What Makes a Talk Worth Hearing? Hint: Are You Curious? with Carol Cox & Diane Diaz: Podcast Ep. 482

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482-SYB-Curiosity.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Carol Cox:
What are those questions that you constantly are asking yourself? What sparks your curiosity? And even more importantly, what is going to spark the curiosity in your audience? Hi, I’m Carol Cox, host of the Speaking Your Brand podcast, joined by our lead speaking coach, Diane Diaz. Hi, Diane.

Diane Diaz:
Hi, Carol.

Carol Cox:
For the last few episodes, I’ve been talking quite a bit about our idea of the expert trap. And when we get stuck hiding behind our expertise, we lose out on making a deeper connection with our audience and also truly helping our audience discover more about themselves, where they want to go and the transformation that they want. I talked about how AI can be helpful in some instances, but that it fundamentally lacks curiosity about us because it can’t have curiosity. It’s a machine. It’s not a person. It can have engagement. And it’s very clever at keeping you engaged on the platform, but it really can’t provide that true curiosity. And just last week I was reading an article in The New York Times and it said that curiosity is actually a feature of our biology. This is why we have it as humans, and the machines don’t have it. It’s part of our biology because it’s to help us to learn more broadly. Because when you have a gap between what you want to know and what you want to find out, that gap is what causes you to want to seek out information, experiment, try new things, and to learn. But what often happens is that when we get so close to our own topics, our industries, the work we’ve been doing in our careers and our businesses for so long is that we stop being curious. We know so much, and this happens to all of us, that we know the answers to the common questions, or we know what to expect. And so we need to add that sense of serendipity and surprise and Counterintuitive to what we’re doing in our work, in our body of work, with our thought leadership, our signature talks, and the ideas that we want to bring out into the world. So Diane has been, of course, listening to these episodes that I’ve been doing, and she had her own insight. So we were chatting about this and I was like, well, why don’t we just come on the podcast? Yeah. Conversation live. All right, Diane, so I’m going to turn the conversation over to you.

Diane Diaz:
Yes. We were having those conversations because I had been listening to those podcast episodes, and then I thought, you know, I am someone who is endlessly curious. I, I think I relayed to you, Carol, in a conversation we were having where I’ll be walking in the morning and then I’ll just random thoughts, right? Going through my head and I’ll think, maybe I see something. I’m like, oh, I wonder how that machine works that I see. Right? So I look it up. I’m like, oh, that’s interesting. And then that leads me to like, oh, wait, how much do machines like that cost? And then I researched that, right? And so just one thing to another, to another, to another, because I, I could research anything because I just like to know because I have this curiosity, right? And I, I think and the article you were talking about kind of bears this out that using AI is fine, of course, but we sort of might be losing our curiosity by maybe relying on it too much because as you just said, AI’s can’t be curious. They are not humans, but they don’t even push you to be curious because they’re just trying to give you the right answer. How about this? And then you type one more thing. Oh, how about this? Oh, you didn’t like that? Well, how about this? But it never explores something tangentially related to it, right? Where my brain and a lot of people’s brains, it goes from one thing to the next to the next that aren’t necessarily connected. But I learn a lot. And sometimes those things I learn that don’t seem related come back later to something that I’m working on, but we’re kind of losing that if we’re just relying only on AI because you can’t get that from the AI.

Carol Cox:
Right? And we think about neural networks. So in our brains, we have neural networks, these large language models, that’s how they’re constructed, which is via neural networks. And neural networks are very efficient because they put similar things together. So animals sit in one part of our neural network. And part of Chatgpt’s neural network says, okay, cat, dog, fish, cow, pig, like they’re all animals and they all have these features and these activities. So they kind of sit there and then over here are other things, you know, related to like the industry that we’re in and kind of the things that happen to go on. So in large language models, you can get them to cross pollinate. You know, you really have to try. They’re not going to do it on their own. But for us, Diane, we that’s how we love to work because, you know, we worked with hundreds of clients over the years and I don’t even think we’re consciously doing it. But our clients will talk about something and we’ll ask them questions. And I think we are making these leaps across our own neural networks because we’re looking for the stuff that’s interesting. That’s not the same old stuff that we’ve always heard, but is the stuff that is like that piques our curiosity as well?

