Write Like A Human

AI can spit out clean copy in seconds, but here's the problem: clean copy is starting to sound like everyone. I'm sitting down with Jill Ivey, the "words girl" behind Jilletant, to talk about the one advantage a chatbot can't steal — your voice. Not your font choices. Not your credentials. The actual you that shows up through rhythm, word choice, and the tiny tells that make a reader think, "Yes, I trust this person."

We get specific about what makes human writing different. Jill breaks down voice the way writers and editors understand it — the reason you can read an unsigned page and immediately know who wrote it. She shares a real ghostwriting example where something as small as "cannot" versus "can't" is the difference between generic and true-to-the-person. We also talk about why professionalism without humanity backfires, especially for service providers in crowded industries like law, coaching, therapy, accounting, and consulting.

Then the conversation opens into the life behind the work: Jill's ADHD diagnosis in her 30s, what finally made it click, and how medication, pregnancy, breastfeeding, and an Adderall shortage forced her to build new strategies around focus and self-compassion. Plus the creative thread running through all of it — the Kentucky Derby story of Barbaro, and the road trip romance novel Jill has been quietly writing for years.

If you're building a personal brand, writing a website, or trying to lead with thought leadership without sounding like AI-generated sameness, you'll leave with practical steps and a real mindset shift.

Subscribe, share this with a friend who's outsourcing their voice to a chatbot, and leave a five-star review so more women can find the show.

Connect with Jill:
Website: jilletante.com
Email: hello@jilletante.com
Listeners: book a story audit on her website — $50 off with code SHESUITE

Transcript

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Welcome And Big Promise

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Welcome back to the She Suite Society, where we celebrate the beautiful mess of women's journeys. I'm your host, Dahlia, and today I'm sitting down with Jill Ivey, the words girl, behind Jillitant, a content and thought leadership studio built on one very specific belief. AI can produce passable English, but it cannot produce you. Jill's got the resume for this argument. Penn undergrad in creative writing and MFA, years of ghostwriting thought leadership for founders across three continents, and an ear so precise she can tell you whether a client would say cannot or can't. But this conversation goes a lot further than craft. We get into an ADHD diagnosis that didn't show up until her 30s, because the markers everyone assumed were gifted kid behavior or actually something else entirely. And a novel she's been quietly writing for almost 20 years, sparked by one of the most heartbreaking stories in Kentucky Derby history. We talked about what happens when service providers, lawyers, therapists, coaches, consultants stop hiding behind credentials and start writing what like actual humans and why that shift matters even more for women and minority business owners who were trained to say we instead of I. If you've ever wondered what your voice is actually worth in a world flooded with AI-generated sameness, this one's for you. Let's get into it.

The Jillitant Name Origin

SPEAKER_01 1:36

Yeah, Gilettante, like dilettante, but with a J. Ah, okay. I was like, it's French. Where did you come up with that name?

SPEAKER_00 1:43

So I, you know, the the word dilettante, um, it's it's usually just pejorative. It's somebody who like dabbles in a lot of things, but I actually love the idea of a dilettante because it's somebody who's interested in a lot of things and is is seeking some level of expertise or some some great level of knowledge in lots of things. It's not just dabbling, it's it's a passion. And so when I started my business, I was doing content strategy and copywriting and editing. And I was why choose? So um I love a good portmanteau and I decided to take the word dilettante and put a J on it. And then it didn't look quite right because dilettante has one Ls and one L and two T's.

SPEAKER_02 2:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:19

And so I I put two L's and one T in there, and that's that's my company name. And I uh I incorporated in gosh, 2013, 2014, but I've been doing this solely on my own since 2017.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Okay, so you've been on it for a while.

