Teri Holland (00:08.242)
Welcome back.
Teri Holland (00:13.974)
Welcome back to Success in Mind. It has been a hot minute since I have recorded an episode. And so first I want to talk about that and where I have been. And then we're going to dive into the content for today and what we're actually here to talk about, which is about AI and why AI should not be writing your content. But first, let me tell you where I've been. So I took an impromptu hiatus. Was not planned, was not expected. And to be honest, I'm not even entirely sure why I took a break.
You know, I'm a big fan of taking intentional breaks or breaks when you really need it. I didn't feel like I needed it other than I just hit a big creative rut. And I felt like if I created content for the show, if I created episodes, I'd be pushing, I'd be forcing out content just for the sake of having content. And that didn't feel aligned.
And also I wanted to take a step back and really think about where this show is going. We just hit our 11th anniversary, which I can't even wrap my head around that I've been doing this for 11 years. Like we've, guys, we've been here for 11 years. And for those of you who have been with me since the very beginning, thank you. Thank you so much. But I've realized a few things that it is time to level up this show even more. That I got a little comfortable, a little stagnant where I was. And
So we're gonna be leveling up, and I'm not sure if I'm ready to share what that means yet, but you can look forward to some high-caliber guests joining us in the future. I will tell you, I'll tell you that much. So here we are in our 11th year, which blows my mind, and I'm here and I'm back, and I'm ready to start recording consistently. And before before we dive into today.
The last thing I want to say about that is that I think one of the reasons I hit that creative rut or hit that wall is because that number 11 years just felt like it had so much weight. And around the same time, just a couple months before that, I hit my 400th episode and I felt so much pressure to create something really special for it that I delayed on recording it. And I think that was the beginning of it, is that I hit that rut.
Teri Holland (02:33.515)
Because I didn't know what to record, what would be special enough for the 400th episode. And then I hit 11 years and it just it just kind of piled on. So I'm here, I am back, and I have a lot of new fun things that I want to share with you. But let's talk about what we're actually here to talk about today. So we're gonna talk about AI and AI in creating your content and maybe why we shouldn't be leaning on it so heavily.
But first thing is first, let me acknowledge the big elephant in the room. And that is that I am not anti-AI. And I use AI in my business very, very regularly. Do I use it every day? Probably in some capacity. Yeah, I am using it every day. AI is incredible. I use it to brainstorm, to help me create outlines for like courses or
Even hypnosis recordings. Like I'll give it sort of the
Teri Holland (03:38.528)
AI is incredible. I use it to brainstorm ideas, to research. AI is such an incredible research tool because it can pull in so much information so quickly and compress it for you into a very digestible format instead of going to Google and then you search and then you have to search through all of the content it brings up for you. AI just shortens that time frame. I also use it to repurpose content. So for this episode, for example, I will take this episode and I will run it.
through AI and it will come up with content ideas of how I can share this episode. It will pull quotes for me. It'll summarize the episode. It will turn my transcript into a blog. But that's content that I created and now I'm just having the AI help me repurpose. I will go through it again. I won't post just what the AI says because it sounds too much like AI. So I will go through and I will put it back into my words to make sure that it still has me in it.
So I'm using it. I'm using it consistently. It has saved me hours every week. Our many, many hours. One day I'm gonna track it and see how much time AI is actually saving me. But I know it's saving me time every week. But I think somewhere along the line, a lot of entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants, service providers started skipping a step.
And they started taking what the AI spits out, doing maybe a quick read through, maybe changing a couple words or fixing some mistakes here or there, and then hitting the publish button. But here's the thing.
be honest, the content's fine. It's grammatically correct. it makes logical sense, it hits the talking points, but it is empty.
Teri Holland (05:36.566)
And it just doesn't sound like you. And your audience is very wise to this. They can feel it. They might not be able to name it, but they can feel it. And those who are certainly very familiar with AI, they can name it. They know exactly why they're not feeling your content anymore. Because they know there are giveaways. There's the obvious giveaways when content is AI generated. The overuse of dashes. Now that's the long dash, by the way.