Diane Diaz:
Yes. And we don’t have the, as I say, the curse of knowledge, right? We don’t we are not in their industry. Maybe we know a little bit about it, but we’re sort of outside the work they do. And so we’re not looking at it from the standpoint of, let me get you the right answer. We’re looking at it from the standpoint of, oh, I could be in that audience. What’s interesting to me? Oh, how about this little thing you said over here about when you were a child? Ai is not going to ask you, well, what? What that thing about when you were a child, how does that play into your message? It’s not going to ask you those things, but that’s what we’re looking for because we’re sort of the audience. We’re the laypeople looking at this message and how can it be more interesting? How will it engage me? How will it excite me? Right? How, how will I want to know more about it?

Carol Cox:
That is so true because one of the questions we ask in our very first Thought Leader Academy group call is, what did you like to do when you were a little kid growing up? And I love hearing the different answers. And there’s a lot of commonalities. And we will oftentimes in the VIP day, ask clients about some formative experience they had when they were growing up or, you know, why they got interested in the the thing that they do not necessarily because that story is going to end up in the talk. Most of the time, it doesn’t end up in the talk. That’s not why we ask it. But we’re probing for something deeper. And I can say, after using ChatGPT for almost four years, it has never once asked me what I like to do when I was a little kid growing up.

Diane Diaz:
No, no, it’s so true. And I, I think that that goes to that point I was making to you earlier, Carol, when we were messaging back and forth about this idea of, you know, you can just look to children, right, for this idea of curiosity because we do sort of even as adults, I mean, never mind AI, we just as adults kind of lose our curiosity because we we are looking for the right answer, right? Because we have jobs to do and all of that. But children will ask the most random questions and connect questions to other questions that have nothing to do with each other. But they they go on and on and on because they don’t know anything. Right? And they’re just learning. So they just ask like, why is the sky blue? Why is the grass green? Like, you know, great question. I don’t know the answer to that. Right. But these are these are curiosities. And I feel like that’s sort of what is happening with maybe the overreliance on AI tools. I mean, we certainly don’t use AI to create your talk because it is not going to probe you that way. It is not going to lead you to, you know, the fact, for instance, that I love education because I grew up poor and I knew education was my way out of that. Ai is never going to know that about me, but that might make its way into my message about why it’s important to tell your story, right? Yes.

Carol Cox:
Yes, absolutely. And so not only is it kind of a something to be mindful of as far as when you’re using these AI chatbots and thinking that it can help you to tease out what your core idea is or your signature talk is, and it can put together a very polished outline. And again, it sounds great. I talked about this a few episodes ago that in more detail is that the other thing that I see happen with some of our clients who come to us, is that they’ve worked with other speaking coaches before they found us. And a lot of times, unfortunately, what those coaches did was not really coaching and it was not creating a deliverable for them. It was giving them a formula for them to fill out on their own that said, like, open with your story and then fill. It’s almost like a Mad Libs. I don’t know if Mad Libs are still around, but like a Mad Libs where it’s like, fill this in and then fill this section in and then fill this section in. And sure, in the signature talk canvas framework that we use, we do have an overall narrative arc that we’re building towards, but it is not formulaic.

Carol Cox:
It’s not like, oh, you must always start with the story or you must always have this and this place because every person’s talk is different. Every person’s style personality is different. Some clients want to kind of get the first nervous energy out. So we recommend do a couple show of hands questions when you first start versus launching into a story where you’re not quite feeling ready for that. So if you are looking at other speaking coaches, which of course we recommend do your due diligence is figure out, are they going to hand you a bunch of templates and a formula for you to fill out on your own and not really get a lot of help with? Or are they the ones doing the work, what I call the heavy lifting for you? Because if you could do it on your own, you would have already done it. It’s really hard to do on your own. We can’t really do it on our own. You need someone else to do this for you because you’re too close to your own thoughts.