Training As A Lifelong Writer

SPEAKER_01 2:35

Yeah. Uh you said you started off in copyright. Tell me, tell me where you went to college or did not go to college.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Yes. So I went I went to University of Pennsylvania, did my undergrad in English with a focus on creative writing, and then I minored in psych with a focus in cognitive neuroscience. And uh then I yeah, yeah, I I love I love brains. I love the way the brains work. And and there's a real connection too between the the way that the brain works and the way that we we both create and the way that we take in information and and writing. Um and so from there I worked for a couple of years and then I decided to get my MFA in creative writing while I was working full time. And uh so so my background, my my education primarily is in creative writing. And then, but I've also got experience as a journalist. I did PR for a while. So I've kind of been circling all of these different professions that you can do where you have a writing background and where writing is really important to you. And I've been a writer my whole life. Like I wrote my first book when I was five years old. I love that. I love that. I uh I taught myself to read when I was about four. Um my mom, my boy, I had a sister who's two years younger than me. So my mom was busy with her, and she also worked for my dad's business. And so my mom was super, super busy. And I was a bored kid with ADHD that went undiagnosed until I was in my 30s. And um I I loved books. I loved when people would read to me, but there was nobody around to read to me. So I decided that I would learn to read for myself. And uh this is also it was the 80s, so I was watching a lot of Reading Rainbow, and there was a segment on Reading Rainbow about how to make your own book out of a cereal box. And so I just took it upon myself to do that. Like, I think it was like probably a Saturday morning or something because my nobody was around. I just did this, and then my parents showed up and it was like, here, here's this book that I I wrote. Uh, and my mom still has it. What was it about? I think you remember it was around the holidays. So I think it was probably about angels' Christmas trees, something like that. I know that I definitely rated that. I mean, my my parents are the children of people who came up during the depression. So they keep like wrapping paper and Christmas bows and and that sort of thing. And so uh we have like the box of good bows that we weren't allowed to touch, but then we also had the box of bows where the adhesive had already come off, they were a little crushed, you know, and and so we were allowed to use those for crafts. And so I know I definitely like stuck some bows in there. It was a three-dimensional book. I love it so much.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

That is so stinking creative. You've been creative your whole life. I've tried.

SPEAKER_00 5:06

I've tried. I'm not a visual artist, I'm a decent photographer. And I, you know, I I came up also in the you know, in the 90s when we were just starting desktop publishing. So I I edited my yearbook in middle school. I did a lot of video editing in high school. So uh, but do not put a paintbrush in my hand, don't give me a pencil, I will give you a stick figure at best. I was invited to a like a paint and sip sort of thing. And it's like, no, I will, I will just, I will get drunk and I will create nothing. Uh, because I that's just not the way that my my brain works and and I don't have those skills. But I have a good eye. Uh, and I I use that in ways where, you know, if I'm working on something for a client, I can say why something does or doesn't work. I have a lot of clients uh and a lot of people that like just in my orbit who have been experimenting with AI graphics, and so I can tell them why that they're not working. Um but uh I, you know, it's like I know, and this is that that dilettantism, like I know just enough to get myself into trouble with some of these things because then people look to me like, oh, you know so much. Can you fix this for us? Like, no, but I know people who can. Uh, I'm I'm the words girl.

SPEAKER_01 6:10

You're the words girl, which to me is, I mean, listen, that is art. People just don't really, they always think of art, to your point, kind of, is as just drawing or painting, even arguably even music or being able to play an instrument. I think they do forget the art of words. I think they completely forget that that is also creative. And in this day and age of AI, um, imperative to have.

SPEAKER_00 6:39

Yes.

Why Words Are Real Art

SPEAKER_00 6:40

Yeah. So I also I have I did a lot of acting. Uh, I acted all through high school and college, and then I did a little bit of professional acting after, and I decided I hated auditioning. So I I I let that part of me go. I still, but I still do some voice acting. Uh, and I think that the thing that people forget is if we're if we're talking about theater or film or music being an art, somebody write it, write it. Listen to me, I'm a writer and I can't conjugate verbs today. Somebody had to write those those words that are being put out there. And sometimes it is the artists themselves, but sometimes it's other people. Like if we are doing a Shakespeare production, we have to acknowledge that Shakespeare wrote those words and we can we can study and appreciate and analyze uh the the words that were written 500 plus years ago. I think that right now with AI, a lot of people think anybody can be a writer because you just put a prompt into Chat GPT or put a chat a prompt into Claude, and it comes out with something that is passable English, you know, or passable your language of choice. But there's no there's no craft to it. The output of AI is predictive, it is based on stolen data that was used for training, and then it is based based on the prompt that you have given it. What are the most likely combination of words that it should put out to give you an answer to your prompt? There's no original thought in in the output from, and I'm talking about generative AI too. Like I feel like people really kind of have started talking about AI as this monolith, but I'm talking about the the things that either put words on a page or the things that are creating quote unquote art based on stolen information. And so, but there's no original thought there. There's there's no ingenuity. There's the these thoughts cannot create, they cannot think. They process. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

That's exactly right. Thank you for noting the difference. I think that's why the prompter matters tremendously. That's why they get different outputs than than others. For sure. Very much agree with that.

