Using AI Without Losing Your Coaching Magic

Show Notes

Let us talk about AI. You are either saying, “I am sick of it,” or “I am scared of it.” They are the two things that I hear people say all the time. I went to a leadership conference last week and they were talking about AI. One of the big things that came out there was not about which tool to grab or what the latest thing to do is. It was to think about what it is that you want to change.

Use AI With Intention

What do you want the outcome to be? Just like we do with coaching. We think about how we can move our clients to the outcome that they want. What is their problem and what is their desired outcome?

AI is no different. Instead of thinking, “What is the latest tool? Let us grab this shiny object,” ask, “What do I actually want it to do?” and then reverse engineer it from there.

Work it back from, “Okay, I want it to be able to help me clean up my writing, especially when I am tired.” So something like ChatGPT or Claude or sometimes even Gemini would work really well in those instances at the time of recording. By the time you are listening to this in the future, there might be a whole different suite, but things like that are a really great use of AI. You put down those thoughts and get them arranged into a cohesive order or get it to check key grammar, things like that.

Use it in a way that you might use a junior sales member or a team member, not by getting it to do all the work for you. Having said that, it can do the work for you in some cases.

AI Simplifies Your Work

AI can be helpful to your tasks. Recently, somebody had to get all this data from different areas to do some reporting. Normally that would take eight to ten manual hours. They wrote some AI prompts and used some AI tools, and it could be done in 30 minutes.

That was doing the work for them, yet it was still just picking up the bits and pieces from everywhere. With AI, we can get the desired outcomes we are looking for without wasting energy and without losing our ability to think.

We are finding that with things like writing, people’s handwriting is becoming really bad because we are not using it, and our brains will do exactly the same.

So you need to be using AI as a thought partner, as brainstorming, not as a way to stop thinking. That is where a lot of people go wrong. They are not checking what it says. They are not saying, “I would not use that word,” or “Furthermore is not something most people use in general language,” or “That comma before the ‘and’ is not how I write.”

Give it those guidelines. Give it instructions just like you would if you were getting a junior to do something for you, and make sure that it is actually working for you the way that you would want it to.

It is not going to replace you as a coach, yet it can certainly make your life a lot easier and enhance what you are doing when you use it well.

Use AI With Confidence

So if you are a little bit frightened, you really do need to think about jumping in. It is just like a car. Nobody wanted to drive a car in the beginning because we did not understand them or what was going on. Even once cars became mainstream and you were 16, 17 or 18, however old you were when you learnt to drive, it was all very scary.

Now most of us just jump in our cars and do not even think about it. AI is going to be no different. It has been around a long time already in lots of things you probably do not even realise. We are already being exposed to it.

There is no sticking your head in the sand and running away from it. It is something we need to learn to use, and use sensibly, with guidelines.

Privacy First, AI Second

Be very careful what you put into especially the free versions of these tools. With free versions you are basically giving them licence to learn from you. If you can afford it, make sure you have at least an entry level paid version so they are not learning all your information. And please do not put your bank details, personal details or passwords into any of these tools. That kind of information can become part of a database that could be leaked. We have already seen instances of AIs being hacked.

That is not to scare you, yet be cautious about what you are putting in. You can always load things without the private information.

When my daughter was looking for a job, she got a contract and I loaded that into ChatGPT to see if there were any red flags in that contract. It was quite funny because she had to start early at 7am, which is quite early here in Australia, and it flagged that as one of the issues, saying that a 22 year old might not be suited to a role starting that early. For my daughter, that actually worked really well.

We took out any personal information. We removed the company name, her name, anything that would identify her. We just got it to read the contract and look at what was there.

We identified that three of the four issues it flagged were not a problem at all. One of them we thought, “Okay, that is a question to ask,” which she did, and they answered it quite nicely.

These are the kinds of things you can do.

Speak to AI for Better Results

A really good way to use it, especially tools like ChatGPT, is to voice your instructions. Verbalise and talk to it because the way we write is generally different from the way we speak, and often we can speak a lot faster than we can write.

When we give instructions by speaking, we provide much more context. The more context you give it, the better. If you are outlining a workshop, that will give it a lot more to work with.

Then you can rate the ideas, check them out, look at the flow, and see if that is going to work for what you want to do. If you have content you have used previously, you can upload that as well, without the sensitive information

Humanness Is Your Superpower

Remember, you need to inject your humanness into it. That is what will really make the difference. Going forward, we are going to start to wonder what is real and what is not. By injecting your personality and your human qualities into your content, you create that difference.

The biggest thing with AI is that it cannot do emotions. That is what we do as coaches, is it not? We read people’s emotions, we read their body language and how they do things. That is going to be something that will take a very long time for AI to be able to replicate.

That is why you are going to be an amazing coach when you use AI.

Some of the things that you can do that AI cannot do in your coaching are holding space. AI is never going to be able to hold space the way we do as people. Another thing is that it cannot bring in your lived experiences and wisdom, and those client stories you can articulate.

Yes, it can generate case studies and similar content, but it loses the emotion and the real essence of what is being said. Until AI can genuinely feel emotion, it will not replace us as coaches. So do not fear that.

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