AI, Authenticity, and the One Thing That Can't Be Cloned: Your Energetic Field

If you're a spiritual entrepreneur, healer, or soul-led business owner navigating AI right now, you're probably holding more than one thing at once. The excitement of what's possible. The fear of sounding like everyone else. The quiet worry that something essential, some quality of transmission, of frequency, of presence, might get lost when a machine helps generate your words.

This episode is for that woman.

Michelle breaks down the Three Layers of Presence that actually build an irreplaceable soul-led brand 

Want to run the experiment Michelle describes in this episode? Here's the exact prompt:

First: Id like my messaging to be direct and impactful. List the words, phrases, and sentence structures I use most repeatedly. Be specific. I want actual phrases and constructions, not general descriptions like "you use warm language." Give me the real patterns. Second: and this is the most important part: Tell me honestly where my writing softens, qualifies, or pulls back just before saying something direct. Where am I managing the reader's reaction rather than just saying the true thing? Where do I seem to be working hard to be liked, or to avoid being misunderstood, or to make sure no one feels called out? Where do I add a sentence after the bold one that quietly undoes some of its power?Don't be gentle with the second one. I'm asking because I genuinely want to know. The more specific and honest you are, the more useful this is.Here is my content:[paste your content here]

Transcript

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So AI has been growing like crazy. AI can clone your voice, it can write in your style, it can mimic even your cadence, like how you show up. It can generate content that sounds like you to people who don't even know you yet. And if you've found yourself somewhere between being mildly unsettled with that and quietly spiraling about that a bit in terms of just how crazy accurate it seems that reaction you're having is information. Because what you're actually afraid of losing is your irreplaceability, and that, that's exactly what we're gonna go into today. What makes you irreplaceable? So welcome back to "Into the Work." I'm Michelle Pofferman, psychotherapist, coach, and apparently a woman who has a lot of feelings about artificial intelligence. There is so much content right now about AI. There's so many opportunities. It's super exciting. Most of it stays on the surface, like they're teaching you all the things you need to know about, you know, whether or not you should disclose using AI, which tools you should use, how to stay relevant and keep up. But that's not what we're talking about today, 'cause that is not my expertise. But I will tell you, I'm getting to know some of it and learning, and that's super exciting. But today I wanna talk to you about going underneath all of that, because I think the reason so many of us are unsettled by AI isn't really about just... Well, it is, but it also isn't just about keeping up with technology. I think it's also about our identity. It's about the question AI is forcing a lot of you to answer is what am I actually made of, and is it something that can be replaced? And especially when part of what we put out there in our offers, so if we're, if you're running a business and you're putting yourself out there, you're wondering Am I irreplaceable here? So before I jump into the way that I'm gonna break this down for you that's gonna be really helpful for you to understand what the layers are of your presence, how you're putting yourself out there, and what sticks and what doesn't, what AI cannot replicate and what it can. But before we do that, I just wanna spend a few minutes naming what's actually happening,, because I think a lot of you are holding more than one thing at once right now in terms of maybe fears or anxiety, and I want you to feel heard before we go any further. So I wanna point out that some of you are genuinely excited about AI. I am too. Did I not mention that? The possibilities are real and freaking enormous, and there are days when I feel like a kid who just discovered a superpower, and I'm like, "Oh my God, this is so cool." The ability to scale ideas and to move faster in your business, to finally get the thing that's been living in your head out into the world, that is significant. It's huge. And also, on the other hand, the possibilities can feel completely overwhelming 'cause there are so many possibilities. And when you can do everything, choosing what to do can kind of become its own sort of paralysis, and that's worth naming too. But underneath the excitement, underneath the overwhelm, most of the women I know in this space are carrying some version of a couple of these fears, and so I just want you to hear them. And first one I'm gonna say is just the fear of sounding like everyone else. You have spent years finding your own voice, doing the inner work required to actually know what you think, right? And for some of us, that was actually some serious digging because we spent our, our half of our lives not sharing what we think and protecting that and not actually even knowing because we were trying to be what everybody else needed us to be. So you did the work that required you to actually know what you believe, what you wanna say, and you watch AI flatten everything into some pleasant, well-structured, utterly forgettable content because that's what's happening. It's becoming generic, and you wonder if that's what's going to happen to you, if the voice you worked so hard to find is gonna dissolve into this You know, algorithm of averageness because, you know, if we start