The Space Where My Thinking Expands

 The Space Where My Thinking Expands

 

Par Karima Guerfali Lazzem - Best Training Academy 

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There is something almost intimate in this habit that has quietly settled into my daily life.

Before, when I walked out of a conference, a reading session, or a training — I would feel that familiar urgency: write, capture, freeze the ideas before they slipped away. Today, I do the opposite. I let the words come… but out loud. I speak.

I speak the way one confides, the way one searches, the way one feels around in a room still dark. I speak about what moved me, what unsettled me, what cracked something open. The ideas don't arrive in a straight line — they cross, they sometimes contradict each other, they answer one another; one thought calls up another, then a third appears, unexpected. I circle back, I nuance, I doubt, I rephrase. And in that slightly disordered, almost fragile movement, something begins to take shape: my thinking clears. It becomes brighter, more alive. And it is from that place that this reflection was born.

For a long time, I heard the same anxieties around artificial intelligence. A nearly muffled unease, sometimes tinged with suspicion: the fear of watching texts lose their soul, ideas become smooth and interchangeable, human thought fade behind answers that come too fast, too clean. Responses that start to look alike, a pattern that grows almost repetitive, almost routine.

I cannot say these fears are foreign to me. They make sense… if one expects artificial intelligence to think for us.

But that is not what I experience. What I experience is far more subtle. And, in many ways, profoundly human. I don't ask it to produce my thinking. I ask it to help me hear it. And that nuance changes everything.

When we are alone with ourselves, we already carry this inner dialogue. That small voice that comments, questions, anticipates. Psychologists call it self-talk. This inner murmur — sometimes even spoken aloud (1) — helps us organize our ideas, step back, solve problems, prepare ourselves.

Speaking makes thought visible. And that is precisely what I rediscover today in the way I interact with my AI agent, my artificial intelligence.

I never arrive with a perfectly constructed idea. I arrive with something more fragile: an intuition, a feeling, a sketch. I tell the story of my idea or my experience, I clarify, then I correct, I change my mind, I sometimes contradict myself. And little by little, through this exchange, a shape appears. An idea I could sense without yet being able to name it. (2)

Artificial intelligence, for its part, does not think, does not feel, does not doubt, does not live. But it has this remarkable capacity to receive this flow, to structure it, to suggest connections, to reformulate, to open pathways. It acts like a rather particular mirror: it doesn't simply reflect — it helps you see differently.

And that is where everything shifts in the way I perceive it. I no longer see it as a tool that produces. I see it as a space. A space in which my thinking can breathe. A space where my thinking can stretch, hesitate, explore, lose itself for a moment only to find itself again. A space where connections appear, sometimes exactly where I wasn't expecting them.

The more I think about it, the more I recognize in this experience something very close to what I live in training rooms.

I never walk into a room with the intention of transmitting fixed knowledge. I arrive with markers, concepts, models… but what truly interests me is what will emerge from the encounter.

Every group transforms the content. Every person brings a nuance, a story, an emotion. And little by little, something is built — together. At the end, the slides remain — but they are no longer just a support. They become the trace of a shared journey.

Today, I realize that my relationship with artificial intelligence follows this same logic.

I don't delegate my reflection to it. I offer it a ground, a context, a living material. And within that space, it helps me organize, clarify, and connect my thinking and my reflections. It becomes a discreet but precious presence — one that listens, reformulates, structures, then suggests. Sometimes, it opens a door I hadn't even noticed. And behind that door, I find an idea that was already there, inside me — but still silent.

What grows in this relationship is not the machine. It is my thinking. And this idea moves me deeply, because it puts things back in their rightful place: the human being remains at the center, with everything that makes them rich and complex — their history, their emotions, their contradictions, their intuitions, their singular gaze on the world. Artificial intelligence, for its part, brings something else: a capacity to navigate vast amounts of knowledge, to establish connections quickly, to structure and to accompany.

This is not a substitution. It is an encounter, a collaboration. And perhaps the real transformation lives precisely there.

We speak a great deal about what artificial intelligence can do. But we still speak far too little about what it can reveal in us.

I would no longer say that it is an extension of me. I would say that it has become a space in which I can extend myself. A space where my thinking can take up more room, more depth, more nuance. Because at its core, what expands in this relationship is not the machine — it is my capacity to understand, to connect, and to express what was already there, waiting.

Perhaps the future will belong neither to rejection nor to dependency. Perhaps it will belong to those who learn to dialogue with these tools without ever disappearing behind them. To those who know how to preserve their voice while accepting to explore differently. (3)

A partnership, yes. But a partnership where human thought remains alive, fluid, irreplaceable. And where technology, simply, offers it a little more space to exist.

"After all, we have always grown through dialogue. First with those around us. Then with books. Then with mentors. Today, a new kind of dialogue appears. The question is no longer who we think with — but what this conversation brings forth in us."

Because at its heart… that is exactly it. The great thinkers throughout history never thought alone — they thought with their teachers, their students, even their adversaries, the authors they read, the works they contemplated. AI does not invent intellectual dialogue. It simply adds a new interlocutor to this long history of human thought.

References : 

(1) Ethan Kross, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It, Crown, 2021.

(2) Gary Lupyan – recherches sur le rôle du langage parlé dans l'attention, la recherche visuelle et la résolution de problèmes.

(3) Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, Portfolio, 2024.