Now don't get me wrong, I love a good M-dash. I have always used M-dashes, but not nearly as much as AI uses the M-dash. And so if your writing is full of M-dashes, while that might be cor grammatically correct, it screams AI because we humans, we don't use them that often. We use them, yes, but we don't use them on every other sentence. We
We don't write like that. And it's sterile. AI has this sterility to it. Is that a word, sterility? I think it is. Anyway, you know what I'm saying. AI just feels sterile. There's no real emotion in it. It's vacant. There's no human soul. It uses too many triplets. And again, I love a good triplet. I come from a theater background. I grew up studying Shakespeare. I love
I love triplets in writing, but AI overuses the triplet. And that's where it'll list out three things, three I three ideas. It's always it puts things into threes. So too many triplets. But there's the there's other giveaways too. The formula, this isn't blank, it's why. I'll try to think of an example. This isn't, this isn't a shortcut. This is efficiency.
Things like that. You'll see that a lot in AI-generated content over and over. It's very dramatic. At least I think AI sounds very dramatic, very like there's an intensity to AI that doesn't necessarily suit the content or your brand or your voice. And here's why all of this matters so much, especially for those in the coaching space and those who are in service-based entrepreneurial businesses. You are the product.
Teri Holland (08:03.947)
If you're a personal brand, you are the brand. You're the product. People don't just buy your program or your framework or your system. They buy you. They buy the way you think, the way you phrase things. And the particular combination of experiences and beliefs and personality that makes you, your perspective, different from every other coach on the planet who's doing roughly the same thing, but
They want you. They don't want that other coach.
That's your competitive advantage. And when you hand your voice over to an AI model that's trained on the entire internet, you get content that sounds like, well, the entire internet. You sound like everyone, which means you sound like no one.
Teri Holland (09:05.153)
And you just become noise in a very noisy space. That's not differentiation. That's not going to help you stand out. You are going to blend in. And the whole point of branding and marketing is to stand out, to differentiate yourself. And in order to do that, you need to be you.
Teri Holland (09:28.759)
Now, I want to talk about something that doesn't get discussed enough in these kinds of conversations. And it's something that I work with with my clients quite often. There is a massive amount of personal development that happens through the act of writing your own content. Now, stay with me here. When you sit down to articulate that you believe something or the thoughts that are in your mind.
Your take on a certain problem or your theories, your perspective on a business strategy, your story about a moment that shifted everything in your life, or your story about working with a client and their success. When you are doing that, you are doing
When you do that, you are doing internal work. You're being
Teri Holland (10:32.289)
And when you're doing that, when you're doing that kind of creative, expressive work, you are actually doing internal work. You might not realize it, but you are. You're getting clear in your head. You are choosing your words. And you're choosing your words to help you figure out what you actually think, not just what sounds good.
Teri Holland (10:56.619)
When AI writes a draft for you, you skip that whole process. You get the output without the internal work, without the introspection, without the growth. And over time you start to lose that muscle. And there's already been studies shown, and I wish I had pulled them up actually before I recorded this, but I didn't know I was gonna go here. But there, but you can look them up. There are studies already being done showing.
Severe cognitive decline in people who are using AI to replace their thinking. Somewhere, and again, I'm pulling this from memory, so I might not have this exactly correct. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe there's one study that showed a 40% decline in cognition after a year of using AI. Don't quote me, I could be wrong, but it was something along those lines. So you get all the output, you get the
You get this content you can use that AI has generated, but you haven't had to think about anything. So not only is that content empty, vacant, void of any human connection, you lose the ability to think. You lose that muscle.
You start to forget how to even write something or what your voice even sounds like. You start becoming dependent on a tool that tells you what you believe, and you lose the ability to discern if that is true or not. And if this scares you, it should scare you. This is the reality that we are now in.
And then there's the authenticity part of this. And I know that word gets thrown around so much, you've heard me complain about it so many times, but it's it's true.