r- the more and more, I mean, so many of us are now noticing right away, like, what's AI, what's not AI. And there's this fear of losing the transmission. And for those of us healing and in the spiritual world, in the spiritual work, this one kinda goes deep for us because, you know, in your body, not just your mind, that's what your clients are actually receiving. It isn't just information, it's frequency. It's the felt sense of being met by someone who has done the work. And you wonder, can AI-assisted content actually carry that? Or does something essential kinda get laundered out of it when we use AI? And I think this is a really important question. Now, the f- there's also this whole idea about imposter syndrome that AI seems to help, you know, seems to deliver on a silver platter because now you can produce content that looks polished, it sounds authoritative, even on the days you don't feel either, right? And there's a voice, you know this voice, that whispers inside, "Is this really you? Are you being authentic? Are you as smart or knowledgeable as this AI sounds? And for some people, there's also the guilt of enjoying it. And this might be the most uncomfortable one for some of us to admit if you're really, um, tied into this. So you're using AI, it's helping you. I might even be genuinely excited about it. You might be excited about it. And then you read something about the writers who are losing their jobs. You read about the artists having their work, Stolen without consent, and suddenly the pleasure turns into something heavier. Like, am I participating in something harmful? Am I complicit in something? And I don't have a clean answer for that. I don't think any of us do right now. I think that, that you're asking the question says something important about who you are. I think we need to do our due diligence. I think we need to do our research, but this thing is growing and is coming, and here we are. So here's where I want to shift the conversation because I think we've been having-- We've been asking kind of the wrong questions, I think, w-especially w-with our fears. The question most people are asking is: How do I use AI without losing my authenticity? And I think that sounds reasonable, but it's also built on this premise worth examining. And I think that you are assuming you already know clearly and completely what your authenticity is, what it actually is, what it's made of, where it lives, what parts are real. And you also potentially, if you're thinking about this, perhaps you're also aware of your shadow parts, right? You're aware of, and I say this with enormous compassion, the very sophisticated, well-developed performance of realness, right? Like, our parts that are protecting us, right, but how we go out in the world and perform that are a little bit different than our authentic, true, wise self, right? Because here is what I have found to understand. AI doesn't threaten authentic presence. What it does, and this is the thing making everyone so uncomfortable, is I do think it can expose how much of what we've called our brand was never really us to begin with because it's so easily mimicked. It's so... It's... Right? It's letting you know when you're using AI and you're throwing it out there, I think it's really possible for you to just become generic because in, uh, because you're not your brand who you are. Maybe you haven't gone deep enough to really be able to know what it is you want to insert in there that says, "This is who I am, and this is what I do, and this is how I'm gonna help you." And so for women who have been calling it in and just throwing in a prompt and so for women who have been calling it in, just throwing in a prompt and sticking it in a post or sticking it in your email or your messaging, AI is genuinely a bit destabilizing because you're becoming generic. Uh, pretty soon everybody's gonna read that thing and say, "Ugh, here we go again." That's kind of a curse, right? That is not good for your business. It is not good for your, uh, wellbeing, your energy in your business. But for women who have done the real work, who have gone into the wound, who have built their authority from the inside out, AI is not really a threat to us. I don't-- It's not. It's a sorting mechanism. It just raised the stakes for everyone who hasn't done the work yet, for sure, because you are going to sound like everybody else if you're not somebody who knows how to program AI to s- to truly be your authentic self, to truly put out your authentic voice, to put out your authentic stamp on everything. And so the reframe is that AI doesn't threaten women with real depth. I think it just makes depth non-optional. I think it's non-negotiable now, which means that the real question isn't how do I use AI without losing my authenticity? I think the real question is, do I actually know where my authenticity lives so that I can actually put it into a prompt, right? I can actually make sure that how I'm using AI is to transmit this authenticity into the world, and am I giving that to people, or am I giving them a very polished, very consistent, safe version of it? And to that answer, we, uh, can lean on this, this little framework that I've created. Um, and, you know, in this, I created this in AI. I said, "Hey, I. I wanna look at a few different layers of what it means to be present." And I plugged in what, three areas that I felt like I wanted to look into, and AI gave me some bullshit answers. It was like, it told me to say things to you that are not true or real for me. So I use it to brainstorm, and then I scrap the rest, okay? I just use it to brainstorm, to get my juices flowing, to get some different language than the w- language