Welcome to Make More Money Without Selling Your Soul. The podcast for bold entrepreneurs ready to simplify scale and reclaim their time. I’m Polly Lavarello, Evergreen scaling strategist and cushy business pioneer. Join me and my occasional guests as we explore the themes of wealth, selling and well-being, because building a business that works for you changes everything. Let’s dive in.

00:39

Hello and welcome to the show. Today we are talking about AI again. But this time we’re talking about stop looking for better AI prompts, learn to lead the conversation. And again, this is just a short one, but a really, really important one, and very meta because I hosted a workshop on AI on Monday for health practitioners.

00:56

It went down so well. I will definitely be doing more in this area, although I haven’t quite yet figured out exactly what that will be. I’m still getting feedback from those who attended, those who’ve managed to catch up with the replay to get a sense of what was helpful, what they’d like to see more of, et cetera, et cetera. I have my own reflections in the meantime, because as is often the case, you know, as we are helping others, we often learn something about ourselves or learn something about how we’re saying things in a different way. That feels really, really important And so I wanted to touch on this because AI is relatively new.

01:37

It’s not going anywhere. If you listened to my last episode, you’ll have heard how I touched on the fact that whether we mean to or not these days, it’s unavoidable that we are in some capacity or another interacting with AI and using AI, whether it’s watching adverts that have been crafted with AI, whether it’s using the Netflix algorithm suggestion as to what episode or show we’ll like next, all the way through to Google searches where we’re clicking on AI-generated suggestions, or using the background remover on Canva or using captions. You know, we’re all somehow in some capacity or another using AI. And funnily enough, actually, that was one of the themes of my workshop, which is where I kinda said, and that doesn’t mean that we have to be an entire sellout to AI. We do get to have boundaries and firm lines around where we are happy to use it and where we will never use it, and actually how intrinsic that is to our success with AI, our feelings around AI, and transparency and clarity for your people.

02:39 

But here’s the thing. At the very beginning of the workshop, unscripted, I found myself sharing the reason why I created this particular workshop, which may seem to have come out of the blue for people who’ve been in my world a while, who so far have mainly heard me speaking about systems, group programs, wellbeing, leadership. To suddenly be talking about AI may seem like it kinda came from nowhere, and it hasn’t behind the scenes. It’s something I’ve resentfully, begrudgingly been using and getting better at all the time, and it’s something that, of course, I have been increasingly integrating into my curriculum inside the Everyday Sales Accelerator so that the exercises and everything that people essentially need to do inside their business is easier and more efficient.

03:26

And I think particularly for us neurospicy folk, more interactive, which I think is, you know, hugely beneficial when you’re asking somebody to do something in their own time. So I have been, you know, really enjoying all the benefits of AI, and yet I’ve wanted to hide away from actually being the person that help people with AI. And I think the reason why I finally felt motivated to put on my own workshop was because I myself, on the journey of, of improving my abilities with AI, have signed up myself to various workshops, experts, all of the things And what I found increasingly is that some of these workshops were encouraging you to download about eight different subscriptions to do eight different things in your business, that for the average business owner to have $200 worth of subscriptions going out every single month is just way too big a leap to make.

04:21

And oftentimes, the hours involved to actually get all of those AI tools to a level where they’re actually working really effectively, it just isn’t efficient or practical or any of those things. So I don’t like that advice. I don’t… And I also feel like for a lot of people, they’ve gone from having next to no understanding of AI to suddenly buying all these tools that they need to wrap their heads around. Like, that’s just… It didn’t make sense to me. You know, in the meantime, they’ve got a tool like Claude that they are vastly underutilizing. So I really wanted to kind of solve that. But secondly, and this bit feels really, really big, ’cause the first bit probably feels a bit obvious. In fact, some of the many questions I received ahead of the workshop was like, “What are the subscriptions I need to keep and what are the ones I can ditch?

05:06

And are there any that are more kind of does all the things so that I don’t need to have quite so many of them?” So that was a question I was already getting. But there was a really, really, really big piece that I really wanted to speak to, which is a lot of people are selling prompts like it’s one and done. Here is your content strategy that you can use forevermore, or here is the way that you can organize your data collection forevermore. And a lot of the time we are outsourcing our understanding of our business and AI to somebody else who’s selling it like one and d- like it’s one and done. And that’s very convenient to do because, of course, if you sell it like it’s one and done, you get to sell an offer and never have to think about it again.

05:48

But the reality with AI, as I’ve shared in previous episodes, is that it is constantly evolving, constantly improving in many regards, and so the things we can do with it are changing all the time as well. So to infer that you have created something that is never going to need to change again is just totally dismissive of what AI actually is and how AI actually functions. So the bigger takeaway I really wanted people to take from the workshop, which you, my lovely listener, I want you to engage with as well today, is that AI is a brilliant mirror for your leadership skills or, in some cases, lack of. And I wanna highlight a few examples here Let’s, let’s do three. Let’s go with three examples.

