Welcome to Using AI at Work, where today we're joined by Cole Whitdy, a leading voice in psychedelic integration and personal growth. As the co-founder of the Condor Approach, Cole bridges ancient wisdom with future technologies like AI. She's a visionary coach dedicated to leveling up individuals through self-responsibility, honesty, and accountability. Get ready to soar to new heights with transformative insights from Cole Whitdy in today's enlightening conversation. Let's get started. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Stable. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started.
Cole, thank you for being a guest on the Using AI at Work podcast. And we'll just jump in and talk about for those who aren't familiar with you or your brand or your services, can you kind of tell them what it is that you do for a vocation?
SPEAKER_02Sure. You know, right now my focus is really around integrating psychedelics. So it's in education, working with doctors, life coaches. It's become such a fast growing field, much like AI, that for me, what I'm really here to do is to integrate. We say integration is not optional, but how you integrate is. So whether it's ancestral traditions or artificial intelligence, for us it's all intelligence, but how we integrate and work with it, the intentionality, we call it the condor approach, is the brand. It's the high-level perspective of evolutionaries, the people that are looking at where we've been, analyzing that, where we're going. And then it's really thought leaders from different communities that are trying to figure out what does this mean for us moving forward? And so they come to us because we're a coaching certification. We really help people to become a psychedelic informed coach, but we use AI to help them run their businesses so they can focus on serving people and not processes. And so that's where it all kind of coalesces together in this conversation is AI is how I can serve 170 clients with a me, my husband, and one other person team, right? And three weekly calls and you know, all of it. So whatever direction we take it today, that's where I'm coming from.
SPEAKER_00Okay, awesome. So I'm curious, uh, how long have you had your business, this particular business?
SPEAKER_02This business and this iteration, we are at three years in change, but it's evolved from two different businesses. So in total, conceptually, we're at about seven years, give or take. But this iteration, as known as the Condor approach, we're at a little over three years.
SPEAKER_00So I'm curious, what was it like before you introduced generative AI into your business? And what is it like now?
SPEAKER_02Man, you know, even looking back, even just this last year, Chris, I can look back a year. It's not like we're talking about business 10 years ago. We're talking about my life last summer was tough, right? Because I'm dealing with contractors and hiring short-term. I just need this one project done. But slowing down as a visionary to try to explain the vision when it was still very new, I wasn't getting the results out of contractors I needed. So I was pouring a lot of time and money because the deliverables I was getting back wasn't it. And so just looking back at a year and a half ago, I've made more progress in the systems and the setup and the organization and what we track and why it matters. We've made more progress in the last year in our in how we deliver it than we did in the seven years before that with any product. And it's because of how well we can organize it and distill it quickly.
SPEAKER_00What was what was your introduction to how did you get how did this solution reveal itself to you?
You know, I don't even know exactly, but it, you know, someone did a post last December, whenever Chat GPT was launched.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I'm I'm always following new trends. I always have new phones, new technology. I'm always kind of tracking it. I know a lot of amazing people in a lot of fields. So it crossed my field enough times where I was like, what is this thing? Like, let me check it out. And within an hour, I knew this we had not seen anything like this before. And that this would be, in my opinion, since the Industrial Revolution, the biggest marker of change for humanity, period, as a person that society labels as neurodivergent, someone that didn't graduate from high school, that has no degrees and only completed a ninth grade education. For me to be able to take my concepts and get it into a presentable uh place for me to teach from, because I can speak. Yeah. I'm sure pe people have probably approximated I can speak at this point. But to teach is a whole other game when it comes to presenting information. And so I very quickly saw that I could take transcripts of all of these calls and all these people I had coached and turn it into content. That mean that means I was changing not only my own future, but the coaches I work with who are neurodivergent, who come from low-income areas that didn't have access to education, because I could teach them to be resourceful through this technology. And that for me changes everything.
SPEAKER_00So once you spent that hour on it, what was the first place where you were like, oh, I'm gonna use it for this?
SPEAKER_02Oh man, do I even remember? Because when it came out, I mean, I was 14 hours a day refreshing because this is when it would stop and you know, the influx. And that was my full-time job for 60 days. And so I I think a lot of it initially was how can I get our online portal information? Because we have a lot of things that we teach, how can I turn it into a cohesive manual? Like, how can I now take all these little concepts and present it more effectively? So initially I think it was a lot of play, a lot of experimentation, but I was applying it to my business immediately in every way possible. So from writing meditations to affirmations to, I mean, you name it, I have used Chat GPT to explore it, question it, think differently. For me, it's all about just like how psychedelics give us a new lens to view through.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I can ask Chat GPT, like ask chat, hey, what are some other questions I can ask myself to consider different, right? So I'm having it coach me into better outputs and prompts and whatever. So I feel like it's it's infinite.
SPEAKER_00Let let's compare where you are today versus where you were last summer, as far as how has productivity improved.
SPEAKER_02You know, it's again one of those things that's like the only way I can truly measure it is from my physical health. Because this time last year, I was so depleted mentally trying to figure out how to organize things because it's not that's not what I'm good at. I'm a visionary. I can explain it, I can tell you the feeling and the vibe and and what the big picture is, but to reverse engineer it was the problem. And so now things that used to take three to four months to flesh out with a team, whether they were contractors or the people that worked for me, I can do in three days. So from a productivity, I can now actually it's like the things that had to be done in the business, but the things I hated doing and were literally killing me. But the it but they had to be done. But now it allowed me to reverse engineer from my vision and then ask ChatGPT, okay, so then what are the positions I need to hire? And it actually helped me get better at hiring so I could get the right person for the task. So if we do the math on, well, what's three days compared to three, four months, plus mental health and burnout and whatever, and you know, and that's soul sucking for a visionary.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But I and I sat and I listened to my friends that are visionaries say, Oh, I can't hire, I can't hire good help. And I'm like, because you don't have the right prompts. It's the per it's you. You can't, you're not giving a clear enough vision.
