo as a Metaphor for Coaching
I want to stay with the martial arts thread for a moment, because I think it holds something important. Being a yoga and qi gong practitioner, I too believe in the power of these practices for discipline and insights.
Michael has trained for 14 years, 10 of those to reach black belt. He credits community as the essential ingredient. You cannot get to mastery alone. You need people to push off of people who will hold you accountable when your technique slips. People who won’t take it personally when you show up grumpy and distracted.
The parallels to coaching are striking. In both spaces, the work is about learning to respond rather than react. It’s about staying calm when someone throws something unexpected your way. It’s about using technique at the right time, at the right speed, in a way that keeps the other person safe.
And here’s the part that stopped me: Michael described sparring as a space where someone is depositing energy onto your body because they believe that will get them what they want. The martial artist’s job isn’t to fight back. It’s to absorb that energy and redirect it.
That’s coaching. That’s what happens when a client brings frustration, stuck-ness, or fear into a session. The coach doesn’t fight it. The coach holds the space and asks, “What do you want to do moving forward?”
AI, in this vision, becomes another training partner in the dojo. Not the sensei. Not the opponent. A mirror on the wall that helps you see your form.
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What This Means for Coaches Ready to Grow
If you’re a coach, facilitator, or leader in a helping profession, this episode is an invitation to ask yourself a question most of us avoid: What are my blind spots?
Not your client’s blind spots. Yours.
Michael admitted that the AI insight about brushing past emotions didn’t just change his coaching. It changed his relationships, his business partnerships, his way of being in the world. That’s the ripple effect of honest self-examination. It never stays contained to one arena.
The technology exists now to support that kind of reflection. But the technology is only as powerful as your willingness to look at what it reveals. As Marco and Michael both emphasize, it takes bravery. It takes the kind of courage that says, “I’m willing to be uncomfortable if it means I can serve the people I care about more fully.”
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Your Invitation
If this conversation stirred something in you, that restless feeling that there might be more available in how you show up for others and for yourself, I want you to sit with that.
Here’s what I’d ask you to try this week: after your next coaching session, conversation, or meeting, take five minutes and write down what you noticed about your own patterns. Not the other person’s. Where did you lean in? Where did you pull away? What emotions did you move past quickly?
That’s the beginning of the kind of awareness Marco and Michael are building technology to support. It starts with the willingness to look.
If you want to go deeper, connect with Marco and Michael through JourneyLoop.ai to explore how their platform can support your growth as a coach or leader. You can also find more about their work in the show notes for this episode.
For those ready to explore what transformation looks like when strategy meets soul, I invite you to visit realeyes.love and discover the resources, community, and conversations we’re building through the REAL Eyes Realize podcast and Christina Roberts Enneking Coaching.
Until next time: be true, be bold, be REAL, and be you.
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Listen to the full episode of REAL Eyes Realize wherever you get your podcasts. If this post resonated, share it with a coach or leader in your life who’s ready to turn the mirror on themselves.
