Even when you’re the most capable person in the room, there are moments you feel less than. Most of us never say it aloud.

Marcel Schwantes, writing in Inc., argues that you don’t have to be the most technically capable person in the room, or have more experience and war stories than everyone else in that room put together.

Besides, AI has neutralized a lot of those differentiators. Someone else is better at doing complex math in their head? Someone else has a team of analysts who delivered a brief just before the meeting? So old school. We all have those gems now. Sometimes swarms of them.

Those who could once beat the rest of us on technical capabilities alone are finding it harder and harder to win, and they feel the heat. They’re up against anyone intentional about developing and deploying their deeply human capabilities, especially when those are paired with increasingly powerful AI executive assistants, research analysts, whatever we want to call the team of agents we train to learn, remember, forget, and simply assist us.

So what are your superpowers?

Schwantes points to three: emotional aperture, adaptability, and curiosity.

Start with Emotional Aperture. It’s how you read the dynamic social emotional landscape in the room, the whole composition rather than one face. Who went quiet. Who agreed a beat too quickly. Reading the room lets you adjust the tenor and tempo of your message to meet others where they are, rather than blabber on from an AI-generated script, no matter how polished it is.

Here’s one I’d add. In situations where the outcomes are genuinely uncertain, you don’t feel one clean thing. You feel an array of subtle, complex emotions at once. Rather than ignore those feelings or simplify them, acknowledge them, in yourself and in others. And keep in your pocket the science: Igor Grossmann’s lab at the University of Waterloo ran five studies with 3,678 people and found that wise reasoning travels with emotional richness, not emotional flatness. Complex feelings, not simple ones, foster wiser decisions.

Next meeting, the numbers will already be handled and the brief will already be written. What are you bringing?