Diane Diaz:
Yes, that’s a really good point because, you know, again, AI is not a person and so you can’t bounce your ideas off of it in the way that you can with me or you working in a VIP day or in the thought leader Academy group calls where you’re bouncing it off of other, other TLA clients. Uh, you need that those outside perspectives because it is hard for us, you know, being inside our own heads, right? To have necessarily the curiosity about ourselves. But other people can ask us questions. And then I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a VIP day and just in casual conversation, a client will mention something about where they used to live or something they did as a child or a previous job they had. And then later on, as we’re working together, I’m like, oh, remember when you said blah, blah, blah, let’s go back to that. And they’re like, why? And I’m like, well, let’s just go back to it. And then we start talking about it and all of a sudden this huge epiphany and it just opens up this path for the talk out of just a conversation, but that is really hard to replicate with an AI that has to be done with a human right.

Carol Cox:
It’s not going to come out with some formula that that someone hands you and says, fill in the blanks of this. That’s because that’s not how, that’s not how you get to a talk that is different from what everyone else gives you. Because, you know, speaking is getting more competitive. There’s more people out there who want to be speakers. Event organizers have a lot more choices. We want you to be well positioned. We want you to be able to get those speaking engagements. Hopefully, if you found us and speaking your brand, you align with our mission of amplifying women’s voices for positive change. So we want you out there sharing your message, and we want you to have the strongest, most powerful, most engaging, most compelling talk that you possibly can. And what I guess what really kind of disheartens me is when I see women come to us who have tried other avenues, and there they get a little bit defeated because they spent a lot of time, effort, money, resources, mental energy that they’ve done. And they don’t feel like they’ve gotten what they were looking for. And so then they not that they want to give up, they’re not giving up because they find us and they come to us, but they almost kind of have to get past that, that little bit of like, oh, it didn’t work out for me. And then, but what we provide them, I kind of, you know, we, we call ourselves speaking coaches and we are because we will, you know, provide our insights and our guidance and we’ll ask you questions, but we also do the work. We’re very big on like we’re going to, we’re going to create that talk from beginning to end. It’s not halfway done. It’s not like you have pieces scattered here and there and you don’t know how to put them together. Like we are the type of people we’re going to get the thing done for you and you’re going to it’s going to be exactly what you were hoping for, and then you’re going to put it out into the world with our with our help.

Diane Diaz:
Yes, yes. And, um, one of the other things that you’ve mentioned is this idea of, well, if we were talking about the VIP day, this idea of the constraint, right, is that if you’re using ChatGPT, I mean, it’s happened to me, it’s happened to you, Carol. It’s probably happened to everybody. You can go on and on and on and on. And it seems to, in my experience with it, again, I’m not knocking AI tools, but my experience with it is that it’s almost too much, right? Like there is no constraint. It’s unlimited information. But that doesn’t help me because I’m trying to create something that’s tangible, right? So in a VIP day, we have three hours. And that seems like, well, how on earth like, I need weeks to create a talk. No, no you don’t. Right. We’re going to create your talk in a three hour block because that constraint makes us have to pinpoint ideas. We have to key in on certain stories. And yes, we’re going to dive deeper on things. We’re going to talk about some things more than we’re going to talk about other things. But we have a set time frame. And just from the experience of working with so many clients in VIP days, we know, you know, we start out lots of conversation. We get to the middle. It feels like it’s a little bit of a mess, and then it starts to pull together. Everything starts to coalesce towards the second part of that VIP day into a completed talk. So that constraints actually beneficial. So rather than just circling the AI drain constantly, constantly, constantly. And, you know, thinking about the idea six ways from Sunday and never getting anywhere, you actually get somewhere because again, we have the benefit of being able to have that curiosity on your behalf.

Carol Cox:
It reminds me of Parkinson’s Law, which says that the work will fill the time that you have allotted for it. And I can’t tell you how much I experienced this personally. Like if I’m saying I’m going on a trip and I know I only have a certain number of hours to finish whatever work it happens to be for the week before, I have to, you know, leave to go on that trip. Oh my gosh, it will get done that week versus other weeks where I’m like, oh, I have until Friday to get this done. Guess how long it will take.

Diane Diaz:
Till.

Carol Cox:
Friday? Friday.

Diane Diaz:
And it’ll take.

Carol Cox:
Three times as long sitting in front of my computer as it does when I know I only have a certain limited amount of time.