SPEAKER_00So what is I guess uh the obvious um conclusion from that would be that you're are you working less?
SPEAKER_02Oh no.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, most entrepreneurs don't.
SPEAKER_02It got more exciting again, right? Because I could go back into the visionary aspects. The thing is now, now I've taught. So here's I'll walk you through like the the last year. So it's like step one, I learned Chat GPT. But if I'm the only one that knows, we have a problem because we are still on the bottleneck of productivity in our very small business. For us, it's small, right? Our highest year, we were seven just under 700,000 last year was our biggest year. And so it's not enough to start hiring. We were at this kind of like middle point where you can't afford to buy the time of the people that can get you to the next place. And so I was working hard, but doing the things I hate. Yep. And so the step one is I learned Chat GPT. Okay, but that still doesn't solve the problems. So the next thing was I used Chat GPT to really get clear in what what I needed to get off my plate. And then I started to like even my hiring process I built through Chat GPT, and now the first guy that I brought on, my training was teaching him Chat GPT the way that I use it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Right. So I taught him to be resourceful, and then he had access to all of the documents and all the information I've ever built that was just destroyed in random folders in Google Drive. I don't know if anyone else else's Google Drive looked like mine used to, but it's like a graveyard of awesome stuff. And so in teaching him that, now I got on with him. Not now, when I hired him, I got on with him every day. And I would say, now how would you do this through Chat GPT? We would discuss, I'd give him new prompts because I was already nine months into using it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Now he has I uh we have a process that we learned from Alex Sharfin, who's my business coach, of how to time study what are the tasks you're doing. So you time study, but then I was able to put that into Chat GPT to see what are the tactical things I'm still doing that I don't need to be doing that would be an admin role. So then the guy I hired, he did that, and then I did that in what our daily practices are. Now we have a new role to hire, but he will train that person. So now I'm out of chat, I'm out of training chat in that way, but now they don't have to come to me with the questions. They come with me with the result of the prompts they had, and then we discuss it. So now I've already increased my own productivity and got me out of the tasks because I taught them to be resourceful with ChatGPT. And so now it's not creating a codependency on leadership, yeah, it's actually teaching the resourcefulness because all the documents about the company they need, they have access to. And so now it's just finding the right pieces to plug it together. And so for me, now it's like for the first time I'm in this iteration for the first time. I'm back in the excitement of creation because now I can see the path out. Last year I couldn't see the path out of doing those like tactical things, which is why I didn't work for other people because I hate that stuff.
SPEAKER_00You know, that's a very common issue with um everything from solopreneur to the C-suite. There's some portion of their job where there's an expectation of a deliverable that is something they don't like doing. And one of the things that we've done with clients is we I learned it from the EOS uh business scaling model. It's called delegate and elevate. It's simply a matrix where you document what it is that you do throughout the course of a day or a week, but you categorize them, things that I don't like and I'm not good at, but I still have to do them. And then it works its way up to getting to the point where this is what I'm great at and I love doing. And one of the things that we did even before GPT was have them do that, identify the quadrant that was, I don't like do, because what happens is if you don't like doing it and you're not good at it, you're gonna procrastinate, you're gonna be a bottleneck on those things, and your output is gonna be last minute and and sloppy in some cases because you're not putting your business prowess into that. You're just like, let me get it done. And the fact that you were able to use GPT, and this is for anybody listening to this, do that same exercise. Very simple, just Google delegate and elevate, but go into take that output from delegate and elevate, the part that you don't like, plug it into GPT and say, what define the job requirement, just like you did, right? And now you can identify, okay, I don't like doing these things, let me hire somebody. Okay, well, maybe they don't like doing them, right? And one of the things that we've done that take that even a step further for that role is we're big fans of um personality tests like the Colby Index and DISC. And we will take, we'll get somebody to take a Colby and we'll run it through and you know, act role and goal, act as a Colby interpretation expert. Here's the job requirements, here's their Colby score. Are they a good fit? And before, I mean, even with a Colby score in hand and a job description in hand, we kind of had to guess and hope that they'll figure it out. And in any business, small business, large business, turnover is very expensive. So the fact that you figured that out on your own uh should be encouraging for all the other entrepreneurs who are sitting in that same place going, This sucks. I want to go spend time with my family, but I got I gotta get this shit done.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02And I love that you just said that. You know, I work in more of the what many would refer as the woo-woo space. So we use human design and in the same way. In fact, I just did a live for our community an hour and a half ago to show them how they could use human design with their clients for that same thing that you just said. Because the the signs of the not-self in our business, for me, my husband, and uh Dice, who's our community manager, we have basically a manual for each person. What are signs the person is in their what is called in human design, not self, and how can you check in with them? So we've basically now have a manual for each person where let's say that Dice sees that I seem a little contracted or something feels off. He can go read the Cole manual. And if he sees that there's certain signs that I've also added, because I know myself really well, then he knows what he can do. I actually put in what to ask me. Hey, Cole, have you gotten outside today? I chose that prompt for him to ask me. One, it lets me know he sees that I'm in a little bit of a, you know, frazzly place. But I also know that if I get outside, there is a high potential that that will shift my state and give me that pause and kind of pull back from work or whatever and do an assessment on myself. And so now we have these individual manuals. So he knows, like, wow, if if I want Cole to feel appreciated, do this for her. If I want Ta to feel acknowledged and appreciated, do this, right? Ta loves words of affirmation. He loves to be acknowledged. So, oh man, I really appreciate him today. The best thing I could do is send a slack and be like, man, thank you for your time. So now there's no guessing. And that's how me and my husband ran our marriage, but we never thought about bringing those same skills to business. And it's not that we're doing it romantically, but we even with employee and people working together, we're like, let's set it up so people know how to operate to win. Like instead of you trying to guess, oh, does Cole like flowers for her birthday? And you read on my thing, quality time, take me to lunch will delight me more. Because we're just cutting, we're just to be as efficient as possible. Yeah. And so we used whether it's like you said, Colby, disc, whatever, the more that you can bring context, and then as a company, we can agree to how we're gonna interact. That's what AI provides, is because then you choose your context. We all can say, this is how we're gonna use this tool. Now everybody has a place for cohesion because I've worked for other companies. I've worked in sales, I've watched, especially in sales, you see very high turnover rate.