The Skill AI Will Never Replace (And Caroline Harris Davila Has It)

I was at the midmorning mixer last week when I started writing this post in my head. Somebody in the room was reading the energy wrong — scanning faces, checking their phone, waiting for the conversation to get good. Meanwhile, over in the corner, someone else was just… warm. Present. Actually interested. And the room drifted toward her the way rooms always do.

That same morning I’d been reading an article in Big Think by psychology educator Francesca Tighinean that put the science behind exactly what I was watching. Turns out, the thing that makes certain people magnetic at networking events has nothing to do with confidence, status, or how impressive their LinkedIn profile is. The research, from psychologist Danu Anthony Stinson, found that the single strongest predictor of whether strangers want to connect with someone is interpersonal warmth. Not competence. Not credentials. Warmth.

The article describes something called the “acceptance prophecy.” The story you tell yourself about whether people will like you shapes your behavior, which shapes the actual outcome. Walk in expecting rejection and you contract; short answers, phone checks, arms crossed. Walk in expecting connection and you open up, ask better questions, actually listen. Most of us are creating our own social outcomes without knowing it.

I thought about that a lot when I sat down with Texas State Representative Caroline Harris Davila for the latest episode of Rock Solid. Because what she described, her whole approach to public life, is the acceptance prophecy running in the opposite direction, on purpose.

She Ran Scared and Showed Up Anyway

Here’s the part of Caroline’s story that surprises people: she almost threw up after the first speech she ever gave. This woman who walks into a room and immediately draws a crowd was petrified. Shaking. Convinced she couldn’t communicate.

She ran for the Texas Legislature at 27 with no money, no campaign experience, and a public speaking phobia she’d carried her whole life. She had seven years of Capitol policy work and a deep love for Round Rock, but the mechanics of running? None of it. What she had was a moment of clarity sitting in her boss’s office, staring at the direction her community was trending and thinking: if I want to see a change, I have to step up myself.

That’s not the story of someone who walked in confident. That’s the story of someone who chose warmth and purpose over self-protection and then did the hard work to grow into the role anyway. The Big Think article talks about how anxious people don’t actually lack warmth; they suppress it as a defense mechanism. Caroline went the other direction. She let the purpose be bigger than the fear.

Now she’s one of the youngest female Republican representatives ever elected to the Texas Legislature, named GOP Freshman Legislator of the Year after her first session, and more importantly for what I’m writing about here, one of the most genuinely connected people in Round Rock. You’ll see her at ribbon cuttings, at the Women Who Mean Business luncheon, at Chamber mixers, at nonprofit events. Not because she has to be. Because she wants to be.

The Two Things She Told Young People (That Science Already Knew)

I asked Caroline about confidence. Specifically, what she’d tell someone who wanted to move through the world with more of it. She gave two answers, and both of them map directly onto what the research says works.

The first: anchor yourself in something bigger than the outcome you’re chasing. For Caroline, that’s her faith; the belief that every person she meets has a specific purpose they were built for, and that her job is to be a piece of what’s already happening in someone else’s life. The practical result of that belief is that she walks into rooms focused outward, not inward. She’s not calculating whether she’s coming across well. She’s thinking about the person in front of her.

The Big Think article calls this being “the welcomer.” Dr. Julie Smith is quoted in the piece: “Don’t wait to be welcomed. Be the welcomer.” Every person at a social event is waiting to feel included. Magnetic people don’t wait for that. They provide it. And by focusing on making others feel seen, they become the most welcome person in the room. That’s not a soft idea. That’s the mechanism.

The second: remember that you’re already making an impact every day whether you know it or not. A smile to a stranger. A check-in text. A moment of actually seeing someone. “You don’t know how big of an impact even that can have,” she said. She’s talked to people who were in a dark place, who just needed someone to acknowledge them that day. A smile was enough to shift it.

The research backs this up too. What Stinson’s study found is that a small act of shared vulnerability, even just saying “I always feel a little awkward at these things,” lowers the perceived risk of the interaction and makes both people warmer. Collins and Miller’s landmark meta-analysis found the same thing: we like people more simply because we’ve disclosed something to them. The opening move costs almost nothing. The payoff is enormous.

What AI Cannot Do

I’ve spent a lot of my career thinking about how humans make decisions, and right now I spend a lot of time thinking about what AI changes about that. Here’s what I keep coming back to: AI can be trained to recognize patterns, optimize messaging, predict behavior, and generate content faster than any human team. What it cannot do is drop its armor first.

Warmth is a human signal. It’s felt, not inferred. When Caroline walks into a room and actually sees the person in front of her, something happens neurologically in that interaction that no chatbot can replicate. The Stereotype Content Model, Susan Fiske’s foundational research on how we judge people, says we assess two things within seconds of meeting someone: warmth and competence. And warmth comes first. Every time. Because the brain’s first question isn’t “Can I respect this person?” It’s “Can I trust them?”

AI is increasingly good at competence signals. It can sound smart, structured, credentialed. But the warmth signal, the eye contact that lingers a second longer, the follow-up question that proves you were actually listening, the small disclosure that makes the other person feel less alone; that’s still entirely human territory.

Caroline said something near the end of our conversation that I keep thinking about. She mentioned how her old boss could take a piece of policy and turn it into a story that made it real. “It’s just storytelling,” she said. That’s the lesson she learned about public speaking. That’s the lesson she passes on to young people now. Not: memorize talking points. Not: project confidence. Story. Human, specific, connecting-to-a-real-person story.

That’s the skill. And no amount of prompt engineering replaces it.

The Practical Part (Which Is Actually Simple)

The Big Think article ends with something worth printing out and putting on your desk:

“Someone has to lower the wall first. Magnetic people are simply the ones who decide that person is them.”

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. You don’t need a new personality. You don’t need to be an extrovert. You don’t need to be Caroline Harris Davila, who admits she almost didn’t run because she was terrified of public speaking and now loves it. She changed her story. You just need to decide that in the next room you walk into, you’re going to be the one who goes first.

Ask the first question. Make the first comment. Smile at the person who looks like they’re wondering if anyone will talk to them. That’s it. That’s the networking strategy. That’s the leadership strategy. That’s the one move that compounds over a career in ways that no LinkedIn optimization ever will.

What story are you telling yourself about how rooms are going to go before you walk into them? Because that story is already shaping the outcome.

Listen to the Full Conversation

If you want to hear Caroline tell her own story, the middle child of 11 who ran at 27, built a reputation one constituent meeting at a time, and turned a fear of public speaking into a love of storytelling, it’s all on Rock Solid. Catch the full episode here, or watch it below. And if you’re in Round Rock and want to learn more about Caroline Harris Davila’s work, her office door is genuinely open. She means it.