479-Solo-AI.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Carol Cox:
If you have a pile of chat threads in Google Docs, but you’re not quite sure what to do with them all, they sound great. And yet you’re struggling to actually pull anything concrete and cohesive out of them for your next presentation or talk, or you’re struggling to remember exactly how ChatGPT phrased that thing. That sounded so good at the time. This episode is for you. Hi there and welcome to the Speaking Your Brand podcast. I’m your host, Carol Cox. In the last episode, we talked about what I call the expert trap. What happens when you use your talk to prove how much you know, to keep adding more information and more content when your audience is really wanting you to help them to see and understand things differently and to learn about themselves. Today I want to talk about the AI version of The Expert Trap. And I want to say right away, this is not an anti AI episode. I use AI. I have a background as a software developer. I founded and ran two technology companies. I’m fascinated by large language models. I’ve built AI workflows and tools inside, speaking your brand to help us with operations and some of the things that we do. I have episodes that I’ll link to in the show notes if you’d like to learn more details about that. So there is no judgement. There is no criticism whatsoever if you’re using AI, but I want you to use it well. So that’s what I want to talk to you about today.
Carol Cox:
Three things to be careful of when you’re using AI, especially around your thought leadership, your talks and your presentations and three ways that you can use AI with your talks and presentations. Because I know that you want to save time, you want to be more efficient, you want to be more productive. I feel like we are all feeling the sense that we have to produce more, produce more content, put more things out into the world because AI, quote unquote, makes it easier to do so. But it doesn’t really. I just feel like I’m working even more with the AI than I did before. Chatgpt launched a few years ago, so we’re going to talk about all of that. If you’re new, welcome to speaking your brand. We work with women entrepreneurs, executives, and leaders to help you to uncover your thought leadership message and shape it into a signature message and signature talk so that you can have a positive impact and positive change on your audiences. If you haven’t yet taken our Speaker Archetype quiz, I highly encourage you to do so. It just takes a few minutes, ten multiple choice questions, and then you get your results right away so you can see which of the four archetypes you are. Because I want you to lean into your natural communication strengths, and then add to them so that you become an even better speaker. And you can take that free quiz at speaking your brand.com/quiz.
Carol Cox:
Now let’s get on with the show. First, I’m going to share the three things to be careful about when using AI. And then we’ll go into the three ways to use AI with your talks and presentations. Now, what I’m sharing with you is all based on my own experiences, especially, let’s say within the past six months. Obviously, these large language models are getting better and better. What ChatGPT was able to do even a year ago, much less 2 or 3 years ago. We are light years ahead of that. And so I am very I, I use ChatGPT and Claude pretty much every single day. So I’m very aware of those capabilities. So this has nothing to do with the capabilities of the models. Rather it’s to do with where are we leaving? Where are we overly relying on AI to do our thinking for us? And where is it getting us tripped up. So I’m going to share three examples. And I’m going to kind of composite these clients because I don’t want to reveal any identifying details. I want to protect the innocent. So if you’re listening to this, don’t assume that you’re one of the clients that I’m sharing because it’s easy to probably see yourself in some of these. But if you do see yourself, it may be because you’re doing these things. And again, there’s no judgment in this. It’s just helping us become more aware of where AI fits in, where it’s potentially holding us back.
Carol Cox:
The first example is I was doing a VIP day with a client, and this is a three hour session on Zoom, where we are mapping out her signature talk from beginning to end. I have done this hundreds of times over the past ten years. I really love this process. It is fun. It’s thoughtful. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes the questions I’m asking or what we’re trying to pull out does require a lot of thinking, a lot of questions that lead to other questions. And so what I find is that it’s really my curiosity that is driving the question. So the client will say something kind of offhandedly. A lot of times they’re not really thinking much about it. And then I’m like, okay, hold on a second. Let’s dive deeper into that because that has sparked my curiosity and I want to learn more. Which means most likely the audience is also having that same reaction. In this VIP day, we were going through and talking about the different ideas that she had for her talk, and she had a lot of different ideas, and she had been presenting before. So this wasn’t new. And she had a certain topic that she always presented on. But I had a sense from the conversation I had with her in our consultation call that there was something bigger here. There was a bigger message here than the one that she was delivering, delivering, which was very narrowly focused.