AI Output Versus Human Craft

SPEAKER_01 8:41

Um so you have your MFA in creative writing. Yes. What's the moment you realize that fiction craft and business storytelling uh weren't actually different skills?

SPEAKER_00 8:54

So I think that a lot of it comes down to voice. When you are writing a novel, or even yeah, I my my background really in my MFA was more creative nonfiction. I was I'm an essayist. I am currently writing my first novel. Yeah. Um but um but but even when you're when you're an essayist, the the voice matters. And I think a lot of people think of voice as the actual physical sound that is being made by my throat and pushing, you know, with air pushing out through my mouth and my my tongue is helping to modulate it. And and that is that is what literal voice is, but there is voice that comes across in writing, which is why you can pick up a novel by Ernest Hemingway without the cover on it and start reading it and immediately recognize that this is Hemingway. He has these signature styles of writing, the same way that if I'm just, you know, a friend sends me an article and I don't read the byline and I'm looking at it and it's like, this sounds really familiar. I think this is Tanahasse Coates. And then I can scroll up and see, like, yes, that is Tanahasse Coates or or whoever. And so the voice of the writer, which is something that you really do work to cultivate when you're studying writing, when you're working on writing in an academic setting, is making sure that the narrator of this piece uh sounds interesting and authentic. And if it's fiction, you want them to sound original. If you're a memoirist, then you want your voice to be really consistent throughout all of your work. If you are a fiction writer, it's your job, unless you're doing a sequel or you have a series where you have like a consistent narrator, you want that narrator to be unique, even if it's not a first-person narrator. You want that narrator to be unique to the story that you were telling. And so, in a business setting, when you're doing thought leadership writing, because I've done so much thought leadership writing for other people over the years, it is my job to make sure that the thing that is going to be published under their name sounds like it was written by them. So to give you a, excuse me, to give you a really concrete example, many, many years ago, I worked with a founder who was born in India, but had been educated in the UK. His business was based both in the UK and in Silicon Valley. And then he decided to, you know, throw an extra wrench into the gears by moving to Singapore. And so he had this like very worldly experience, but because of his both his background and his education, he had a very distinct way of speaking. You know, he had what people think of, you know, as a an Indian accent. There are all sorts of regionalisms. It's a huge country, but but to just to say that he had an Indian accent to like really flatten that the way that we can say somebody has an American accent and there are tons of regionalisms there too. Um, but because he'd been educated in the UK, there were certain words that he would say that had more of what one would think of as a British pronunciation. But he also, because of his formal education, had a very formal way of speaking too. So I noticed over the course of talking to him that he didn't use a lot of contractions. He was a young guy, he was in his his early 30s, but he didn't use a lot of contractions when he was speaking. So it was always cannot, not can't, do not, not don't. And so when I was writing for him, one of the things that I would do is make sure I took all of those contractions out, unless there was something that like really sounded weird. It to, you know, because I also like to read things out loud when I'm writing them to see how they sound, like how they land on the ear. And so sometimes it would be this this contraction really needs to stay. But I would usually, after I do a draft for something I was writing for him, do a find on my word processing software and just search for the apostrophe. And if it was a possessive apostrophe, it could stay. Like we needed those possessive apostrophes. But if it was a contraction, really evaluating whether this was a contraction that sounds like something that he would say, or whether I should use the entire the full compound two words in order to speak more in his voice. So that's you know, that's just one of those little things that people pick up on. And that honestly at this point, uh you can put all of the data into to chat GPT, like create your custom GPT, make it understand the way you write and what your expertise is. It's not going to catch something like that. It's just really not because it's not human and it doesn't have that ear.