06:42

One thing about AI, and one of the biggest fears I have around AI, outside of environmental impact, outside of politics, and all the other kind of gross stuff that’s going on, but one thing that really concerns me on a very human level is how so many people are apparently losing their ability to kind of think critically and are outsourcing that to AI. I think that is incredibly dangerous, and even though we’re already on some weird, crazy paths in life right now, I feel like if we lose that part of our very human functioning, that we’ll be in an even more dangerous place within the next decade. So being able to think critically is so important, yet I see time and time again, tired business owners say to me, “Oh, but Claude said I should do that,” or, “ChatGPT was really enthusiastic about this idea.”

07:34

Of course it was. It’s AI. Please, can we remember, it’s a word salad of preexisting concepts on the internet. It’s a pattern spotter. It is not it’s, it’s not all of the things. It’s, it’s not the final word. But why do people often respond that way? Because our brains are fired to respond almost submissively to Any assertive facts that are thrown our way, okay? That will get aggressive. But in the f- in the form of AI, where it’s like, “Hey, big fella, we love you. Yes, that’s brilliant. Yes, we’re gonna do that. There’s nothing that can go wrong here,” people just buy into it, right? And that’s so dangerous. I know some people have programmed, uh, like, you know, ChatGPT to be less friendly because they could recognize how it was actually manipulating them into almost having parasocial relationship with…

08:27

Well, I don’t know if it could be called a parasocial relationship, but having a, having feelings for, emotions for an AI. You know, think, “Oh, thank you, that’s really kind of you to say that.” Hold on, you’re an AI. You don’t exist. Well, you do exist, but, you know, that’s a whole other conversation. But, you know, it’s, it’s just… Yeah. So critical thinking, point number one is just because it’s assertive does not mean it is correct, okay? There are so many things it doesn’t know about you, about the situation, about your ideal clients, about whole o- whole host of other factors. And so you being a leader is being able to li- you know, I, I think it comes back to the analogy that lovely Iman once shared, which she kinda said, with AI, I treat it like an apprentice.

09:11

You know, a really enthusiastic apprentice who will get a lot of things right, but a lot of things wrong. And I kinda took it one step further at the workshop where I kinda said, you know, it’s almost like Karate Kid. Like, we want AI to know as much as humanly possible about our business, about our ideal client, about our values, all of the things, so that it factors those things into what it will share. But let’s not forget that even when you pay for it, it still has a relatively short-term memory. It can regularly misfire for whatever reason. And so therefore, we still need to hold all of those things in our conscience so that when we see something that is in a misalignment to any of those pieces, we can immediately identify it and push back.

09:51

‘Cause guess what? AI’s not your husband. He’s not gonna get in a huff and ignore you all night. It will come back with another solution, okay? So people who are conflict averse, people who, uh, want the easy route out will often kind of see the assertiveness of AI and be like, “Well, okay, I can use that as my… Well, AI seemed confident about this.” No, you are the boss. AI is your apprentice. Please know that you get to push back, okay? So that’s point number one that I really wanted to get across, that, you know, don’t be afraid to push back. There will not be conflict with AI. My second point carries on nicely from the first point, which is, you know, clarity.

10:31

You know, I’ve already touched on this slightly in terms of like when you know what you want, it is much more likely to give you what you need. But outside of clarity around your values, your ideal client, what it is that you’re doing, similarly, if you’re asking for something like an Instagram post, being clear about who it’s for, how you want your reader to feel, uh, what, what action you’d like them to take on the other side. Don’t kind of do the easy thing of saying, “Hey, I’ve seen this cool idea. Turn this into a post for me.” Be clear on the purpose. You know, be the strategist inside your business. What is the purpose of why you are posting, and what is it that you want to actually convey? If you just hand it over to AI, then it will come up with something, again, you know, it’s just a word salad of pre-existing concepts off the internet.

11:13

It might not actually be in alignment with your current strategy, your current goals. So all of these pieces do need to tie back together nicely And I guess the third and final piece is, you know, you need to lead the process, not just the conversation. AI isn’t going to fix a fundamentally unclear business model or an offer that doesn’t solve a valuable problem or a customer journey that doesn’t make sense. In fact, very often it can just compound all of those things. One of the things I’ve done with my prompts, because obviously I support clients in all those areas, and yes, AI does play a role in that, but one of the things I’ve done, which almost irritates some of my clients at times, is I involve a heck of a lot of questions in my prompts so that AI digs for gold.

12:02

It asks you all the relevant questions so that it can come up with the right answers. And when you come back with two-word answers, it will ask you for more. When you come back with wishy-washy coachy terms, it will ask you for clearer terms that someone can actually understand. So it essentially does a lot of what I do with my own clients in terms of helping them get to a point of clarity in what they’re sharing and helping them recognize the gold in what they’re doing already. So I actually really love AI for all of those aspects, but the reason why I was able to create those incredibly thorough prompts is because I’m aware of what human behavior’s like. I’m aware of our propensity to say very little. I’m aware of our propensity to talk in industry talk. And so I trained my AI prompts to actually cut through all that BS and get to the truth of the matter, and train you in the process, help you recognize where you are drifting into that territory.