that I'm repetitively using. So I want to introduce to you what I'm calling these four layers of presence, okay? So of course, one of them is the authentic self. So let's just say that deep down at the core of it all, you have your authentic self. But there are three others that I think we should talk about today that you project out into the world, okay? And there are these three other areas other than your just true core, authentic soul self, these other things that are, that are in the works when you're interacting with other people and you're interacting with the world. So let's look at how you are signaling to other people. Signaling are the things that represent how you be in the world. They are your vocabulary, your signature phrases. I have a lot of them. If you've been listening to my podcast for a long time, you've definitely heard me repeat some signature phrases that I say a lot. There's patterns in how you communicate in such a way that if someone heard me speaking here today but didn't know this was my podcast, they would be like, "That sounds like Michelle." Right? It-- Because my, the nature of my voice, the, the cadence of my voice, all those things can be replicated. They sound like me, right? And here's the important thing, AI can learn your signals. We can feed it enough of your content, and it will produce it with remarkable accuracy. Now, I want to be really clear, because this gets misunderstood. Signal is not fake. Your signal is real. It emerged from you. It belongs to you. But signal is the language of you, not the depth of you. It's the delivery mechanism, okay? And, and a delivery mechanism can be learned, and so AI can learn that, and it can do a really good job putting that out there. But here's what I want you to hear. AI just made depth non-optional, because if your differentiator can be imitated, you're invited to ask, what's underneath it? And for most of the women listening to this, the answer is a lot. There's so much more to you than just the things you're s- those things we talked about that are your signals. There's even more than you've been showing. There's more than you've been trusting people to receive. There's so much depth in you that you're probably not even aware of all of it, right? And AI can help you scale your signal, and it can refine it, and it can amplify it, and repurpose it, and we should let it. But that's not selling out. That's just smart. The signal is not the sacred part. So you're just, that's just smart to do that. It's okay to do that. But it's not the sacred part. Now let's talk about your field. Your field is where it gets interesting. This is your energy. And let's just say your field is the energetic transmission that happens when somebody reads your words and feels, not just understands intellectually, but recognizes it at a level beneath logic. It happens when someone like DMs you or messages you, "I feel like you were just inside my head." It's just that felt sense of being met by somebody who has actually been somewhere. That is magical, and that's when you get the cool feedback like, "Oh my gosh, how do you know me?" Right? And feel that energy. It's not your words, it's not the language, it's the quality of consciousness behind your words. It's your nervous system regulation carried through the language. It's the words you've alchemized into wisdom. You cannot clone a field. You cannot clone your energy. You can't extract it, pattern match it, which is all that AI does. You know, it pattern matches. So it can't do that. It can't train a model on it because it doesn't live in the output. It lives in the woman who produces the output. It's the things you have survived. It's the places you've been honest about when it would have been easier to not be honest, right? The moments you stopped abandoning yourself and started saying the true thing, those are not replaceable. Those are not reproducible, if that's a word. That is honestly like, whatever you do, I feel like on some level that's a massive part of your offer, of what you put out into the world, is the stamp of your energy. So your content is the delivery mechanism. Your field is what's being delivered, and what your clients are actually buying at the deepest level is that transmission. The felt sense that the woman on the other side of these words has been somewhere real and come back with something worth having, worth saying, worth listening to, worth experiencing. And so here's the practical implication The investment with the longest ROI in an AI world is not better content strategy, it's deepening your field, doing the work that makes your transmission richer, more honest, more sourced from genuine alchemized experience, because that is the one thing that cannot be automated. And that's why it's so important to allow people to meet this part of you, whether through video, podcasting, or writing. And yes, AI can help you brainstorm what parts of you you want to share, but it's important that you show up in the work, that you imprint your field, your energy in as much as possible that is distributed out into the world. Now, this is the layer I want to spend even a little more time on because this is where it does get personal. I want to share something I actually did before recording this episode, because I could have just taught you this concept, but I think you're going to get more from hearing what happened when I ran this experiment on myself. So I'm going to share a prompt with you, and this is a little experiment I did on myself and tell you what the outcome was, and you can get curious about yourself. So I wanted to see, because I'm looking at, putting my authentic self out, my truth, my boldness, I wanted to see where