Hi,

I’m writing this from the road somewhere in between Cadiz, Spain and Malaga.

Three boys packed into the car, snacks everywhere, someone’s foot is veering dangerously close to the other brother’s foot and I booked tonight’s hotel approximately 40 minutes ago from the passenger seat.

I can FEEL all my Type A planners writhing internally at the offense that this sentence brings.

I see you. I love you. I’m sorry. 🥴

Planning trips in advance is a skillset that eludes me and it’s mostly to do with time.

The good news is that driving a few hours north, south, east or west of Lisbon lands you in some of the most stunning spots in the world…

There is nothing I love more than stumbling across a hole-in-the wall village with amazing food, local wine and views for days.

But the darker side to all of this European road trip glory is the life of two parents who run their own businesses.

And who are both in big growth chapters right now.

In between the Spanish coastal stops, I’m on my laptop in the car, teaching my storytelling masterminds while my family heads for Tapas, my husband gets up at 5AM without fail…not to meditate or workout but to do a few hours before everyone wakes so he can be as present as he can.

His biggest client contract came to an end this month so now he’s in sales mode and it just happens to coincide with Spring break.

​I’ve spoken about this struggle before. ​

Most specifically when me and my 12-year-old got into a legit yelling and then both of us crying match on a beach…. In front of a quiet French family.

You can take the Americans out of Brooklyn… 😬

The questions that loop in my head on these trips:

• Am I being present enough?
• Can I take my foot off the gas right now?
• Are my kids mad at me?
• Can I for the love of God stop talking about AI and Trump with their dad? (Spoiler: no. I cannot.)

My kids know their parents don’t have “normal work”.

But they’ve also had more life adventures than most adults.

That is 100% a direct result of their parents taking professional risks.

Life and cultural exposure is our family’s north star – and like everything worth having, it comes with a side dish of guilt and an occasional public family throwdown.

I don’t have a clean answer for how to balance it.

What I’ve landed on is something like: every season has chapters. Some chapters you’re really present. Some you’re not. The goal is to have more present ones than not.

That’s the best I’ve got.

I do know that my boys are tremendously proud of their mom although I did have to tell my 9-year-old son to “please stop telling your friends that your mom is selling her AI company for $70 million and is giving all of their families millions of dollars.”

To which he goes to me, “Mom, I’m manifesting this for you and us and them.” (actual response.)

So what IS for REAL happening right now? (not selling my company.. yet🤣)​
​
I’m head down focused on how “we AI”.

I know the rage right now is to teach everyone how to automate every aspect of your life, your business, your brain.

✅ Run 8 AI agents simultaneously.
✅ Claude Co-work your way to productivity.
✅ Let the machine think so you don’t have to.

But that’s not what my co-founder Wiebke and I believe is the right long-term move and we are willing to be intentional and steady about this, even at the expense of short term gains.

​We had a deep discussion on this last week on LinkedIn.

And now we have science to back up “why MyStoryPro has always been built with intentional friction on your input.”

​Harvard Business Review and BCG just published a study on what they’re calling “AI brain fry.”
​It’s acute cognitive overload from constantly prompting, building, keeping up with the constant LLM changes (ie) get off ChatGPT and go to Claude ASAP and evaluating outputs.

When you outsource the thinking to AI, you don’t get that part of your brain back.

Can you please re-read that and now scale this phenomenon to the masses??!
​
A whole generation of people being conditioned to not use the part of their brain responsible for reasoning, judgment and empathy?
​
The study found a 33% increase in decision fatigue for affected workers.
​
✅ More mental fog.
✅ More of that “buzzing” feeling at the end of the day where you can’t remember what you actually decided. (because you’re not really deciding in the same way any more.)

And the people feeling it hardest are early adopters.
The ones who went all-in first.

This is exactly why MyStoryPro is built the way it is.

We’re not here to generate your output for you.
We push back on your input.
We make you go deeper before we let you off the hook.

Here’s what I mean: as a former TODAY show producer, I know the REAL story lives at question 9 when I was interviewing people. But you have to go through questions 1–8 to get there.
​
A guest could come in with a perfectly polished talking point but it wasn’t until the ninth question that they said the thing that actually mattered, the thing that made the cut for air.
​
That’s the moment we’re engineering for at MyStoryPro.
Not the surface answers but the ones underneath it.
​
The surface is where all the AI slop lives, and you deserve better than that.
And now that everyone has access to the same tools, the same prompts, the same Claude Code playbooks -your lived experience is the only thing that’s actually scarce.

Two podcast conversations dropped this week where I go deep on exactly this:

🎙️ AI-Ready CMO with Peter Benei → why the messy, human story is your real competitive advantage… even in corporate America.

🎙️ But First, She Failed with Paola Soares → why it is dire that we have females building AI.
​
If you’ve been wondering how to show up in a world where everyone sounds the same…and to NOT lose the part of your brain that makes you uniquely human, please take a listen.
​
In the meantime, we just got to Malaga for lunch…..and then we’re popping off to Nerja and I managed to, en route, book us an Airbnb on the ocean “because someone backed out” and we got it at half off.

Maybe I’ll stick to my Type B vacay planning ways!

Talk soon and salud for preserving our brain power amid all this AI frenzy,

XO
Patrice