SPEAKER_01 12:50

That's right. That's a really good example. I'm so glad you shared that because uh people people have ideas that that of the concept of why it is wrong or what this AI slop is, but don't have any concrete examples. Yeah, why? Why what makes the human part so different? And I think you've captured that so so well. Um that's really, really cool.

How Voice Shows Up On Page

SPEAKER_01 13:18

You said you were diagnosed with ADHD much later.

SPEAKER_00 13:21

Yes. Yeah, I was in my 30s. It was it was what happened? Like what happened? So all of my life, um, there were some some kind of markers that we now know are markers in women uh that were just kind of attributed to me being a gifted kid. And I was I was also the oldest daughter. And so we know all of these things about like oldest daughter behavior and and like the the ways that they act and the way that gifted kids are kind of marked from a young age. So I was a very enthusiastic reader. From again, I taught myself to read at four. And from that point, there was always a book in my hand when I was like, I would go to the dentist or the orthodontist, and everybody wanted to talk to me about what I was reading. Cause like I was the girl with books, and I often had more than one with me because I would either finish one really fast and and need something else, or I'd be like, okay, I'm I'm at a good stopping point. So now I've my mood has shifted and I want to read this other book. Um so, so you know, I was a good, I was a good reader, I was a really good writer, and I loved school. And so nobody thought that a kid with ADHD would be performing well at school at that time. Because at the time, what we had as that kind of way that ADHD presented itself was what we think of in in now is the way that it presents in boys, where it's more hyperactivity than hyper focus. And so the way that I was able to hyperfocus, nobody, nobody suspected was ADHD. But if you look back, I had the markers there. I am very deadline driven, which means I'm a procrastinator. Like I have, I have a deadline and I meet my deadlines. I always, always meet my deadlines, but I am working up until the last minute. And I probably started like 24 hours before the deadline. Um I'm I'm a night owl. Uh, and it's it is bedtime sleep procrastination, really, that that I've learned. Uh I I thrive in the late night hours because it's my time. I get to do the things that I want to do. Um, there are, you know, there are a couple of other things. I'm terrible at opening my mail, like really bad about opening my mail. I get it out of the mailbox and then it piles up in my house and I'm just blind to it. And and so, so there are all of these things where, you know, like taken in combination, it's probably ADHD, but nobody ever really put it together until during the pandemic when all of a sudden these meme accounts started up that were like, you know, women with ADHD meme accounts, and be like, oh, that sounds like me. Hmm, that sounds like me. And one day I was talking to my therapist, and I think also during the pandemic, we were all because we were all working in a different way, and we our schedules were different, and the way that we interacted with people was different. And so that was that was surfacing a lot of things for us. We were noticing things about ourselves. And so I was talking to my therapist one day, and I said, you know, I was looking at this like this meme account, and I just wanted to like read to you what I what I discovered. And my therapist's like, oh, so you're ready to have this conversation. I was like, What do you mean? She's like, I have thought that it was possible that you had ADHD for a couple of years now, but the last time I brought it up, you didn't seem receptive to it. It's like, I don't remember you bringing it up. She's like, Yeah, bingo. So um I didn't at the time, and still really, it's very hard to go through the entire diagnostic process. Um, and in and at, you know, at the time it was hard to do anything. Like the backlogs on literally everything 2020, 2021, were so huge. So my therapist just said, if it's okay with you, what I would like to do is write a note to your doctor and say, like, this is what I've noticed. I've been seeing you for several years now. I would recommend that you try going on medication to to kind of circumvent the the process. And so my GP, who was not a psychopharmacologist, saw the note and was like, okay, what do you want to try? It's like, I don't know. Adderall's the brand name that I'm thinking of. So let's start with that. And it like, it was like a switch turned off, or like I, or, or you know, when you when you hit like the mute pedal on a piano, it was so quick for me that you know, out the first couple of days your body's going crazy because now you're on a stimulant and so you don't quite know what to do. But like once I got over those first couple of days, it was like I can sit here. Normally my morning was like, okay, I've got to, you know, I'm gonna have breakfast and I'm gonna scroll through social media and I'm gonna do these things. And then it's 10 30 in the morning and all of a sudden I'm sitting at my computer for the first time. And I noticed that like I could sit down at my computer and just work. I could for for hours. Um, now you know the problem is then like you forget to go to get up and go to the bathroom or you forget to eat or all of those things. But it it was such a big switch for me. And so then I was on Standard Release generic Adderall. So I just had a bottle in my medicine cabinet that said amphetamines, which is a really fun thing until I tried to get pregnant. And when I started trying to get pregnant, my doctor, I was due for a refill. My doctor's like, nope, you get one or the other. Um you had to make a choice. So I went, I went off of it, and I could have gone on to a non-stimulant form at that time, but I was already I was already taking well butrene, which you know, it's it's an antidepression, anti-anxiety, sometimes helps with ADHD. So she said, you know, you're already on this. I don't want to throw something else into the mix because this is potentially counterindicated for pregnancy. It's one of those drugs where like the benefits of staying on it generally outweigh the potential side effects that you can have during pregnancy, but let's not throw something else in the mix. And so then got pregnant. So I was, I was off of Adderall for, you know, however long it took me to get pregnant, off of Adderall for the entire pregnancy, off of Adderall for 14 months while I was breastfeeding. And then my I went to the doctor and I said, I need something, but I don't know that I want to go back on Adderall because it's hard to get. Uh, it's right now, right now, currently, there is an Adderall shortage. Uh, and you have to go, like, because it's a controlled substance, you have to get go through extra hoops to get your prescriptions and changes to to healthcare have meant like I used to be able to do that by telehealth, but now they're saying, No, I actually have to go into the office. And so they put me on a non-stimulant for a while and I didn't love it. Um you can feel the difference.