Carol Cox:
And about half way through the VIP day, I asked her a question that popped into my mind and I said, why did you name your business what you did? Because the name of your business is much broader than this very specific topic of a presentation you’ve been delivering. She answered that question and that became the core of the talk. All of a sudden, it shifted from this very narrow, tangible, kind of expert trap presentation into a bigger thought leadership message. Now, the business name had been there for a while. It wasn’t like it was new. But I was able to uncover it through my curiosity. I was looking for the signal in the noise, not the frequency of the words that she was saying or what was obvious, because what was obvious was the presentation she had been delivering. But the signal was why she had named her business the way she had. Now, could AI have done that? Could AI have found that signal in the noise? Could AI have asked my client, why did she name her business the way that she did? I don’t know, maybe it has. Can in the future, but it certainly hadn’t up until that point because AI is backward looking. That is the nature of the large language models. The way that they have been trained is they’re looking at everything that has happened before. They struggle to be forward looking. They struggle to find that signal in the noise because they’re looking for repetition.
Carol Cox:
They’re looking for frequency. They think that is the thing to focus on is what is being said most often. Whereas as the coach, as the person who is helping the client with their thought leadership, I’m looking for the opposite. I’m looking for what is not obvious, not for what is obvious. And I think that is the power of human to human coaching is the curiosity. Ai can fake curiosity when it will ask you that follow up question, but it’s not really being curious about you. It’s wanting to keep you engaged on the platform because then OpenAI and anthropic are going to keep you as a user. That’s the difference. It’s not a cure. It’s not curiosity that it’s seeking. It’s engagement. Let me give you the second example. I was working with another client again, composite client. I’m going to kind of put some different aspects together. And she had an important talk coming up. She’s been a speaker for a number of years on the topic that this talk was related to, but it was a different format for this talk. So she was feeling a little stressed about it because it was an important stage for her. So she was kind of putting some pressure on herself, even though she had been doing speaking engagements around this topic for a number of years. We had done her VIP day years ago, and she had been delivering her talk around that. But then she came back to me for a couple of coaching sessions to help her with this important talk.
Carol Cox:
She sent me the script that she had put together and an audio run through, and I always asked for an audio or video run through because it helps me to hear the person saying it out loud, not just reading it. Because when I hear it, then I’ll recognize, oh, this part needs to go a little bit later, or we need to, the audience needs to know this, or they may be thinking this in their head, so we need to address it. So I’m listening for that. I’m also listening for personality, for humor, for the inflection, for when the client’s voice gets more energetic and gets more passionate and kind of gets a little bit faster versus when they slow down. And I listened to her audio run through and I looked at her script and it was completely void of her personality. And she has a very vivacious, naturally funny, very engaging personality. She’s great on stage, she’s great with people. All of that was gone. We had our coaching session and I asked her this because we have a good relationship. I said, I listened to the talk and it sounds fine, like the words are fine, but what happened to your personality? None of that came through. And she kind of abashedly said to me, well, I did ask ChatGPT to look at the script and it suggested some things. It actually it took some things out that it thought wasn’t weren’t good to, to keep in.
Carol Cox:
And I said to her, I said, I get it. I understand this is an important talk to you. You want you wanted to do well. You thought AI would help you to polish it and it has polished it, but it has also then stripped it of all of your personality. It also made it really hard for her to remember the words and the phrasing. We generally recommend to our clients not to try to memorize your talks. It’s too hard. You’re going to get tripped up in your mind about what sentence comes next, and you’re going to be so worried about that, that you’re going to lose that natural connection with the audience when you just talk from what you know. This is why the our signature talk canvas framework and all the post-it notes on the board in that framework that we do in the VIP day is so powerful because we’re writing down the words that you’re saying on those post-it notes, and then we are organizing it into that narrative journey for the audience. But it’s still your words, your ideas, your examples, your stories that how the way you say them. So it’s much easier than for you to take that and actually deliver it. But when ChatGPT, when AI writes it for you, it sounds really good on paper. The words and the phrasing, you’re like, wow, I could never have written that myself.