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And I wanted permanent delegation, not I don't want to have to keep training people because my time and because I don't like doing that. That's yeah, I'll do it, but I don't like to do it. And so the more I started to go, then what do I? So my intention with Chat GPT comes down to how to figure it out. So let's say someone's new, they've heard of Chat GPT, they've spent an hour on it, and they're like, Yeah, I mean, it's kind of it's whatever. It's like going to the gym and spending an hour and flipping around on a couple machines. You're not fit by the time you leave. When you get a trainer, when you get support and you know what your goals are, they can help you train to the goal. Same with chat GPT. And so when I sat down, I said, What is my intention? Intention for me is what do I want to know? What do I want to do? Who will I need to be, or who do I need chat to be, or what do I need to understand? And then I give myself a time limit. So it's a game. You have one hour to fulfill this task because I don't know if you've had this, Chris, but I've gotten lost for hours. Suddenly I'm like making an Oracle deck. Like this is not what I came in here for. And especially for multi-passionate, excitable people, yeah, it can turn into the worst efficiency like distraction ever. And so by me knowing my intention, what do I want, and then setting a time limit so that I am focused in achieving the task in set amount of time? That's when I started to get and really understand how long some prompts would take to get clear. Because some, you know, some things take a little bit more nurturing and and working with than others. And now I even have a clearer idea of how long that takes.
SPEAKER_00How did you get proficient in prompting?
SPEAKER_02You know, as far as it's one of those, like I'm it's only new to me that I was proficient. I didn't know. I've just been putting in the reps. Yeah. And
so it was more that I to me it I guess it seemed kind of obvious, but also because I didn't have a standard education, I've always had to think different to achieve the X. I had to work on relationships, I had to see things from a broader perspective to reverse engineer how can I make it happen if I can't take a traditional pathway. Because any job I couldn't do it if they wanted an application, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And so I think that that is the gift of my experiences, is it required, I think, out of the box to survive. So go ahead. No, I mean, so that's you know, it's one of those like I'm still new to the fact that I actually know more than other people.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So for those of you listening to this, there's certainly this fear that you're falling behind. And one of the things I try to tell people is you're not late. You're early, right? Even now, you're still early. And this idea of how Cole was describing, she didn't even know that she got good at it. It came from those repetitions and learning and paying attention to the output. Tweet, oh, well, what I meant was this. And then eventually it just gets to where it's a second nature. I had a similar experience. We went to um uh a conference at the end of July. I mean, that's GPT had already been out six, nine months. You're seeing all this content out there about all these amazing things that people are doing. And I went to that conference and it was it was a marketing-related AI conference, and I was excited to learn from all these people. And I realized nobody knows, right? It's a random set of people, people like you and the other guests that we bring on to the show, and the people that are just getting in there and using it. For those of you that start using it, if you say, well, I tried it, I can get those answers from Google, right? If you're using it as a search engine, you're missing the entire transformation that's possible. And what you're talking about here, Cole, is that you got very clear on an intention. You didn't just sit down and go, who won the War of 1812? You understood before you sat down, and I like the idea of setting a time frame because it's going to keep you from going down all of those amazing rabbit holes that, oh, well, what if we did this? And GPT will give you output. It may not be give moving you towards the intention that you had when you sat down. So I think that's a very powerful uh uh suggestion for folks is know when you start putting in your input, understand what you want as your output and give yourself a timeline. So nowadays, uh I guess maybe today, typical day for you. What does AI usage look like for you in a day like today?
SPEAKER_02Mm-hmm. I'll just run through exactly what I did today. So every Monday we teach a masterclass. It's free in our Facebook group. And so the first thing I do in the morning is I create the slides for the presentation for me to follow. So I go into Chat GPT. I know what I'm going to talk about. And today happen to be around using AI or working with that. I don't even say use. I work with it. We're collaborators, right? Yes. And so I get down what's my intention this morning was to do the slide presentation. So there's Chat GPT, there's also an incredible presentation AI called Gamma. I love gamma. It's very quick, especially when it's a quick presentation, you know, doing it virtual. I just need the prompts for what I already know. So I went into Chat GPT. I said my five taught, you know, my intro. I said I want it to have an intro. I want to have an about me slide. Then I want to have an overview of the three talking points for today. Then I want a summary. And then I want to, you know, book a call from, you know, CTA. So I go to ChatGPT, it gives me the title, it gives me the description, it tells me about the class. Then I go to Gamma, I had it build out the slides. And within an hour, I got it all completely out and ready together. Why? Because I know what I'm teaching. Yeah. And this is really the thing is for people that would say they're more in an expert role of what they're teaching, what I'm sharing, I've known for 15 years, right? This is not in really my whole life, but as far as as a skill. And so it's very easy to just riff off of slides. But it used to take me forever to make slides because I'm not a designer. I don't see visually art. I'm it's my words. It's that is what's good for me. And so instead of having to come up with a description and then go to upwork or hire someone to do the slides or just do a, you know, uninteresting Google slide, I had it all kicked out and edited and I made my adjustments. In an hour, I was from concept to completion. And so it that frees up my time to know. I know it takes me about an hour to finesse a presentation, but now I also know what prompts give me about the same length of presentation and how many slides and whatever, because I do it every Monday. So that it's a combination of systematized and automated and manual input. And after we finish recording today, I will do some of the preliminary work for next week, use Canva and some AI with Canva to promote for the next class. So it's a combination of being able to predict and project what I want to have done. But now I know that I don't have to do the slides today. I do it Monday mornings before the class. That's what I do. So AI is infused to probably 70% of my day every day, whether it's, you know, working on a concept for the coaches that I teach or I'm coming on a podcast and I just want to take a different spin. Like you said, so many people go on and use it like it's Bing or Google.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But if you go on, I like to first start by creating a binary effect, a polarity. So I'll go on and say, what is plant medicine and psychedelics? And it'll give its, you know, convers its thing. And I'll go, okay, well, if that's the case, then what would master mycelium and power plants be if I wasn't a patient working with these ancient technologies? Because I work with master teacher plants and fungi as a student, not as a patient. So our position in this world of psychedelics is from the master teacher, not from the plant medicine for sick people. So first I want a position, I get I ask it one meaning, and then I will either do a polarity or then give it another thing to consider and have it describe the difference. That helped me define our messaging clearer in what makes us different from other, say, psychedelic integration trainings. And so by knowing how to help Chat GPT, first I had to give it some context. And then I had it describe the differences. And then I'd be like, no, it's more like this. Now rewrite it. I was able to truly clarify what makes us different. And then I started taking our whole website and I would just copy and paste the whole thing in chat. And I'd say, rewrite it. I want it to be more inspiring. Because right now I don't like the say the deficit, you know, FOMO. I don't like that sales type. So then it did it from a more inspiring position so that I could get the people who are excited about it. And so I probably redo my website like every six weeks because I think it's super easy now. Because it's so easy. And it feels more authentic.