Diane Diaz:
That is absolutely 100% true. And so I think having that constraint also creates more. I mean, it not only creates a final, tangible product of a talk, but it creates more action, right? Because you can’t if you don’t have the talk, you can’t really do anything. You’re not going to go pitch yourself because you don’t have a talk yet, right? You don’t know how to talk about what you’re going to talk about because you don’t have talk yet. But having that, that set time frame and that constraint of it’s going to get done in three hours. Now you have a talk. Oh, now I know what my message is. I know what my stories are. I know how to talk about my talk. I know how to pitch myself. Right? Because now you have the thing. But you know, you can spend eons going around and around and around with AI and never get to that point. And that’s, that’s I’ve experienced that myself. And it’s very, it’s actually very frustrating. And sometimes I just get frustrated. I’m like, okay, I got to put away the AI. I need to just start using my own noodle.

Carol Cox:
I know it’s like there’s so much, you know, I do enjoy about AI and there’s certain capabilities it has that I’m, I’m very much appreciate. But then other times I’m just like, you know what? I kind of wish I just could just get back to just only knowing that I have my own brain to rely on.

Diane Diaz:
Yeah, it’s true, it’s true, Carol, because I just when I was, it’s so funny because like, I love when I’m in a VIP day and a client sort of, they sort of stumble upon like their own curiosity, right? They sort of like, like trip over it and it’s like, oh, look at that. Like, here we are at this thing. I didn’t even see where this was going because that’s how curiosity goes. And I love when I personally am going down some rabbit hole, I think I, I could if they had a job where your job was to just Google things and learn about random things. I could do that job because I just love to learn about anything. But I think having that curiosity within the constraint of a three hour VIP day is magical.

Carol Cox:
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s and to your point about you can’t really create other things until you have that signature message and that signature talk done, because that is the, the clear, cohesive embodiment of what your body of work is. And you need that like literally mapped out. And that’s what we do. And then you can create the downstream assets from it because now, you know, okay, here’s how I’m positioning myself as a speaker. Here’s what I’m going to put my on my speaker page, on my LinkedIn profile, my speaker proposals. Here’s how I’m going to now feel more confident increasing my fees that I’m going to charge for speaking. So all of that comes downstream. And I feel like so many people do it the other way, which is they’re trying to create have ChatGPT create all these assets for them, but they don’t yet have that clear, coherent, unique thought leadership message that is going to help them to stand out and going to differentiate them from all the other speakers in their industry. They need that first before they’re creating all the materials.

Diane Diaz:
Yes, yes. And it’s sort of like applies even that idea applies even to the VIP day. It’s like we have to kind of get messy, right? And it has to be like all because, you know, how many times do clients say, oh, I’ve got so many ideas in my head, I just don’t know what to do with them. Yeah, exactly. Let’s dump them all out. It’s going to be a mess. And then we’re going to pull out the ones that make sense, because then we’re going to start having these conversations. And then, you know, as I said at the end, it coalesces into this, this amazing talk.

Carol Cox:
So I know I’ve told this story in the podcast before, but it’s been a while how the three hour VIP day came about. And I think it’s useful for this idea, number one of the value of constraint, but also the value of you. You don’t need to do as much preparation, right? As you may think that you need to do. So this came up, this was, I think in 2018. So I had started kind of speaking your brand in 2015, but really got kind of more, you know, geared up with clients in 2016 and 2017. And at the time, a client would engage me for a coaching agreement like, and we would do six weeks or eight weeks, like a typical kind of what a business coach would do, where we would meet once a week for an hour. Because I model myself after the business coaches that were around back then. So we would meet for an hour or so. I would ask them questions, put it in a Google doc. I kind of had the outline of the talk structure that would work well, and I would move stuff around and the Google doc and, you know, and then I worked with Tami Lalli on her TEDx talk. That of course, ended up blowing up to 2 million plus views. And that’s when I started with the poster board with the Post-it notes. But it was all scattered, you know, Post-it notes everywhere. And there wasn’t as much rhyme and reason as there was, uh, and when I developed it, but that still wasn’t a three hour VIP day. That was multiple hours over a long period of time. And then a woman contacted me on a Monday. Or maybe it was even a Tuesday morning. And she said, and she had come referred from someone and we had a consultation call, I think it was on a Tuesday. And she said, I have a speaking engagement coming up and I really need you to help me create my talk. I’m like, great. Sure. When, you know, when do you want to start? She said, well, my speaking engagement is this Saturday and this was Tuesday.