Carol Cox:
Trust me, I have felt this way too. But then you go to try to remember it or to say it, and you just can’t like you’re struggling with it. That’s what was happening to her. So we talked about that and I appreciate that she was honest about it. I said, okay, so for your next run through, kind of discard that script that you have and you know, your content, you’ve been delivering this topic for a number of years. Just grab a piece of paper and write down an outline of what you would put in this talk, knowing that, you know, this is a shorter talk. So you’re going to have to leave some things out. So she did that. She recorded the new audio run through. She sent it to me. Oh my gosh. What a difference. Her personality came through. It was engaging. The storytelling was so much better because the phrasing was hers. She got back to who she was and it was easier for her to deliver it. She told me afterwards because it was her own content. And I said, yes, that’s exactly why you have to do this yourself. So that’s the second thing, to be careful about the words that AI writes can be very seductive, because if you’re not a great writer and I’m not a great writer, you’re thinking to yourself, I could never have written that. But the words are soulless. And I know a lot of people say that about AI writing, and that doesn’t mean that all AI writing is bad, or you should never have AI help you to write something or to polish something.
Carol Cox:
But be careful when it comes to your presentations and talks to what you’re speaking, because that’s where your cadence, your personality and your words matter so much. Let’s talk about the third thing to be careful about with AI. And I mentioned this at the top, having so many unfinished projects and documents, like I said, I have a almost infinite list. I feel like of chat threads with ChatGPT and Claude, and it can be helpful to help me brainstorm ideas for podcast episodes or for blog posts that I want to do. So that is helpful. But then I, I look back through my Google Drive and I see all of these folders over the past couple of years of different ideas and chat threads I’ve had. And honestly, most of them have gone nowhere. They sounded great at first and that I didn’t actually implement most of them, because that is the downside of AI. It gives you so much that you then just I don’t know about you, but I just kind of give up at a certain point, I’m like, okay, I need to get back to my regular work. This sounds great, but I don’t really know what to do with all of this. This, again, is why structure and constraints are really important with AI. There are no constraints.
Carol Cox:
It will keep having the conversation with you for days on end. It will keep prompting you at the end of that that turn. Okay, should I create this next for you? Or what do you think about this and ask you that next question? There’s no constraint. That is why when we work with you in that three hour VIP day, that is the constraint. Now, that doesn’t mean that we don’t do extra coaching. If we need to have extra time to finish the talk, absolutely are guaranteed to you, is that you have a finished signature talk that you love. So the three hour VIP day is what kicks that off. And then we do a follow up session or two as needed if needed to finish it. But the three hour VIP day is that constraint. But the three hour VIP day provides that container So that we know we have to get it done. I am focused and I have done this hundreds of times. I’m focused on the questions I need to ask, the information I need to get to lay out the post-it notes. Also, the reason we use that poster board is that it fits a certain number of Post-it notes on it and acts one, two, and three of our framework. And those Post-it notes equate to about a 35 to 45 minute talk. Of course, we can always expand the content that the Post-it notes represents to make it something longer. We can take away some things to make the talk shorter.
Carol Cox:
But having that constraint means that the conversation is not going to go on forever. And the post-it notes are not going to go on forever. So if you two are struggling with unfinished projects, with unfinished presentations, with unfinished talks, come talk to us. The best thing to do is to schedule a consultation call. I always love hearing from podcast listeners like you hearing about what you’re doing, what your goals are about, your thought leadership and your speaking and how you want to use your voice. So schedule a call with us at speaking yourbrand.com/contact. Now let’s talk about three ways that you can use AI beneficially with your talks and presentations. The first way is with your slide graphics. I have been working with ChatGPT, especially over the past few months, to really help me with my brand, design and aesthetic for the slide, graphics, podcast, episode, graphics work, workbooks, and so on. So it has done a really good job of taking my current brand aesthetic that’s represented on the Speaking Your Brand website, my Brand colors. I’ve given some examples of other things that I have done and has added some nice elements to it. I was delivering a virtual presentation recently, and one of the attendees wrote in the chat, I love your branding. And I was like, well, I do have ChatGPT to thank for that. Here’s one thing to be careful of, though. Chatgpt will put a lot of text on your graphics.