SPEAKER_00And what you were talking about with this, even this process, I've always played this game and business of hyper optimization, not necessarily just because can I do it, right? Like what can I automate? What can I outsource? That sort of thing. And with the process of you creating those slides every Monday, now that you've done the heavy lifting of you figured out, you went through the iterations, now you know that if I type this prompt in, it's going to lead me to an output that I can feed to gamma and get my slides. There was a study done with Harvard, and Ethan Moloch reported on it. And he indicated that they, in the study, they had a group of Boston consulting group consultants, and they took half of that group and just do your thing. You're an expert, you're smart, you're good at your job, go for it. And the other half, they just gave them Chat GPT. They didn't give them any training or anything like that. And the outcome at the end of eight weeks certainly indicated that there was a performance. But the biggest win was that the lowest, lowest performing consultant at the beginning of this, it didn't raise them up to expert level, but they got the biggest boost. So now that you've done the hard work of you know what your message needs to say, you know the paradigm from which you come, you know the avatar you're targeting, you can take those prompts and give it to somebody who you just hired. Now, maybe they don't create the finished version, but that person can now on day one use those tools because you've kind of primed them for that use and give you the 80-20, right? Now that hour might only be 20 minutes. And not suggesting that that that's the case, but I'm wanting people to understand that it's awesome to use the tools and it's awesome to be proficient at the tools, but it doesn't stop there that you're now good. What happens is now you've created a tool that somebody else in your company, they don't have to be the principals in the company, they can now get the heavy lifting done and further eliminate time that you have to spend on that. So let me ask you with the time that you're not spending, let's go back to last summer, the time that you're not spending dreading having to do the stuff that you don't like and that sort of thing, because those results can be created a lot faster. What are you doing with? And I knew this, I'm an entrepreneur. It's, you know, there was a promotion that was like, hey, get your time back. And I said, man, entrepreneurs aren't, they're not gonna get any time. They're not gonna take three days off. They're gonna fill that time with something. What are you filling that time with now that's hot like the highest leverage stuff for you?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, now I can look more at the future vision. Before I was still stuck in this reactive business running because I'm putting out fires, and that's why it was maddening, because I have a vision for the future, right? And so for me, it was that I wasn't actually in my purpose and what I knew I wanted to do. So it's the difference of feeling like a wave is gonna crash over you at any second and being on a board riding the wave. Now I'm riding the wave. Nothing has changed as far as what, you know, time and all that. And this the perfect example of what becomes possible besides just what shifts in the time and how I spend it, is that I am doing more now in the future of where we're going because I'm not in the reactionary because people have a clearer idea of deliverables. They have a clearer idea of what to give to me to sign off and be like, yeah, you rocked it, that's perfect. But I built out whole manuals for them. Who are we? What are our values so that they're running that through Chat GPT before the prompts so that we can have like a brand. Like these are this is what you build your prompts based off of, right? But where it really came in handy, Chris, was we were in Tonga. We had booked a trip to swim with humpback whales pre-COVID, and then COVID happened, so the trip got put off till this past October. I wasn't planning to not work in Tonga when I got there. We lost internet because I had empowered my one team member to use Chat GPT, I was able to finally get one text through and I and because there's all the SOPs I built out in there, I taught him to be resourceful. He was able to figure out how to log into our portal, how to send an email. He'd never worked with it before, because I empowered him to find answers. It had nothing to do with Chat GPT. It's that now the culture of the company was if one, if it costs less than a hundred dollars, just do it. I like, don't even come to me if it's that.
So we we were able to give such a clear vision of how to make decisions. Then he was also able to go to Chat GPT, having never written an email to a list, never done any of that, grab old emails, have examples, and figure it out and send a good enough announcement to our list that we couldn't run our masterclass because we had no way to do it. So it's what we're instilling in people that also saves time and energy. Right? It's not just if I get time back, it's that that actually now gave me the confidence that I could go take a week off and the business would be fine because people could figure it out. And that for me, that potential, we did not lose a step when suddenly having no internet. And to me, that was the proof. That was the value. Like, yeah, work more, but I cannot like I have no problem not working. Like I won't work for no reason. Yeah. I just, when I'm lit up, then I have no problem working 14 hours.