SPEAKER_01 19:12

I think for you, it's a notable yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:16

And and I I could, I know, you know, I went from Adderall to nothing to this, so it was kind of still better than nothing. Yeah, but I didn't, I was able to to kind of focus more, but I didn't have those like intense moments of hyperfocus where I could just like feel the medicine kicking in. And fun side effect of the medication that I was on was that it gave me terrible heartburn. And it was like, I I've just gone through several a couple of years of not feeling like I had complete control of my body from trying to conceive and then being pregnant and then breastfeeding. Like I and I'm a yoga teacher, so like control of my body is very important. Yeah. And so, so it's like I I don't like the way that I feel when I'm on this. So talked to my doctor, she said, You're right, let's put you back on Adderall, right as this latest shortage has uh has kicked in. So I have been unmedicated for the last couple of months. Uh, and what that means is that I have to really like lasso that hyper focus, those moments of hyperfocus when they come. So sometimes it comes at one o'clock in the morning. Sometimes it's like I am on my way up to bed and I have a thought, and then I'm I'm gonna sit down at my desk and I'm going to write that down. And then it's two hours later and I'm still working because that's when that hyperfocus hit me. And again, like I'm a night owl. So that's that's not unusual that it would happen at that time. But it's also giving myself the grace to say sometimes I sit down at my my desk. There's some days, and it's just like my my brain is not braining. I I cannot do this work right now. I need to, I need to either do the fun thing, which lately for me has been, I'm gonna stop the client work and work on my novel instead, or I need to get up and and move my body. So I need to to go lift something heavy, or I need to go on a long walk, or I need to go do some yoga. And because we know that like exercise releases dopamine, and dopamine is what people with ADHD need. And so sometimes that's what it takes for me to get into the hyperfocus. And sometimes it's just like, you know what, I'm gonna play with my son. I'm I there's there's no way that I'm gonna be able to get anything done. I'm gonna play with my son.

SPEAKER_01 21:05

I completely relate. I mean, that is that, and I know there's going to be a lot of women that relate to that, probably uh still undiagnosed. Yes. I don't know how you approach that, but uh, but I love that. Um, I

Late ADHD Diagnosis And Medication

SPEAKER_01 21:25

love that. Tell me about your novel. Okay, sorry, I wanted to go a different direction, but now I'm just really interested and I want to hear about the circle.