Diane Diaz:
Yeah.

Carol Cox:
Wow. And, and she traveled a lot for the job that she had. So she’s basically like looked at her calendar. She’s like, the only availability I have would be like Thursday morning from nine to noon. The three hours I was like, okay, let’s do it.

Diane Diaz:
Wow.

Carol Cox:
So we did it, I did. By that point, I had the poster board with the post like that had that, all that framework already, you know, that I was using. So we did it and it was amazing. We got it done in three hours. She felt great. She did the speaking engagement on Saturday, her content, her stories. She knew what she needed to talk about. She needed the flow and she needed to know what was the most important stuff to include and what could be excluded. And we did it. And hence the three hour VIP day was born. And we’ve done it hundreds of times ever since.

Diane Diaz:
Yes. And that’s a really great story because I feel like I personally believe that the three hour VIP day yields a better talk than if you did work on it for months. Yes. Because, Carol, let’s just talk about our own personal experiences with this, because you and I, once upon a time, a couple of years ago, applied to speak at this TEDx event and we auditioned for it, literally found out we were auditioning, I think the week before, pulled something together, auditioned and then had like another week or two to then practice it and deliver it, which was with no notes or anything, no slides. It was Ted style. So it was eight minutes. We had to pull that, that whole I had to pull that whole talk together. And you did too, in like a four week period. And so my belief.

Carol Cox:
That if that.

Diane Diaz:
Was crazy, my final delivery was pretty much my audition. So because I didn’t really change anything about it. So if I the honest truth is, if I had had months to work on that, number one, I wouldn’t have started immediately. Number two, I would have gone around and around and around with ideas and talked myself out of some things and not made decisions on things. And then, you know, come to the, you know, two weeks before I’m supposed to deliver it and not, I would probably be more frazzled. But having that constraint of only a few weeks to pull it together, I had to be very decisive. This gets cut. This stays in. I practice, practice, okay, that has to go away. I’m done. And it was.

Carol Cox:
Because we were busy, because we had like Thought Leader Academy going and our workshop going, and we had our university stuff going. Like we had a lot going on. I remember we were like, why did we sign up for this number one? But of course we’re glad we did because it, it does teach us about like, you’re exactly to your point, the longer runway you have, it seems appealing at the time, but it’s not usually not the case.

Diane Diaz:
Not the case at all. And I learned that from you early on is that I used to start on, on presentations very far ahead. But what that did was just stress me out. And now I’ve learned I it’s not like I wait till the last minute, but I do not start very far ahead. I give myself enough time, but I have a I have a constraint on it because I know, okay, I have this amount of time to work on it. I’m going to get it done. And then once it’s done, it’s done. I’m not going to keep rethinking it and rethinking and rethinking, which is that’s what AI leads us to do.

Carol Cox:
Plus, you use our signature talk canvas framework to lay out the structure of the talk. So you’re not starting from a blank document or a blank slide deck. That is stressful. And you will keep going around and around in circles and second guessing yourself. But when you know, again, not a formula, but when you know, okay, act one needs to accomplish this. Act two needs to accomplish this. Act three needs to accomplish this. You know what kind of what content pieces you need to fill in?

Diane Diaz:
Absolutely. It puts structure around it. And that’s almost a constraint, right? Because again, it’s not a formula, but it’s the constraint of, you know, it, it has a certain structure so that the audience has a certain experience. And if you’re working to that, then that makes it a lot easier.

Carol Cox:
And to my point about you need less preparation than you think. So not only for your, your talks, but also for the VIP day itself. Because that example of that woman I talked to, who we talked on Tuesday, she had her VIP day Thursday morning and then she spoke on Saturday. She had zero time to prep. She couldn’t spend hours putting together past materials or answering the homework questions or anything like that. It was basically like she showed up. I knew she knew her stuff. I had to ask the right questions to get the right information, to get it into a compelling talk. And we were able to do it because sometimes I will talk to prospective clients and they’ll say, well, I don’t feel ready because I need to first, like, go put my presentation together and go put my slides together and go, you know, think through all these things and do some more research. And I’m thinking, I know, like if you were coming to us, you are an accomplished woman who has, you know, experience in your career and in your business, in the industry and what you do, you are ready. If we could start the VIP day literally right now, sometimes I’ll tell them on the console call, we could start right now or tomorrow morning with zero preparation on your part. I really don’t need to do any preparation on my part as far as I don’t need to go do a whole bunch of research on your industry. Because to our earlier conversation about curiosity, I want to bring myself and my curiosity to I don’t want to have the answers for you because I shouldn’t have the answers.