SPEAKER_00This is interesting because I mean, I've got a long career as an entrepreneur, and you learn things, you become better, and then when you have a win, those wins end up being bigger because of all the pain that you went through earlier in your career. And I spent a lot of my most of my earlier career as an entrepreneur, there was a lot of anxiety associated with it because of I don't want to do that thing, but it's got to get done. I'm not good at it. I don't have the budget to go hire that person and that sort of thing. And I can imagine that if an entrepreneur is feeling that way and they spend, they commit to spending, spend one day, one day playing with the models, and just you don't even need to know any prompt patterns when you sit down in front of it. At the end of that day, I think that they would have a wake-up call and go, oh, I've now got a team. This thing can be my marketing strategist, it can be my tech advisor, it can be my SaaS culture builder, like whatever those things might be. So let me let me get this clear. Do you have some prepared information about your company or your avatar or your brand design or your brand or any of those types of things that you feed into Chat GPT so that it's got on a fresh chat, it now has all the context it needs to address the specific intention that you've got.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. And yes. So we just call it our condor manual. Like this is our culture manual. So if someone's gonna write an email, if someone's going to, we're designing a new itinerary right now, so that for the next cohort that starts, we want all of it to be cohesive. We don't write it traditional, we're more playful, we use emojis. So when I run my emails, the tone I ask for is Deadpool, the superhero, because it's sarcastic and jokes, right? So we do we have it do the emails, but then I want it run through as Deadpool. And then I change the jokes to be relative to our business, our culture, and whatever. But it's the fastest tone that is like me. Because if we suddenly start putting out emails that are very we're not a medicalized training, even though we have a lot of medical training, that's not who we appeal to. So our emails are more like social media posts. And so they someone coming into the company has to know that, or else our audience would know immediately that's not us. Yeah. Right? And so it's one of the most important things. So they can go to the manual. We have the, you know, we have everything, mission, what we do, why we do it. We have the brand colors, and if you're in Canva, I want it to be so that when my team needs to take a break because they have a family emergency that they need to suddenly be gone for two weeks where we can fill it good enough no matter what. That's freedom. Freedom isn't just like take a vacation. It's that, you know, I need to be there for my loved one right now. And so our whole thing was build it so clear that if you need to go be with your family or you want to be, go fully be there. Because then all we have to do is get on board and say what's on your plate, what's coming up, who's gonna offboard it. And I stopped looking for unicorns. Yeah, I wanted to find the person that could take over all the jobs. Yeah, I actually cut all the jobs. I only hire 10 hours per week per person, and they have very specific tasks that they do. No one role that does admin and email and this and this. Yeah, one person manages Facebook, one person manages the Condor community on Mighty Networks, one person does the tech administrative tasks, one person does the customer service to this, to this. Because I started to be able to align the personalities so that everyone is enjoying what they're doing, and I'm finding people that don't want to work 60 hours a week. They don't. They want something that speaks to their heart, that is something they love, and they always work more. We don't have anyone working for us right now that's not an hourly person. And I have a structure and benchmarks that once you become twice as efficient because of AI, I will pay you double and it takes you half the time. I don't care, right? And so I'm like, you're starting at this. Let's say I'm starting someone, you know, running my community for $25 an hour. And I say, and when you can get to this skill level and you're doing this, this, and this, then I'm gonna double you to 50. Right? Because we're working with people that aren't looking to, they want to have they want to coach people privately, they want to build their business, they want to have that. And working for us not only helps them to learn the skills because we are a coaching company, but they're also doing the things that light them up. And so that constant energy means that if someone needs to leave for their family, they can. People are like, I got you, go. Like, don't even call, don't call us, we'll call you if we need anything. And that for us is again why me and my husband had the life we had before this business. And we said we're not gonna build a business that changes what's most important to us. For us, this is our mission, this is a much bigger purpose than a money. Correct? And so
if it didn't maintain the same parts of our life that were important, then we weren't doing it. And we watched friends and entrepreneurs, because when we were doing private coaching, we were doing one-on-one personal coaching. We had a lot of seven, eight-figure clients. We saw what their business was doing to them and we didn't want it.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_02And so when we shifted into this space, it was like, so then what's gonna have to be in place so that that doesn't happen to us? Because that's not the exchange, not even for a mission. I don't want to die for what I believe in. I want to live for it.
SPEAKER_00I like that. So I'm a process guy, and whenever whenever somebody says they got a result, my mind immediately starts, you know, they you eat the elephant one bite at a time. My mind starts seeing all the bites that have to take place with this, right? So the first question I have based on that, I see immediate value to having that role-based prompt catalog that you, you're not asking them to come up with it. You, the principal, the visionary, the one who has internalized what this business means, you set those prompts up, which means that regardless of who uses those prompts, there will be a consistency to output, right? So you're able to provide that to them. Now, they have to take off for two weeks, or let's say it's longer term, or they're going to move to wherever. You now, the onboarding for the next person to fill that role is a lot faster. And probably within a couple of days of them knowing where all the files are stored, they're able to start getting almost the same quality of result as the person who had been there for six months or a year or however long. So that's awesome. But you mentioned one thing that most entrepreneurs and small businesses, I don't think they appreciate it, and I don't think they like doing it, and that's documenting process. However, to get consistent output, you need to have a process that's followed consistently. How involved was that the generative models in you creating those SOPs?