Carol Cox:
It just loves a lot of text, so I have to keep telling it to reduce the words. So we’ll create a slide graphic for me and it will. It’s instinct is to put all the words on it, which of course you don’t want to do. A slide graphic should be mostly some type of visual that represents what you’re talking about on that slide. And then just a short amount of text, maybe a few words or a short sentence. Like I have one slide graphic that says you are the messenger for your idea and audience. That’s it. Those are the only words on the slide. And then it has a visual graphic on it. So I keep asking, I’ll either give ChatGPT that exact sentence or phrase that I want on the slide, and then it puts my brand design around it. So keep telling it to reduce the words. I know that there are some programs out there where you give it your talk outline, and it will create slides for you that can save you time. But also, again, I find it puts a lot of words on the slide. So you just want to be careful about that. The second thing that AI is helpful for with your talks and presentations is brainstorming audience activities, especially for workshops. A couple years ago, we were delivering a two hour workshop on personal branding. And so I asked ChatGPT at the time to help me brainstorm activities for the audience, and it came up with personal brand bingo for as an icebreaker, as the women were coming in before the workshop formally started so that they would grab one of like a piece of paper printed on kind of hard paper.
Carol Cox:
And it had the different bingo items on there, like find, find another woman in the group who hosts a podcast, find another woman in the group who has had professional headshots done in the past six months, whatever the the different topics were. But that was really fun and I didn’t think of that on my own. So then I took the idea from ChatGPT, went to Canva. Found a bingo card as a Canva template and then just customized it with the speaking your brand colors and logo, and then changed some of, you know, change the different items in the bingo. And it was great. The women had a lot of fun with it. So audience activities can be really helpful that for AI to brainstorm with you. The third way to use AI with your talks and presentation is to analyze the call for speaker page that a conference is putting out. What I’ll do is that I will print the conference page as a PDF. So in your browser you can just do a print as PDF, and then I’ll give that PDF to ChatGPT and say, analyze what this conference is looking for, themes, past topics from their prior events. And then I’ll say, what is a good angle that I could pitch or put together for my speaker submission? I used to say that you can use ChatGPT to help you actually draft your speaker proposals.
Carol Cox:
So to write the the description for your talk, the audience, takeaways, etc. I do not recommend that anymore. And the reason is to go back and listen to episode 468. That is the episode that I did with the organizers for TEDx Orlando. I’m one of the speaking coaches for TEDx Orlando. I have been since 2017. I’m also was on the curation committee this year where we reviewed over 600 speaker submissions. That’s a lot. And we noticed right away who used AI to write their descriptions. So their idea worth spreading answer. And here’s what happened. Everyone who used AI, even if their topics were vastly different from each other, they all sounded the same. Because AI has that certain cadence a certain way. They put words together. No matter how much you try to train it on your voice, it will still do what it wants to do. And so this is why I don’t recommend anymore that you use AI to draft your speaking proposals or your TEDx applications. I would rather have you have words and phrasing that feels a little clunky. It’s the imperfection at this point that’s going to stand out. Not the perfect phrasing. Also, for your speaker proposals, make sure to include what I call credibility markers. So these are things that you’ve actually done or experienced.
Carol Cox:
Put that right into your speaker proposal description, not just in your bio because that’s going to stand out. Maybe you have founded a some type of non-profit, maybe you had a certain title or a certain role at a company or organization. Maybe you have worked with clients in a certain industry that are well known. Put that right in there because that is the human stuff. Now that is sitting having to look it through 600 speaker submissions. That is the kind of stuff that I was looking for, not just the topic itself. So three ways to use AI again, slide graphics, audience activities and analyzing the call for speakers pages to find those themes and what your potential angle could be. As I mentioned, if you would like to work with us to uncover your thought leadership message, create your signature talk and learn how to get booked and paid. You’re welcome to apply for our Thought Leader Academy program. It is our most comprehensive program. You get that one on one VIP day, as well as eight weeks of small group coaching. You can get all of the details and apply or schedule a call as speaking yourbrand.com/academy. And speaking of our Thought Leader Academy on the next episode, my guest is a Thought Leader Academy grad, and she shares with us how she has escaped the expert trap as a result of working with us, and how that has propelled her into being a speaker at national conferences. Until next time. Thanks for listening.
Automatically convert your mp3 files to text (txt file), Microsoft Word (docx file), and SubRip Subtitle (srt file) in minutes.
Before you commit to a tool, read our guides: the VEED review, an honest TranscribeMe review, a deep dive into transcription app, our thoughts on AI transcription software, and the definitive roundup of top meeting transcription tools.
Whether you’re focused on streaming speech-to-text, fast transcription, or best English transcription tool, Sonix adapts to your stack. Our transcribe English audio and transcription for journalists capabilities are a standout.
Try Sonix free today. No credit card required.