Teri Holland (12:49.193)
I mean, that word has really lost a lot of meaning, if you ask me, but but we need to use it here. So hang on with me. Authenticity, it's not about being raw or unfiltered all the time. It's not about oversharing. Authenticity in a content context means that what you put out matches what's actually going on inside of you, your conviction, your energy, your lived experience that it's all true and it's you.
And in today's world of AI, people are craving authenticity now more than ever before. AI doesn't have conviction. It has pattern recognition. It's producing the statistically likely next word based on what humans before you have written. AI has never experienced a 2 a.m. breakdown, has never faced the fear of not being able to pay their bills next month.
AI has never had fear, let alone overcoming a fear. AI has never looked a client in the eyes and watched something click for them. It can't draw on that experience because it can't experience it. But you can. And the moment someone reads a piece of content that draws on something real, that specific detail that only you can include, the unexpected turn of phrase from a human.
The story that only you can tell, something happens inside their nervous system. And this is what begins to build real trust. Connection is made. They think, wow, she gets me. This is a this is a person who understands where I'm coming from, and I want more of this. That's what converts. Not content that's technically correct and technically sounds right, but.
That human connection is what actually converts.
Teri Holland (14:54.957)
Hey, enough.
Teri Holland (15:01.813)
A friend of mine told me recently about a podcaster who had changed his whole podcast to AI. It wasn't his voice anymore, and it wasn't him on the video. He had created an AI avatar who was and he was generating content using this AI avatar. And it was based on his voice and his physical appearance. And to the to the naked eye, it looked like him, it sounded like him, and he had a very, very successful podcast.
But once he switched over to the AI version of him, thinking that that would make his life easier, that he could produce content faster, his audience started to disappear because there was no connection. And some of them called it out. Some of them recognized that this is now AI. This wasn't the real him anymore. And the ones who didn't, they just knew something was off. They just didn't feel connected anymore. And he lost a big chunk of his audience.
Teri Holland (16:01.197)
I that that should set off some alarm bells for you. I'm at the point now myself where I'm so tired of reading people's AI-generated content that as soon as I catch a whiff of AI, I scroll past, whether that's the image or whether that's in the text, in the caption. Now again, I am not anti-AI, but AI cannot replace human creativity. And too many humans are using it to do exactly that, to replace creativity.
AI should be your assistant. It can gather information for you that you can then assimilate into something creative and expressive, but AI cannot express. And let me ask you this: if you, for example, if you were to write a book using AI, and you could, you could go onto any AI platform and you could have it write a book for you. And that book is gonna sound decent.
On the surface. But can you actually say that you wrote a book? If you have AI do it for you and it's pulling from all these sources somewhere out in the internet, out in the universe, and compiling these ideas, and you put your name on it, you didn't write a book. They're not your thoughts, they're not your ideas. You didn't put the words together. AI wrote the book and
I'm personally not interested in reading a book that AI wrote. I want to read a book that a human wrote, that you sat down with your thoughts, your imagination, your stories, your experience, and you put it into words and put it onto a page. That to me is exciting. Just like I don't want to watch a bunch of robots playing a baseball game. I love baseball. I don't want to watch robots play.
I want to watch humans play and do extraordinary human things. You know, I saw I saw a reel yesterday on Instagram about baseball, about just that. And talking about how the hardest thing a person could do in sports is to hit a baseball with a bat. And I had no idea how complex it was. Actually, I think it's still on my phone. So let me bring it up and I'm going to.
Teri Holland (18:25.992)
Let me bring it up and I'm gonna share with you.
What this reel said.
So it says that hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports.
Teri Holland (18:43.811)
wait, I have to go through. Okay. From the time the pitcher throws the ball, the batter has 400 milliseconds to hit it. That's shorter than it, or that's about a blink of an eye. Like it's fast. It's fast, they explain. The time it takes the brain to process the image is a hundred milliseconds. The average swing is a hundred and fifty milliseconds, which leaves
a very, very short window of 125 milliseconds for the batter to gauge the pitch and decide if they're gonna swing for it or not.
