Why aren’t you helping people do this…

I was on a catch-up call with my dear friend Robert when somehow we started talking about ChatGPT. It feels like the whole world is ablaze with AI, and now they want to harness it. Interesting evolution… and I digress.

He told me he was using the paid $20-a-month version. And the more he talked, the more I realized he was basically treating it like a more sophisticated version of Google. Which is totally fine, unless you want it to do more of the heavy lifting in your business. So I started asking him questions.

“If you’re using Chat’s Project Feature, have you uploaded your books into your Project?”

He said, to my surprise, “No.”

You need to know that Robert has written and published two books. Then I said, “Wait. You haven’t put your books in your project?”

From there, I started rattling off all the things I would do. Upload his books. Give it his website URL, published articles, podcast transcripts, and any other work he deems important to his project. The most important thing is to tell it who he is, how he thinks, what he teaches, and who he wants to work with. Next, create clear instructions so it knows how to use that information when he asks questions.

Since I’ve been using AI since it started, this seemed pretty basic, and I assumed everyone knows how to do this.

At one point, Robert said one of the things that makes him crazy about ChatGPT is how it can start telling you how brilliant you are instead of actually helping you. I loved when he said this: “Don’t suck up to me. Help me. Damn it.”

I laughed because, yeah. Exactly. Mine used to do that, and it’s very frustrating.

Then he asked me a question I wasn’t expecting. “Why aren’t you helping people do this?”

And almost immediately, my mind started firing off all the reasons why that was a terrible idea. I do not want to become another person hawking something about AI. They’re popping up everywhere like Whack-a-Mole. Take this AI course. Learn this new tool. Use these 47 prompts. Build this agent. Try this thing that didn’t even exist three weeks ago. No thank you.

Plus, I’d already spent months changing the direction of my business. I’ve moved away from just being known for marketing, launches, and funnels and started focusing more on my work with female founders and executives as an Executive Growth Strategist guiding them in their life and work.

Now Robert is suggesting I throw an AI offer into the middle of that? It felt really weird.

And honestly, I thought everybody knew this stuff. When you have a paid ChatGPT account, there’s an option to create Projects, not just one-off GPTs or chats. You put your information into the Project, give it good instructions, and teach it how you want it to work with you. Pretty simple, right?

Apparently, not to Robert.

Later that same day, I was on a call with my friend Scott. He and I are working on a joint AI Project I created, Soulful Communicator. It’s pretty stellar at creating Soulful Marketing copy and editing pieces using neuropsychology and behavioral science.

I told him about my conversation with Robert and how I’d even created a quick five-minute Loom showing him how I would set up his Project. Scott stopped me. Basically, his response was, “There you go. People don’t know how to do this.”

Then he said something that changed the way I was looking at the whole thing. He wasn’t talking about teaching people how to use AI. Scott was talking about helping people take their own genius, their skills, experience, ideas, body of work, and use AI to create more of all of that.

That landed differently.

Because I still don’t want to become an “AI expert, educator, or trainer.” I’m not interested in spending my days teaching people the newest shiny tool or telling them they need to keep up with every new thing that gets released.

Yet, being able to help someone take twenty or thirty years of what they already know and create a way to think with it, organize it, question it, build on it, and actually use it? Hmmm. Maybe that’s different.

And maybe the thing that caught me most was realizing how quickly I had dismissed something simply because it felt obvious and simple to me.

Yeah, I’ve done this before. Have you ever done this with your work too?

When you’ve been doing something for a long time, you forget what it was like before you knew how to do it. You stop seeing the steps and realizing what you know or realizing how much you know. Sometimes you even stop recognizing that something other people find confusing has become almost automatic for you.

Robert saw something in that conversation that I had filed under Everybody knows this. A few hours later, Scott saw it too.

So, yeah… I stopped arguing with them in my head and created the damn offer. 🙂 If you’re curious, see below.

Yet, this whole thing has me wondering about you now. What do you know so well, like me, that you’ve stopped realizing other people may not know it at all?
I’m all ears. 🙂

Hands at your back.
Always,
Xox
Shannon

P.S. Robert is the author of Living a Values-Based Life: Discover, Clarify and Live in Alignment with Your Highest Values and Manifesting for Non-Gurus. If you want to check out what he’s up to, you can find him here.

P.S.S. And yes… listening to Robert and Scott… I’ve created a one-on-one, hands-on training session (90 minutes) to create your Second Soulful Business Brain. In this 90-minute session, you’ll work with me, and I will help you create and tune your own ChatGPT Project so it becomes more like a second brain for your business.

We’ll use your experience, ideas, writing, intellectual property, clients, and body of work, and I’ll show you how to set it up so ChatGPT can actually work with all of that instead of giving you generic answers.

You’ll need a paid ChatGPT account because we’ll be working with Projects. Click Here for More Info and to invest in yourself and your business.

Weekly Photos:

1. We had a sleepover last weekend with Ruby, the one on the left with a ball, and her mom, Foxy. They are Labrador, Cocker Spaniel, and Poodle mixes. They love water and balls. 🙂 We played a lot of ball, went on walks in the forest, and just hung out. Nothing like the energy of two well-trained, sweet pups.
2. Here’s a Steller Jay. There are many here in Northern CA. They are one of the loudest vocal birds. You can hear them from far away. They have very blue feathers and stand out. I even picked up a couple on the trail. Their feathers are a powder light blue with black stripes. They’re called “camp robbers” cuz they’re not shy about stealing your food.
3. Look at this little fawn checking me out. She’s just exploring and foraging in the early morning.
4. I think I’ve shared this pic like this before, cuz I love the red barn and clouds against the green and brown/yellow field. And that huge rock in the Sacramento River.
5. Need I saw more? Yeah, me finding a heart rock along the trail, not so unusual…
6. In this photo, pay close attention to the top right of the rock. Check out the Turkey Buzzards getting their morning sun. Then look down at the lines at the bottom of the rock near the water. You can see how low the river is. Since it’s fall, most of the water has been released to the farmers south. The river is at its lowest during fall/winter.
7. This is part of the Sacramento River Trail, which crosses the river. I love the color of the bridge and the curve of the trail as you wind your way across, with the mountains as a pretty backdrop.

P.S.S.S. Love Books as I Do? – I’m always reviewing the best nonfiction books – Where Buddha Meets Business.

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