SPEAKER_02You know, I think so much of it was just recognizing it had to happen. Because anytime if I even brought someone on to help, again, I'm I had to take radical responsibility. I had to say that if I don't set the standard of organization and then I just hire someone and think they're gonna fix it if I don't operate that way. Because I know that I was that CEO or that solopreneur or that whoever that hired someone, that they were organized and I wasn't. Yeah. And that was just as much a problem. It's like we keep as solopreneurs or small businesses trying to find the person that's gonna be the solution. When for me it was like I had people come on that were super organized, but I didn't follow through with the system or the click up or the Trello board or the Slack channel or whatever. So it was recognizing that I was a part of this mess I kept finding myself in. And so I just said, well, I don't know how I'm gonna do it, but I just started having, you know, even now, my drive folder, I just go for what could it be called? Like what's the, you know, not even like the business name, but it's like condor main vault, SOP's main vault, SOPs for Dice, SOPs for so and so. But the key thing was having that one manual book I told you about, where I've got the mission statement and who we are. That links to every other business document. So for our documents for our who works for us, our roles and responsibilities. First, I come up with the role that I believe I need filled. And then after I hire someone, I have them, I they get on with me, I go through the tasks I want them to take over. I have them document the process. They then go to Chat GPT and create the official lasting documents. We have a general one, but they're gonna do it a little different. So then we're gonna update the SOP to the individual because they have a unique process. So ours is the starting prompt. But then I want them to sit with me and document the process of how do we go from go-high level to you know this to that. Then they create the SOP for themselves so that they understand it, so that we're clear, then that gets linked to that main core document. So it's like there's the main vault SOPs, then there's like the bioindividual SOP of the job, and that main manual is where everything links to. So everyone knows that everything they could need is linked, and it's as simple as having bookmarks that goes to this folder is just this employee's jobs. This folder is just our masterclass Monday replays. What am I gonna do with them? A lot of times I don't know, but just label it and put it there. Even if you don't know the role, even if you don't know the whatever, my team knows what would it be called?
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_02You know, where it's like um social media posts. They'd be like, she'd probably call it social media unedited. They guess. Because it's just go for like the most obvious thing, because then anyone can find it and not get caught up in some of the business language that like I didn't know.
SPEAKER_00Interesting. So this idea, I want everybody that's listening to this to really consider that if you've got specific roles in the organization that and most of them can benefit from the use of these models, if you feed them the pre prompts, you You are taking, you're removing discretion from the individual. They're just they're going through the motion and getting the result based on what you, as the owner, as the principal, as the one who really understands this business, is is looking for. This is good. Let's talk about for people who don't quite, they still don't get it. So the name of our company is Chief AI Officer, and it's it's C A I O. And we we realized that there's this moment that people, and it happened here. I had my chief AI officer here. I was sitting at a computer and I was trying to get a prompt out of it. And he came over my shoulder, took over the keyboard, and then he looked at me, he said, C AI. Oh, I had that oh moment, right? For people who haven't had that oh moment yet, um what advice would you give them on not just saying, oh, it's slightly better than Google, because they haven't had that oh moment yet with AI.
SPEAKER_02You know, the first place to start is just ask the question that you would ask someone about what you're trying to do.
SPEAKER_00Give me an example.
SPEAKER_02So sit down. Yeah, so sit down at Chat GPT. Let's say that you are a solo printer. This is all new to you. None of this makes any sense whatsoever, but you've now heard this podcast and you're like, okay, they said don't just sit for an hour. I'm gonna do this. Go to that intention. What do I want to know? Or what do I want to do? Let's just go with do. What do I want to do in general in my business right now? Well, I want to hire a contractor to help or an admin to help me with my emails from clients and my schedule. So you go to Chat GPT and you say, Hey, ChatGPT, I want to hire an administrative assistant. What do you need to know about me and my business so that you could help me do that? I literally ask ChatGPT to ask me what it needs to know to help. Instead of trying to guess, I'll say, Chat GPT, what do you need to know about me and my business in order for you to help me come up with a job description offer? And it'll say, okay, here's all the things I need you to know. As someone that has an easier time talking, I'll just go to my Google Chrome and turn on my dictation for chat GPT. I turn on my dictation, I say, I'm looking for help. I want to hire someone to help me with my emails and my scheduling. So I need to know what you know, I need to know what you would need to know about me to help me write a description I could post on upwork. And then it's gonna kick back a bunch of questions. Then I'm gonna put that dictation back on, I'm gonna answer them all, and then I'll say, Chat GPT, analyze all this information and to the best of your ability create that for me. So first I say, What do you need to know from me? And it'll say, Here's what I need to know. I say, Great, here's that information. Now will you take all that information and fulfill all the those kinds of questions that you asked me to complete this task?
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_02And so there's this place like, I don't know what the prompt is. I'm like, so say that. ChatGPT, what prompt should I ask you if I want to make a VSL, you know, virtual sales letter? Hey, ChatGPT, I want to do a website that's high converting for my business. How can you help? Ask, how can you help me do this task?
SPEAKER_00That's it. So this would be the equivalent if without GPT or somebody that was, even if though it exists, they weren't necessarily gonna use it in their business. They
would say, okay, well, obviously we're gonna need uh an HR person who does blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so what you're saying is they no longer need the HR person. They can go to Chat GPT and say, uh HR professional, do this. Well, I'd really like to know what Alex Hormozy would say about this. Go to Chat GPT and say, how would Alex Hormozy write this? So this idea of um thinking that you need to have this cadre of uh experts that are very expensive and hard to get their attention or their time, you don't need that anymore. You can just go in there and say, like you just said, tell me what you need to know to give me the answer that I'm looking for. And what's beautiful, we teach this prompting, one of the prompting frameworks that we teach is turn on the recorder and just dump. Ah, so I'm really wanting to do this and da-da-da-da-da. And I think that some people think that they need to be very precise. And, you know, when they're communicating with the model and saying please and thank you. I'm sure when they when they become sentient, they'll remember all of us that said please and thank you.