12:56

So it’s not just correcting it for you, it’s helping you recognize in the process where you might be losing people in how you communicate what you do, and then give you the clean outco- output on the other end. But the reason why I was able to create better prompts was my understanding of humans, my understanding of where my clients often get it wrong, my understanding as to what kind of almost coaching they need to get to the clarity that they are seeking. So, you know- That is from a place of really just leading the process in terms of AI and helping people get to where they need to be. And so one of the things I shared, coming, I guess, back to the premise of this whole episode, kinda saying you don’t need another prompt, is I was sharing with everyone on the call that I want them to dig into the prompts that I’m sharing with them.

13:47

I want them to recognize, you know… A- and they can use AI to recognize patterns in their business. Like, where is there a mismatch between what I say I want and what’s actually in my calendar and being prioritized? Where is there a mismatch between what’s in my calendar and what I’m actually achieving each day? There’s so many things that we can dig into that AI can really s- s- support us to get clarity around. And for me, as an ADHDer, I even say things like, you know, “I’m an ADHDer. I cannot take 10 different points merged into three long paragraphs. Can you please break this down for me bit by bit so that we can work through it, and you tell me when you’re done?”

14:22

So there’s so many brilliant ways that AI gets to support us, but ultimately it boils down to you need to be the leader, you need to be innovative, you need to be the person who doesn’t see AI prompts as one and done, but that you are in a kind of back-and-forth relationship with AI so that you truly master it. And I want you to understand that, you know, learning AI and learning how to use it day to day doesn’t require any coding, doesn’t require any kinda tech knowledge. It’s literally like a little chatbot that you’re essentially conversing with day to day. And if you can get into the habit of checking in in the morning saying, “This is what I’m doing today.

15:00

Here’s what I’m prioritizing,” and allowing AI to really get a full view of how you operate in your business It will naturally support you to get to the stage where you create your own prompts to support yourself within your business, where you can start to see what your blind spots are, and where you have a prompt which isn’t quite delivering on what, what it is that you need, that you can have the confidence to go back in there and update it to make it what you want it to be. Like, everything I have learned with Claude has been marrying my mastery in the area that I’m already in, alongside matching that to Claude, kinda saying, “Well, what can you help me do to make this even clearer? What can you help me do to make this even more digestible? What can you do to help me not w- what’s the word?

15:44

Like, blether away on another podcast episode.” Haven’t quite honored that one yet, right? The human still prevails. But yeah, AI is, is, is there. I, I guess, like, my main thing is, like, don’t outsource. Don’t just kinda show up to a workshop every few months and kinda see that as your way of keeping up with AI. Allow yourself to be interacting with it daily, and see how soon you start to feel a million times more confident with it, and see how soon you start to recognize what the gaps are in how you run your business, and how AI gets to play a brilliant role in supporting you with that. Because I’ve got clients across the board using it for visual data spreadsheets, which then interprets the data for them on a Monday and tells them what they should be focusing on, just using Claude, not using anything else, just using Claude and a Google spreadsheet with col- you know, I even asked mine to do color coding ’cause I’m ADHD, and I really like the simplification of, like, green for good, orange for needs looking at, red for like, this is urgent, we need to look at this first, right?

16:42 

There, there are all sorts of clever things that you can ask Claude to do But you know, ultimately it boils down to having good systems, good awareness of strategy, good awareness of where you’re headed, and ultimately good leadership so that you hold all those pieces together. So yeah, be aware that AI is not some tech tool to understand. Ultimately, what you really need to understand is systems, processes, and how to be a leader in your business, and how to manage it, like I say, like a team member that can support you to have a slick operation where AI isn’t some scary overlord. She’s not like the Miranda Priestly in your business.

17:19

Instead, she is the kind of apprentice that is ultimately going to be absolutely brilliant and an irreplaceable part of your team. But they, but they get there through you managing them effectively. Cool. I hope this isn’t too bleathery. I hope this made sense. And, uh, yeah, go on, go forth, go slay with AI. I guess, you know, the main thing I really felt from the workshop was people’s fear and hesitation and holding back from AI, and that really doesn’t need to be the case anymore. You get to, you get to feel really confident with it, but the first step is actually just making it a part of your day in, day out operations. That’s my recommendation. It’s worked well for me. Anyway, I’ll be back in your ears in the next episode talking more about enrolling into group programs year-round, because that’s my favorite thing to talk about.

18:05

But I couldn’t let this one slide. I’ll be in your ears next week. If you found this helpful, please do share it with another CEO, another business owner. And if you found this episode helpful, please do give me a lovely five-star rating. I always love to see those, and I’ll be in your ears next week.