SPEAKER_00 21:33

So when I was in college, um, this is this this this is going to date me a little bit. So I graduated college in 2006. The Kentucky Derby in 2006 was won by a horse called Barbaro. And Barbaro had been then the favorite to win the triple crown. This was an incredible horse. You could just look at this horse. And okay, I grew up in West Texas, but we were not a horse family. Like I grew up in a city. Um, my my dad's family, my dad grew up on a farm, his family had horses. Like I've been around horses, but my dad also didn't really trust horses. So I didn't like I I never took riding lessons or anything, but I knew plenty of horse girls. Uh and then we would we would go see the family like in the the farm area around El Paso, and uh sometimes we would get to ride horses. Uh so I always I always love the Kentucky Derby. Like I love I love it as the for the pageantry, I love it as like this big event. And so I watch it almost every year. And this horse, Barbara was just he was incredible, he was beautiful, and everybody's like, this is this is gonna be the horse. And at the time there hadn't been a triple crown winner in I think like 30 years. Um and then we get to the second race of the triple crown. There's some problems in the gates, like before they even start the race, and Barbara breaks an ankle. And so normally, like if you know horses or if you like have even seen a movie that involves horses, you know that if a horse breaks its leg, usually they euthanize the horse. But this horse was so valuable. We're talking millions of dollars that this horse was worth. And even if it was never going to run again, the horse was going to be valuable as a stud horse. Thoroughbred horses, unlike every other horse breed, must conceive by live cover. So the horses have to actually be together and have sex. So they couldn't just like figure out some way of extracting as many specimens as they could from this horse to inseminate other horses, and and they needed to keep this horse alive for breeding. So meanwhile, I'm I'm here in Philadelphia. I'm in a situationship with a guy who's in vet school and he's doing his large animal rotation in in the Philadelphia suburbs, part of part of the Penn Vet program. And Barbaro is taken there.

unknown 23:40

What?