SPEAKER_02But um, I mean, there's no reason not to just, you know, stay kind.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. But what's cool about this is that uh, you know, people are are thinking that they have to be good at prompting, and you don't, you have to be good at explaining what it is that you want, even if it is an audio, because at least Chat GPT-4, you can upload those audio files. And I think on the mobile app, you can just turn it on, like you said, the dictate and let and just kind of just just dump. And if there's extra stuff that you're uh communicating in it, or you kind of go off on a tangent, the model knows what to include and what not to include. You're not you're not gonna confuse the model, most likely. So for those of the listeners who are thinking that prompt engineering is like a regular engineering type education, it doesn't have to be. It's and the thing that I'm noticing is that, like for instance, I've been involved in direct response digital marketing for a long time, and I've always respected that copywriters they think about the words they use, really think about what's the impact of this word versus that word. They kind of mean the same thing, but what's the impact? And I've found that copywriters tend to be very good at prompting because they know how to communicate, they they know how to use those words to elicit that. For those of us who aren't copywriters and we haven't studied all of you know uh the mechanics of that stuff, you don't need it. You can simply go in there, turn on dictate, like you said, feed the model what you're looking for, and then start to get that output. Now, one of the things that I think a lot of people are disappointed in is that they they type in one sentence, and what they get is synthetic output because they didn't add context, they didn't give it a role or any of those types of things, right? Um what does your process look like when you are working with the models, you don't get the output the way that you wanted, what does that massaging look like to get the closest to your ideal outcome?
SPEAKER_02So if something is brand new for me, and I love this question, so I'm so grateful that you asked it, because I think this is where again, one of those things that I do that I didn't know that that was valuable, it just made the most sense to me and how I process. If I don't know what I'm doing, I don't start with a prompt. I get on the phone or on a Zoom call with a friend and I talk through what I think or what I think I want in my business. Example I work with coaches, and so one of the things I work in helping them is how are they combining their lived experience, their coaching style, and being psychedelic informed? Because we don't teach facilitation, it's how does psychedelics and how do they they message that right? Because it's not facilitation. So there's nuance to how you pull that all together. So they have a list of 10 questions, we get on with a Zoom call and we just do an interview style. Who do you want to serve? How do you want to serve them? Do you like to do weekend retreats or do you like to do one-on-one coaching? And we're in an authentic real conversation. That's where we start. After we've gone through this 30-minute conversation of an interview, then we take the transcript, put it in chat GPT and say, This is a conversation between two people. This one is me. Can you analyze this and tell me my tone? Can you analyze this and tell me, you know, break this down for me or turn this into an email, an offer letter, or whatever. Maintain the words I use, the tone that I use, do not fill in anything extra or create a website because I can't start with the prompt that way. It doesn't, when I now I can, because I've practiced, but at first I could not sit if I didn't get the output right, I didn't know where to steer the ship from there. So I don't start there. I start by getting on with someone and talking through what's going on. And then I have ChatGPT analyze it for whatever outcome I want of that conversation. And so now that's why with our coaches, they were able to get out of their head of I don't know. And we go, yes, you do. You just don't know how to analyze it. You don't know how to distill it into what is digestible for other people, but Chat GPT does.
SPEAKER_00That's brilliant. And you know, just and here's what's gonna happen for people that are starting to actively use the models. You're gonna think, oh, I'm good. And then somebody's gonna mention just one little thing that they do, and you're gonna go, oh, like that's how I'm gonna do it from now on. So for instance, when you said that with recording the call and uploading the transcript, we've done that for you know, extracting insights from it and stuff like that. However, one of my biggest challenges, and we create a lot of content, has been my voice. Because if you just let, if you don't give Chat GPT a role, it's gonna give you output that seems synthetic. It seems like like um like it doesn't have much of a soul. But taking that call, like I could record a conversation with a friend that was 30 minutes long, regardless of what the topic was. Hey, we're going to Vegas. Oh, it was my kid's birthday, whatever the thing might be. But I could take that transcript and say, identify my voice, how I like the language I use, the intonation, and all that kind of stuff. Now, take this piece of content and rewrite it in my voice. That's right. It could be an article that somebody else wrote, but I want to do my own content piece on that same concept and say, hey, these guys in Forbes wrote this article. Oh my gosh. Because that's a big challenge. Like I've been looking for avatars like, write it like uh Frank Kern, write it like um Simon Sinek, write it like, and there would be pieces in it that I was like, oh, I like the way that says, but I'd never considered just taking a natural conversation transcript, feeding that to Chat GPT, and saying, This is the way I talk, write like that.
SPEAKER_02That's yeah, I just say analyze it. I say act like a speaking coach, a copy coach, a whatever. Analyze my tone and follow it exactly. And now that's in my custom instructions in my chat GPT, because everything's going through our business, the condo approach. So now that's in my custom instructions. Everything it's doing is at least running through that initial filter that's our mission statement, our values, and our tone, which is empathetic, you know, inspirational, relatable, and under a tenth, like we I keep it at about a tenth grade reading comprehension. Always eighth is a little too simplified.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And so I find that 10th grade is about is a good place for us to be. But that was from having it analyze it. And it was crazy how it shifted after that. It's just for me, having it analyze any audio is the most effective way through.
SPEAKER_00I love that. Hey, so we're coming up on an hour, but I want to close with a couple of little tactical things. Do you have a moment to go through a few of those? Totally. Right. So there's um, you know, if you listen to podcasts or you're paying attention to what's going on in the AI space every week, there's like groundbreaking, oh my gosh, Sam left or GPT-4V or whatever the case might be. Where are you getting, or are you paying attention to stuff that's happening in the market? And if so, where are you getting that information typically?
SPEAKER_02You know, I was, but here was it was happening that same shiny object syndrome, right? Oh, the new thing. Now go try this, go try this. I know what I'm here to do. I focus on Chat GPT and gamma. I, you know, I've gone to Claude and I've done mid-journey and I tried all these things, and for me, those were distractions. It was those are all great, but that's where I also think why my experience and what I can do with Chat GPT is exponentially further than a lot of the quote unquote experts in the field, is because at least with Chat GPT, I have spent thousands upon thousands upon thousands of hours just in prompts, just getting an effect. So I actually think that especially if someone's new, just start with Chat GPT. That's it. Get like for me, I believe that it takes 20 hours to kind of get it. 20. So just give it 20. Now having there is a fatigue point, right, which is usually like three to four hours, someone fatigued that's new, and then you just don't really understand it anymore. So you would be more effective to be like two hours a day, every day get to 20 hours. Do that for 10 days just to see and maybe have a new objective each and every day. Because I think that as great as all the other products are, at first I was on watching Twitter and all the email lists and all of that, but truthfully, it was then becoming what it I had to go back to my intention right now.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And I am not working in the AI space in that way. It is not my job or responsibility, but it was knowing that what ChatGPT provides right now would give me enough context for my mind as other things open up. I wouldn't understand enough, just like when you first got an Apple, you know, you got a Mac computer, you could kind of do the phone, you could kind of do the iPod. Like to me, you're still putting yourself in the field.