Diane Diaz:
Yes, absolutely. 100% agree with that. There is so many times clients say, oh, I didn’t know what I was supposed to prepare. Nothing had to prepare anything. You show up and then we just start talking and asking questions and we will get to the talk.

Carol Cox:
And I know this seems really probably very like, come on, you guys, really this works. But it really does.

Diane Diaz:
It really does work that way. Yeah.

Carol Cox:
It’s like, because we’ve put in the muscle memory and we put in the reps of this so many times that I’ll, I was on doing some console calls in the past week, and some of the women were telling me their ideas for their topics. And instantly I was like, oh, I know how to make this more compelling as like more of an idea, not just a topic. And instantly I knew what it was because I’ve trained my brain to look for these things. And that’s where our zone of genius lies.

Diane Diaz:
Yes. Which is again, something that the AI cannot do for you. This is what our human brains, through having done many VIP days on variety topics, everything from wellness coaching to pharmacy to nuclear engineering, literally. And yes, I don’t have to become a nuclear engineer or an expert in that in order to help someone in that field create a talk. Right? So that’s what we bring, is the ability to just ask those questions, take what you’re saying, find the stories and put together that talk.

Carol Cox:
Yeah. And, and this is why we love the work that we do, because we love to learn. We love to learn about you as the person. What makes you tick, what has shaped you, why you love, what it is that you do and what you’re talking about. And we want that passion that you have to come through in your message and in your talk. So as we kind of think about this idea of curiosity, so we, we mentioned, obviously the curiosity that we have about you and what you want to share with your audience. The other important thing is that you having curiosity about your audience too.

Diane Diaz:
Yes.

Carol Cox:
And this is part of the expert trap where we come. So we like we we hold on so tightly to what we want to share our expertise, everything we know, our knowledge. And yes, you should share those insights and those lessons and what you’ve, what you’ve learned over the years from your experience and your expertise, but also about being curious about your audience. What do they need? It’s not just about what you want to share, but what does your audience need? And that’s part of the questions that we end up asking you in the VIP day is to probe a little bit more about the types of people in your audience. Where are they at, and where do they want to go and where are they feeling stuck? That’s that sense of curiosity. It’s also helpful for you to bring to the work that you’re doing.

Diane Diaz:
That’s such a good point.

Carol Cox:
And then the third aspect of curiosity. So we said our curiosity about you, your curiosity about your audience. And obviously your audience needs to have curiosity about whatever it is that you’re presenting to them, your topic and curiosity about you. And that’s where some personal stories do come in, because they don’t just want to hear the information. They can get that from ChatGPT. Frankly, they already are getting it from Claude or ChatGPT. They want to be curious about you. Like what? What what has shaped you? Just like we’re curious about you. So are they. And so that’s why those personal stories where as appropriate for your content and your topic are something that we highly encourage and that we integrate, help you integrate in that VIP day.

Diane Diaz:
Yeah, that’s a really good point. I’ll just give, I’d like to give a visual for how you can think about this, right? So there are libraries now that shall remain nameless that, um, but these are across the country that they are removing the stacks from the library. And instead the books are going to these giant metal bins that in a room that you do not access. And then you go tell the probably one librarian that you need X book, you need to know which that exact book is, and then they will punch it into the system, and the retrieval system will go get it and drop it in a chute to them. So what? Which sounds like, oh, much more efficient. However, what we lose is curiosity. We lose. Oh, I think, I think I want a book on this topic. I go look it up, you know? Then I go to where it is. I’m like, I open it up. I thumb through it. Not quite what I’m looking for, but hey, look at this book next to it. Let me get that right. Oh, look at that. That’s interesting. Oh, let me go. Look, there’s another book down there that I see. Let me look at that. Right. And before you know it, we’ve explored different ideas because again, that is what Carol and I bring to the table is this idea of exploring different ideas. So when you’re thinking about, you know, what is the difference between me trying to do this on my own or having AI help me versus coming to the Thought Leader Academy, working with human beings who know the questions to ask and will probe on things that may seem unrelated. Think of it as that example of walking through the stacks, right? Getting to explore all the ideas versus just that one idea. And it doesn’t go any further. And it just sort of always goes back to that one idea, right? That’s the difference. Yes.