SPEAKER_00 23:41

So yeah. Yeah. So, so like when I went to go visit him, I had to sign an NDA because I was blogging at the time. I was, I was, I just graduated, I think, by this point, but I so I was blogging and I had to sign an NDA and like even to be on the premises. I never actually got to see the horse. Uh, but even to to like go see this guy, I had to sign the NDA. Um, but but so, and he would tell me about what was going on and the treatment. And they were, you know, they were coming up with all these different ways to try and get this horse to heal and and keep this horse alive. Um and ultimately they didn't, and it's not because of the initial injury. He developed something called laminitis, which I I don't even entirely understand. It's something about where they're like the the calcium that helps their hooves grow kind of like invades the rest of their body somehow. So, but so anyway, like I I've thought about this horse many, many times over the years. And I have a good friend who's a literary agent who I was telling this to. And I I had this idea of doing like a if you've ever seen the movie, it's a mad, mad, mad, mad world, or for the millennials, the movie Rat Race with Seth Green, uh, where it's this, you know, everybody's like multiple people running around trying to get to this treasure first. And I'd had this thought, like, what if the treasure is the horse? Like, what if if it is a bunch of people who are trying to get their horses to this horse to hopefully get their horse like pregnant by this horse for his like one last opportunity before they they completely put him out to pasture? Yeah. But I couldn't figure out how to how to write it in that way. And so I kind of put it aside, and my my friend, the agent, would occasionally be like, hey, what's going on there? And be like, I don't know. I've got other, I've got other ideas, we'll talk. So then when my when I was pregnant, uh, I had a really challenging pregnancy. And my third trimester, I had to basically sleep sitting up on my sofa uh because I dislocated multiple ribs. Oh my God. Yes, yeah. I am hypermobile and the hormone that your body produces called relaxin, that is meant to like help your joints get more mobile to prepare for both the expansion that you need for pregnancy and then for delivery. My body didn't need that. And so it did crazy things. We don't realize that our ribs are actually they're they're mobile, they're joints. And so I got in a cold and I coughed on two separate occasions and just coughing dislocated ribs. So I had to sit, and you know, you can't do anything for an injured rib when you're pregnant because they can't like wrap you up. They so they just sent me home with like extra strength Tylenol and said to, you know, keep heat on it. So I was having trouble sleeping. I was sleeping, sitting up, and I downloaded an audiobook because it's like I didn't want to turn the TV on. I didn't want the bright light. Um, listening to music wasn't it just wasn't doing enough for me. So I downloaded an audiobook and I then went on what continues to be an insane audiobook marathon. I'm up to like, I think I'm over 130 books just this year alone, audiobooks. Um, and so, but but I l I wound up listening to a lot of of romance, which had not been a genre that I was particularly into before. I had a grandmother who had a massive collection of Harlequin novels. And so, like, I got a lot of education uh when I'd be in her house, which she would she would take her nap. Um, but it was not, it was not, I was not reading contemporary romance at the time. You know, I have an MFA, so like I have this, you know, I was thinking like literature. I was, I I wanted to only read literature, but I actually wasn't reading that much at all at the time. And so it was like, I will read romance novels, and I think I've the first one was almost an accident. I I picked this book up and I came to realize after that this is like, oh, this is a romance novel that every like this is a romance writer that everybody knows. I didn't know who she was, but I picked this book and was like, I really liked this. Like it is, it's a real compelling book that also has some like very steamy stuff happening. And so then I like I did this deep dive into romance. It's still, it's probably like the top genre that I listened to if you look through my my records over the last three years. Um and one day after my son was born, I messaged my friend, the the agent, and I said, Hey, so remember that book that I pitched you like five years ago and that I haven't been able to do anything. What if I made it into a road trip romance novel? Uh oh. He was like, he was like, Yes, that, write that, write that, write, right, write that. So I said, okay, well, I want to I want to outline it. And I've I never outline things. I I'm a very like I write very fluidly. I write from start to finish, but I've never written a novel before. I took one novel writing class in in grad school. It did not go well. I did not have a particularly supportive teacher. Um so I'm I'm writing this as somebody who has listened to or you know read, because when we listen to audiobooks and when we read, it lights up the same parts of our brain. Uh, but I've consumed enough romance that I understand the structure, I understand the way that this works, and I have the background as a creative writer to like be able to write the multiple personas that you often see in a romance novel. And so I sent the outline to my friend, and his wife was about to have a baby. Uh, I think he actually got back to me the day that she went into labor uh with some thoughts, but most of his thoughts were like, Oh, this is great. I've never, you know, this this is very novel. There's there aren't any romance novels that I'm aware of. There are, there are like the the rural novels where like, you know, a city girl winds up in the in the country with a cowboy. And then there's like Elsie Silver, who I love, who um is a Canadian writer and she's written a lot of romance novels that like there's one that's at a a horse farm uh and they're they're running, you know, they they've so they've got raced horses, but there's not it's not in this like breeding world and there's not the road trip aspect and everything. He's so he's just like, I haven't seen anything like this before. I love it. Here are some thoughts, go right. And so for the last year, just like a couple hours a week, I've been working on this this novel, and uh I am about two-thirds of the way through. I'm hoping to have to be finished with my first draft in the next couple of months, and then then the real work begins, right? Because I'm also I've always been a like I've always been a one draft, a one draft writer. Uh, I will go through and do like small changes, but I write when I'm writing for myself, not when I'm writing for other people. When I'm writing for myself, I write the way that I think, I write the way that I speak. And so I I write the story from the start to the end. And then, you know, I might do things like move a paragraph around, that's but I've never, I've never really truly redrafting. I took one class when I was doing my MFA where we were supposed to work on one piece throughout the entire year. And that was it's the hardest class I ever took because the idea was that you will probably, when you when you get into professional writing, you're going to have people who are asking you to to write things and to cut things and to move things around and to to you know fill out more information that wasn't in there. And so it was a nonfiction class. And I I did wind up publishing the piece that I worked on. Um, but it was it was really challenging for me. So now, you know, with a novel, and I've been given a very strict word count that I've already surpassed. So so that's gonna be the that's gonna be number one, is just like cutting things out, killing lots of darlings. Um, but you know, then then you go through the alpha readers and the beta readers and everything before I even let my my agent friend see this because when he he has a lot of faith in me. And so what I give him, when when I give him something, I want it to be in really good shape.

SPEAKER_01 30:44

Yeah. Oh my god, that is so exciting. That is like an end-of-year present to yourself almost. Yes. Well, you know, maybe the first draft. That is so, so, so exciting. Um, so you've always been in writing, you've always been a reader.

A Novel Born From Barbaro

SPEAKER_01 31:00

And how are you like that today within your business? What like what you do your business now, but do you get to be so expressive in all these ways in your business?

