A guide to protecting your strategic thinking skills against an overreliance on automated thinking and AI by a Thinkers50 expert on leadership in the age of AI.

When was the last time you really thought something through, all the way to the end, by yourself?

For decades, we've been quietly trading our judgment for convenience. Search engines for our curiosity. GPS for our roads. Streaming algorithms for our taste. Each step felt like progress. Until now.

With the rise of frictionless, hyper-speed AI, the stakes have changed entirely. We aren't just outsourcing ordinary tasks. We're outsourcing our minds to machines that don't feel, don't doubt, and don't care. But the future will not belong to those who blindly follow the algorithm. It will belong to those who know when not to.

In Use Your Brain, Thinkers50-recognised executive coach Erica Dhawan offers a timely, deeply human blueprint for creative thinking in a world designed to do your thinking for you. Drawing on a years-long study of peak performers across five continents, CEOs and scientists, artists and athletes, parents and students, Dhawan takes us inside the minds of the people getting this right. They aren't smarter than you. They aren't more technical than you. They have simply refused to outsource the one thing that makes them human: their own point of view.

Through vivid stories, sharp insights, and practical tools, Dhawan introduces a new kind of intelligence for the modern era: the ability to think with technology without surrendering to it. She shows you how to escape cognitive autopilot, ask sharper questions, and make decisions that are not just faster, but wiser.

Use Your Brain is essential reading for everyone, whether you lead an organization or find yourself in the fight to stay indispensable at work; or you want to build teams that think for themselves, raise independent kids, or simply stay fully awake in your own life. This is the field guide for the most important skill of the next decade: the choice to think for yourself.

'Timely and practical'
Nir Eyal, bestselling author of Hooked, Indistractable, and Beyond Belief

'Deeply useful'
—Daniel H. Pink, New York Times bestselling author of Drive

'Brilliant'
—Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, New York Times bestselling author of What Got You Here Won't Get You There

© Erica Dhawan 2027 (P) Penguin Audio 2027