Carol Cox:
I love that visual, Diane. I that is so perfect. I have spent many, many hours at university libraries and I loved it. I found so many things that I wouldn’t otherwise have found by browsing the bookshelves and like flipping through the books like, oh, bibliography. Oh, they mentioned this. Let me go find that book or. Yes. And that’s why I mean, I read on Kindle now because I like the larger font size, but I do miss being able to page through books, you know, easily to find things. And I will often go, there’s an independent bookstore here in Winter Park near where we live, and I call Writer’s Block Bookstore, and I will often go in there to browse around and I, my eye will catch books that I have not come across otherwise I haven’t seen, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, usually I will buy 1 or 2 books because I want to support the independent bookstore. And so not only is this something that AI is not good at, but also our social media algorithms are now trained to give us more of what we already have expressed interest in because we we watched that video for 1.5 seconds longer than some other video. So it’s going to keep feeding us that same type of content. So it’s like we’re getting so much, um, homogenized content and we’re not seeing other things that also kind of help us to find where the intersection of ideas makes things interesting.

Diane Diaz:
Which I, let’s look at this as an opportunity for you, the listener and the speaker to not be like other speakers, maybe that are staying in the homogenous zone of information, right? And you can really step outside of that and create a talk that is interesting, engaging, has story, maybe meanders off to something slightly related and then brings it on back to the main topic, right? There’s, it’s, you could really stand out by focusing on curiosity.

Carol Cox:
Yes. Oh, and humor. Honestly, ChatGPT is not good with humor.

Diane Diaz:
Terrible.

Carol Cox:
You have to have humor in your talk. We intentionally find places for you to put it in, and we have techniques for you to do. That’s one of the things we work on. We’ve done other episodes on humor. I’ll link to those in the show notes. But that is one thing that I think a lot of speakers miss, and certainly AI misses putting into any talk outline you would have it create for you.

Diane Diaz:
Yeah, that’s a good point. And I really firmly believe that humor comes from curiosity, right? Because when you’re curious, you see, you see things as funny. Like I’ve gotten into this habit lately of taking really mundane things and like just anything and like breaking it down to make it seem so ridiculous. For example, who decided this was during football season? Who decided that one guy’s going to hold the football and he’s going to bend over and then the other guy’s going to stand behind him with his hands on him, and then he’s going to pass the ball through his legs. And obviously that’s how the game works. But just when I start breaking down things to their simplest terms and like who decided this was going to happen this way, it makes it hilarious, right? But humor comes from curiosity. So like in me thinking about like, really, how did that come to be? Like it’s ridiculous, right? But obviously that’s how it works. But it’s just so funny. But you have to be curious in order to wrap the humor in there. And again, AI cannot do that. It cannot do it for you.

Carol Cox:
I’ve asked this sometimes like, oh, what would be some, you know, some humorous points to make about whatever it is so bad, it’s even worse than the dad jokes. Like it is bad.

Diane Diaz:
Dad jokes at least make you chuckle. Ai jokes do not make you even chuckle. They’re terrible.

Carol Cox:
So bad, so bad. All right, so hopefully this has been helpful for you listening, you know, lean into your curiosity and, you know, curiosity for yourself, for your audience, what they need to hear from you, what they want to know about you, how they want to learn more about themselves, and if you would like to work with us, the humans, on your thought leadership message and your signature talk, as well as the business of speaking, you can reach out to us. The best thing to do is to schedule a consultation call with us. We’ll chat with you about your goals, answer your questions, and see which program is the best fit for you. And you can do that by going to speaking yourbrand.com/contact. Well, Diane, thank you so much for joining me today on the Speaking Your Brand podcast.

Diane Diaz:
That was a fun conversation, Carol.

Carol Cox:
Until next time. Thanks for listening.

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