maybe some of my old programming might be showing up in the work I'm putting out. And so specifically, my old discomfort with conflict, being misunderstood, being divisive, and how that is impacting my content, right? So I took about 10 pieces of my own content, captions, a section of an email. Captions I posted on Instagram or Facebook and LinkedIn, and I went and put all those pieces, and fed them into AI and asked it to do two things I asked it to list the words, phrases, and patterns I use most repeatedly. I told it to be specific, and actual phrases, not just general descriptions. And two, where does my writing tend to soften, pull back, or play it safe? Am I direct? Where am I managing the reader's reaction rather than just saying the true thing? And where do I work hard to be liked or to avoid being misunderstood? And I asked it to be honest, and that I actually wanted to know the outputs were genuinely useful. I found, it found my voice, it showed me patterns. It really was helpful. Things I recognized immediately as mine. It sounded like me. It was really pulling out these patterns,, words that I use probably too much.? It handed me was like a map, like a very honest map of exactly where I was still reading the room when I talk, right? So, like, that old thing that so many of you guys do too, right? That we're so sensitive to the room around us and reading the environment and making sure that we're palatable for everybody. So it said to me that you build a case before you'll let yourself say the direct thing. So you position yourself as reasonable before you say anything that might be confrontational. And it showed me examples in my writing about where I'm doing that. It said, "You say the true thing, and then one beat later you check that it was okay to say it." And again, showed me examples of how I do that. And I sat with that for a moment. I was like, "Wow, I didn't... Okay, I didn't realize I was still doing that." Because it wasn't wrong. Not because I'm an inauthentic person, It's not because it, things aren't real, but because old programming doesn't disappear the moment you start healing it, sisters. So it showed me that when I'm trying to be bold, I say the bold thing, but then I somehow soften it or disqualify it in some way, and that was really interesting to hear. It pointed out phrases that I say, "I know this is a lot, but stay with me," or, that I insert things when I've said something that's disruptive. It showed me ways, like I'm being wishy-washy versus being direct. That's what AI found. And here's why I'm telling you this, because AI is pattern matching. It found those things because it was pattern matching. And patterns, they just show you what's actually there. So there's true, right? So I want you to try this. Pull together eight to 10 pieces of your own content, throw it in, captions, emails, copy, whatever you publish. I'll put the prompt in the show notes. Give it a try. It's kind of fun to see. But here's what I want you to know. The content AI can't quite capture. When you're sort of like channeling crazy genius zone stuff, right?. AI can't capture that. It's you that, that creates that. It's you that puts that out into the world. That's the kind of content AI's never gonna have access to. It has to come from you. That's the content that came from a woman who's been inside her own wound and came out the other side with something real to say. AI can replicate your signal. It cannot replicate your field. And your job, the real work, is to write more from there, to let that woman take up more space without disqualifying the bold thing like I was doing, to say the true thing and then let it land. What I am saying is this. The transmission doesn't live in the words, it lives in the consciousness that directs those words. So If you bring your full presence to the work, right? If you know what you're trying to say, who you're saying it to, the quality of truth you're reaching for, and you use AI to help you find the language for it, the transmission is still yours. You are the source. AI is just the instrument. What matters is who is directing the work and whose discernment is deciding what's true and what's just technically correct. If the answer is you, fully present, fully responsible for the truth of what's being said, the field is yours. Two questions to take with you this week. One, what in your content right now is coming from your signal and what is coming from your field? And can you tell the difference? I want you to just look at your stuff and say, "Ooh, that's coming from my truth. That's coming from my field. That's my energy right there. I can feel it. I can sense it. It's there." Okay, great. Check that box. And number two, if a perfect AI version of you launched tomorrow, the same voice, same aesthetic, same content pillars, what would still be missing? And are you actually giving that thing to your audience right now? And that gives you an idea of what is your essence? How is that being put out into the world? What is that missing energetic piece? And making sure that it's in all your content, right? Sit with those and see what feel, what comes up. And if you run that mirror prompt that, I will put in the show notes again, I would love to hear what it shows you. Come find me on Instagram or Facebook, wherever you are, LinkedIn, i'm always @michellepoderman, and I read everything, so please send it. I would love to hear it. So as we wrap up, I'm just gonna say, you are not your content. You are the woman who survived what made that content worth writing. And that, woman That's who we're serving up. That's the work. So I'm looking forward to seeing you inside that work, okay? Have a beautiful week. Bye for now.