Teri Holland (19:26.077)
That's the blink of an eye. The time it takes to blink is 300 to 400 milliseconds. So in less than a blink of an eye, that batter has to decide if they're going for it or not and how to swing for it.
Teri Holland (19:43.724)
And they have about a seven millisecond margin of error. So if they swing too soon or seven milliseconds too late, they miss it. And for those of you who don't like baseball, I get it. This might sound really boring, but just stay with me. So all of that to say, like that is extraordinary that a human can do that, could process that information coming at them so fast at like ninety miles an hour or kilometers an hour. I don't know what they measure baseball in. I have to
Just on a side note, I'm a new baseball fan. I've just been a fan for about a year and a half now. So still learning. But anyway, that ball is coming very, very fast. We'll say that. And that batter has has to hit it within 400 milliseconds. And they have 125 milliseconds to make the decision of whether they're swinging for it or not with a seven, seven, just seven millisecond margin of error.
I wanna watch the human do that because that's extraordinary. For a human to be able to do it, that is extraordinary. But for a robot to do it, easy piece of cake.
Teri Holland (20:55.901)
You you just program it to do it. I mean, and I I get that that is also extraordinary in its own way that if you can program a robot to do that.
But that's not interesting. Just like reading a book written by AI is not interesting. Just like watching a reel that's AI generated. I mean, it might have been interesting when we first started seeing them because it was so different. But now it's not interesting. We want human faces and voices and thoughts and ideas and words. That's truly how.
Connection is made.
Teri Holland (21:40.235)
And we need to address one very important thing at this point, because I know
Because I know so many of you are going to say this. You're going to say, but Terry, I have trained my AI to sound like me. No, you haven't. No, you haven't. I hear this from entrepreneurs all the time. I'm involved in many different entrepreneur communities and groups, and they say all the time, but I've I've trained I've trained my chat GP to sound just like me. No, you didn't. My Claude knows how to write in my voice. No. No, it doesn't. And you know why I know this?
Because the output still sounds like everybody else who's using AI to create their content. And also because most business owners, and here's the here's the real like mic drop truth bomb moment, most entrepreneurs don't even know what their own voice is. And if you don't know who you are, and you don't know your voice, and you don't know your messaging of your brand, and you don't
have a solidified brand, then how the fuck do you think that you have trained your AI to sound like you? You haven't because you don't even know what you sound like. And so AI generates this generic
bland copy and you read it and you think wow that sounds good that sounds just like me but no it doesn't it just sounds like everyone else who you are striving to sound like that's that's it it doesn't sound like you it's not you
Teri Holland (23:28.149)
So, okay, let me give you a framework for how to use AI responsively. So let me give you a framework for how I recommend using AI in your content process. Because again, I'm not telling you to throw it away. I'm telling you to just use it a little smarter. So think of it in three phases. So phase one is thinking. This is yours.
This is this has to come from this human brain, this machine that you were running in here. This is this is all on you, babe. So this is the voice memo in the car or bullet points in the note app on your phone.
this is the five minute brain dump on a pad of paper at your desk before you start your work.
You generate the ideas. You
You figure out your angle.
Teri Holland (24:26.377)
You get your actual thoughts and perspective on the page, even if it's messy, even if it doesn't make sense, even if it's incomplete, you're getting your thoughts out. Then we go to the second phase. Second phase is drafting. Now, this is where AI can help you a bit. So you can give it your messy notes, your messy voice notes or bullet points, and it can help you fill in the gaps, maybe suggest a different way to frame something or
Tell you what might be missing, where you might need to flesh out your ideas a little bit more. And then phase three is the finishing. And this is you again. This is a non-negotiable. You take the AI assisted draft, not written draft, assisted draft, and you rewrite the parts of it that sound not like you. You put in your stories, you add the details and the color. You adjust the phrasing to match how you would actually.
Speak it. And a really good way to do that is to take that, take that draft that AI has assisted you with and read it out loud. And any part where you stumble over the words or you think, that's clunky, or it just doesn't flow from you naturally. Think about how I would say this? If I were to tell someone this information, how would I say it? And then adjust it to how you actually speak.