SPEAKER_00Okay. For those who haven't introduced generative AI into their business, what would be an air, like what's one business function or process that you would say would be very low-hanging fruit for them to get some quick wins and go have that oh moment?
SPEAKER_02I would say go into your Google Drive, find maybe you've already got documents and blogs you never wrote or that you released a long time ago, take that blog, go copy and paste it in Chat GPT and ask ChatGPT to create, act like a course creator expert and turn this information into a one-day live event or a 30-day course or a seven-day audio course script and see how you can repurpose something that already exists into a new way that you've been putting off. Because you'll see, like, holy cow, I've been saying I'm gonna create this freebie course for a lead generation that I didn't do it yet. You're you have a full Google Drive of ideas or things you've already done before that it could re-articulate in moments. And so for me, that's where I would go where you to really see what's possible with how quickly something could turn around.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I mean, you could take one article or or one or a few articles and say, give me five ideas for new products based on this content all of a sudden. And then honestly, if you knew how to use the models, by the end of the day, you could have the bulk of those five products built using Chat GPT. Okay, one final question, and that is what are some tools outside of GPT that you've used? You mentioned gamma a lot. And listen, there's other slide things, but I think that's great. You found one that you like to use. Yeah, you don't need that little sliver of better that comes with the new shiny object. You're good to go on that tool. What are some other tools that maybe you or maybe the community manager or customer service or uh what are some of those tools that people should be taking a look at?
SPEAKER_02You know, now so many businesses are incorporating AI into their back end, D script, game changing. Their new technologies and what they're integrating. Just like I said, you could get on and do a Zoom interview with a friend. Now, what we do is we taught our coaches how to distill that information using D scripts technology to create social media posts because now they're not getting on a blank Instagram, they're having a real connection with another person, but they can take those videos and create, right? There's an app for my phone that I also love called Captions. So it takes your video and it puts all the fancy captions and the emojis and it'll add video um images and whatever. And uh what I'll do is I'll take a Zoom video like this, I'll put it in D script to make it a why, you know, to make it the narrow for Instagram, and then I airdrop it to my phone. So when I'm on the fly, I can just grab little chunks of that interview or that video. Even while we're talking here, my cell phone is recording me off to the right because that will be captions from my phone using AI. Right? Because to me, anytime you're on talking about something you're passionate, you love, or you're good at, you should be recording it. Even if you don't know what to do with it now. Our conversation we could take, put in chat GPT, and then from there, we could put that in Canva and there's AI in Canva now, and create entire carousels of information of step by step. So to simplify chat GPT, gamma, D script and captions for is it which is an app for your phone. That's how I run the majority of my entire business is off of those.
SPEAKER_00So, guys, we're gonna have the links to those in the show notes, but that's I I love this because there's so many by doing that, you don't necessarily need that savvy social media person who knows how to use the tool, like all that kind of that can go away. Would it be better to have that person who knew how to use GPT doing it? Of course. But if you're a small to medium-sized business and you don't have the resources or the relationships to get that kind of talent in-house, or you don't do enough of it to where it makes sense to bring somebody on deck, now all of a sudden, next time you do a client sales call, next time you do a consultation, next time you anything to do with your industry, you can use tools like this and almost instantly have the same thing that would cost you thousands of dollars to have a social media expert, quote unquote. And they're probably using AI to do it anyway.
SPEAKER_02So honestly, a lot of them aren't great at it, to be honest. I've paid for agencies that did it and they couldn't get a better output than me because they didn't understand the content.
SPEAKER_00This has been beautiful, Cole. Sister blessings for sharing this with all the people that are going to be listening to this. And I'm looking forward to um, I don't know if you drink alcohol, but uh a beer or a coffee next time I'm in Austin.
SPEAKER_02Both at the same time, because I'm I'm crazy like that.
SPEAKER_00Awesome. Thank you, Cole. It was nice to uh have you on this, and I I I got a lot out of that. And it's awesome when you start talking to other people who are users. I I guess it's like going to a comic book convention where you know you get to geek, really geek out on stuff that the rest of the world, they're not thinking this way yet. So for everybody who's listening to this, you're getting your learning curve is being compressed. Every time you hear somebody like Cole share just one nugget, you're a better user of AI and uh a better user of your life. So anything, Cole, where can where can people find out more about um what you guys are up to and events that you've got going on and stuff like that?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you know, generally just hit me up on Instagram. That's really the best. We have a podcast, the psychedelic coach, if the conversation is curious, and we do uh we do talk about AI and kind of this intersection of ancient technology and new technology. So personally, I love a good DM. So feel free to just reach out with questions in general. If I can help and, you know, whatever, I'll tell you. And if I can't, I'll tell you. But uh Instagram is probably the best. It's Mysticole, M-Y-S-T-I-K-O-L-E, or the Condor approach on Instagram. I manage them both.
SPEAKER_00Nice, thank you. All right, everybody, we'll see you on next week's episode. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to Using AI at Work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work. And a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer, for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for a free AI readiness assessment and AI strategy guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chiefaiofficer.com. So thanks to our producer, Evan Desolnier, for making this episode possible. Follow us on Twitter at the handle UsingAI at Work and visit www.usingai at work.com for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.