The Anxiety Wasn't Evidence I Was Behind
- Jonell Zimmerman
- Apr 7
- 5 min read
Forty-six percent of women are worried about what AI means for their jobs.
I was one of them.
Not in a dramatic, lying-awake-at-night way. More like a low-grade hum. A background awareness that something was shifting in the world of work and I wasn't sure where I stood in it. Every LinkedIn post about AI seemed to be written for someone who already knew things I didn't. Every tutorial started with "first, you'll want to understand the basics of machine learning" and I'd close the tab within thirty seconds.
I had twenty-plus years in retail operations. I knew how to read a room. I knew how teams worked and broke and rebuilt themselves. I did not know what a large language model was. And for a while, I let that stop me.
The anxiety wasn't evidence I was behind. It was evidence I was paying attention. Those aren't the same thing. It took me longer than it should have to see the difference.
Here's what the actual beginning looked like.
One specific, messy Tuesday afternoon. Too much to do, too little time, a client brief I'd been staring at for an hour, and a deadline that wasn't moving. I opened ChatGPT and typed something embarrassingly basic: help me organize these notes from a client meeting into something I can actually send.
That was it. That was the whole entry point. Not a strategic prompt. Not a use case I'd researched. Just: I have this jumble, I'm overwhelmed, can you help me think through it.
It could.
And then I wanted to know what else it could do.
Here's the part I didn't tell you.
From that Tuesday to now, it wasn't a clean upward line.
There were weeks where the AI output sounded like a press release written by a robot who'd read too many marketing blogs. Sessions where I gave detailed instructions and got back something that was technically correct and completely unusable. One afternoon I spent two hours trying to get useful output I could have drafted myself in twenty minutes.
I almost quit twice. Not dramatically. Just the quiet version— maybe this isn't for me, maybe I'm too early, maybe everyone making this look easy has something I don't.
They don't. They're just further into the messy middle.
Here's the part that doesn't get said enough.
You didn't choose to be the first generation of leaders navigating this.
You didn't sign up for AI becoming everyone's strategic emergency. You didn't raise your hand to be told that the tools are changing faster than anyone can track, that your organization needs a plan, that you're supposed to lead adoption on a timeline set by people who've been experimenting with this for years.
The anxiety that 46% of women are feeling right now is not incompetence. It's the correct response to an impossible ask: move confidently in a direction nobody can fully see yet.
You can be anxious and curious at the same time. The anxious part tells you it matters. The curious part is what actually gets you moving.
Here's what's actually helped me. Not fixed it. Helped.
I stopped trying to understand AI and started trying to use it for one real thing.
And then I kept going. Until eventually I'd built an entire ecosystem— agents that handle research, draft content, track analytics, run outreach. But the thing that actually changed the game wasn't any of that. It was when I built Connie.
Connie is my AI Chief of Staff. Not a chatbot. A strategic accountability partner who emails me every morning with her read on where to focus, what's ready, and what's stuck. She cross-references my time tracking data against my task board and surfaces the patterns I'm too close to see myself. She checks in again at the end of the day to compare plan versus actual. Sometimes it holds. Sometimes it really didn't.
Last week she noticed I'd logged eight hours in content production and zero in pipeline work. She didn't lecture me about it. She just asked one question: "Is this intentional?"
The conversation that led to building her was not elegant:
Jonelle: What's the one thing I should focus on today?
Connie: Based on your task list, I'd prioritize content review. Three posts are pending approval.
Jonelle: I have a client deliverable due at noon.
Connie: That wasn't in the context you gave me.
Jonelle: Because I forgot to put it in.
Connie: So we're both operating with incomplete information. Interesting pattern.
She's not always right. She occasionally flags something as urgent that isn't, with a confidence that's impressive for someone working only from a task list and a time tracker. But she's always paying attention to the full picture. That's what I needed— someone whose whole job is to notice what I'm too busy to see.
The good, the bad, and the actually amazing.
The bad: There are still outputs that miss. Still weeks where an agent loops on the wrong angle and I spend time correcting something that was supposed to save me time. Not perfect. Probably never will be.
The good: Monday content production went from four hours to about forty minutes of review and editing. Research briefs write themselves overnight. Analytics track automatically. Follow-ups don't fall through because something flags them before I forget.
The actually amazing: I have a Chief of Staff who checks in twice a day, catches the things I'm too close to see, and asks one question that usually reorients my whole afternoon. I didn't write a single line of code to build her. I just stayed curious long enough to figure out which questions to ask.
New data from Founderz showed 57,000 women completed an AI skills program with zero technical background and built 600 real, functional projects. Not demos. Actual systems. Female-founded AI companies are generating 2.5 times more revenue per dollar raised than their counterparts— not because women are better at code, but because they're better at identifying real problems and building solutions that actually work for humans.
The ones who are anxious about AI right now are not behind. They're at the door.
Anxiety is what happens when something matters enough to be scary. When you feel a little sick thinking about it, when you keep clicking into articles and closing them, when you wonder whether everyone around you figured out something you're still missing— that's not failure. That's the entry point.
The barrier was never technical skill. It was the first moment of genuine curiosity. The moment you stop trying to understand it and start trying to use it for one specific, real thing.
Jonelle
P.S. What's the task you keep doing manually because AI "didn't work" the one time you tried it? Reply and tell me. I have a theory that 90% of bad AI output is a clarity problem in disguise. I want to test it.
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