Teri Holland (25:54.382)
So the final draft has to come from you. That's where the magic lives. The problem with it though is that sometimes AI is so good at sounding good and convincing us that it's smarter than us that people don't know how to finish something that AI has started. And if that's you, I know that's me. I struggle with that. I can't use AI to create content because I get stuck with what the AI has given me. It's almost too confined for me. And once I'm in that AI box,
I don't know how to create within it. So if you're like me, don't do it that way. Just use it for the research part. Use it for coming up with ideas of things you can write about. But then you do the drafting and you have to do the finishing. So all the creative pieces have to come from you. AI can just fill in some of the gaps.
Teri Holland (26:47.755)
Now, I'm gonna be honest with you. This is gonna take longer. It's more work. But remember, just over maybe two years ago, this is how you were creating content. You were writing, you were thinking, you were generating the ideas, not some AI. But in such a short period of time, people have become so reliant on AI that you might have already forgot how to do this.
And if you feel like you forgot how to draft an email or how to write an Instagram caption, then this is your wake-up call that this is exactly why you need to start writing your own. And I hear it from my clients all the time. They'll I don't have time. I don't have time to do it. Well, you used to. You used to, and you figured it out. And and I get it, I do. When you're an entrepreneur, your time is so precious because you have so many ideas and so many things you want to implement. And
It might not be fun for you to sit down and write Instagram captions or to write your blog or to write your book. But I promise you the payoff will be that you actually do start to stand out in this AI generated world that we're in.
This is the content that's gonna grow your business.
Teri Holland (28:08.769)
This is the content that's going to connect to people who will become your clients and your customers who will buy from you. It's not the content that's created the fastest and the cheapest and the easiest. It's the content that has the deepest resonance with people. And AI content does not have resonance. It's just noise. And there's already enough of that on the internet. We don't need you adding to it.
If your audience was just looking for information, they could find it themselves. But they're looking for someone who they trust to help them. And for them to trust you, you have to be a real person. Someone who they believe has lived what it is that they're teaching.
So here's my challenge for you. This is the challenge. Whatever content that you're working on, wherever you're creating, whether it's on Instagram, if you're writing a LinkedIn article, if you're writing your book, if you're creating a YouTube video, whatever it is.
I want you to try something this week. I want you to start with the first ugly draft yourself. Just challenge yourself to do it yourself. Don't go to Chat GPT first. Don't open clawed. Write what you actually think.
In words that you would actually use, even if it's cringy or choppy, even if it feels incomplete, even if it feels not good enough, then go back and clean it up. Use AI to polish it if you want, but let let it still be yours. Pay attention to how it feels. How does it feel when you create something from you?
Teri Holland (29:56.598)
And then pay attention to the response you get because my money is on people connecting more to that content than anything you've created on AI.
Okay, maybe not the first. If you've been using a lot of AI, maybe not the first couple posts, because you might be a little rough at writing if you've been relying on AI. You might be a little rough at thinking. Oof, think about that. Think about that. If you are feeling rough or shaky at doing your own thinking, then this exercise should be an absolute non-negotiable for you to do.
So just see how that goes. And I'd I'd love to hear your feedback. If you want to reach out to me, you know, Instagram is the best place to do it. Just connect with me there. Or if it's on YouTube, you can comment right below the video or on Spotify. You can comment right on Spotify. But just let me know. Let me know if you do it. If you are brave enough to create your own stuff again, let me know and let me know what the result is.
Okay, I think I have rambled on enough for this episode on this topic, but I would love to hear from you and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
So yeah, reach out to me. And if you found this episode valuable, if it sparked something inside of you, then maybe share it with a friend of yours who's leaning a little too hard on the AI.
Teri Holland (31:30.615)
I will be back again next week. Not sure what we're talking about yet, but I will be back next week. And until then, just keep doing the work, keep creating for yourself and see what kind of results you get. All right. I will see you again next week, my friends. Bye for now.