SPEAKER_00 31:12

Yeah. So I have um I have an account on Medium where I have over the years written a couple of things that went like mega viral. And then the last thing that I wrote on Medium was a follow-up to one of the pieces that I had written that went viral, and I was like, this is gonna go viral too. And I got like no audience on it. So, you know, it really it depends. And also, it had been a while since I had written on Medium, and so I'm sure like algorithm changes it. I was busy raising a baby. So, so there were things that I missed. But I, you know, I I'm still writing about I'm still doing the nonfiction writing in ways that touch my business. Um, I wrote a piece during during the pandemic again about the importance of seeing the people that you're working with as human beings. We are literally like, I am looking into your house right now, you are looking into my house right now. There was no separation between work life and home life. And even though we could say, like, you've got to work from nine to five, you've got to be available during those times, whatever. Like, people have their kids running around their house. They've got, I can see your pet behind you. Yeah. Um, which one is it?

SPEAKER_01 32:13

Oh, both of them.

SPEAKER_00 32:14

Um, because I know two. Like, yeah. Um, but you know, and it all started because somebody had posted on in like a Facebook group that I was in, like, how do I tell my employees to to lock their cats out when they're on a Zoom because it's not professional? And that person just got completely boned in the comments. Everybody was like, What are you talking about? This is the best part of being on Zoom. I want to see everybody's pets. Yeah. But that that person had put professionalism above humanity. And so I wrote, I wrote this piece that wound up like going everywhere talking about it's how it's really time that we rethink the idea of professionalism. And so, even though that's not really my wheelhouse, like I'm not an HR person, but I am I am a human being whose entire business really relies on how do we relate to people as humans in a professional context.

SPEAKER_02 33:04

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 33:04

My my thesis of the work that I do is how can, you know, you, a service provider who works in a crowded industry, so you're competing against, you know, tens or dozens or hundreds of people who do basically the same thing that you do and have the same education as you and charge the same rates as you, how do you find the clients that you want to work with? And it's not by putting your resume out there, it's not by hanging something on the wall that shows your prestigious degree, it's by giving a little bit of yourself, of showing who you are so that you can show how you relate to somebody as a person. And they feel good about spending their time or their money or their energy on you because they know that the two of you can relate. Yeah. So, so that's, you know, and but that like that all starts with writing. That's that's the way that people are finding those people who are that like that perfect service provider for them because they're showing who they are as people is through their website. It's through their thought leadership that's been published other places. You're not, I mean, when I'm looking for an attorney, I'm not gonna make 20 calls to different attorneys and say, like, who do I vibe with the best? But I hired an attorney based on his blog because he not only had he written knowledgeably about an issue that I was dealing with at the time, but I like the way that he wrote. I like the way that he talked about his family in the way that he was writing. Like he would he would kind of start with an anecdote and talk, you know, I was talking to my grandson about this thing the other day, and that reminded me of this, you know, it was he was an employment lawyer. So like it reminded me of the way that we uh handled these situations in the office or whatever it was. And I wish that he had not retired because I referred this guy to everybody after that. But it was really just about him coming across as an authentic human with a voice that shone through his content. And he was, I mean, this guy was out in this like I drove almost an hour to get to this guy's office. He was in the suburbs. I live in Center City, Philadelphia. We have my husband is an attorney, we have so many attorneys in this city. And I drove out to the suburbs of Philadelphia because I liked this guy so much, based on first his writing and then an initial phone call that we'd had. And I I hired him. I used him for a couple of different matters that I had to deal with. And he was fantastic. And so I think that if we are able to to like in the writing that I do, I'm very unfiltered. There are certain things that I still kind of withhold. I don't like I don't use my son's name when I'm writing or when I'm when I'm doing these interviews. It's pretty easy to find, but uh, but I don't, I don't pronounce it out there. Right. Um you know, so so there are still things that we can withhold. Being being somebody who's like putting yourself out there as a human being in a business context does not mean that you're writing a memoir. It doesn't mean that you're like ripping your heart out of your chest and holding it out to everybody and saying, please take this, hold this for me. Um but it it does mean that you're you're giving a little bit of your your humanness to the public so that they can then gauge the whether you are the right person to work with. Right. That's a very long answer to the question.

SPEAKER_01 36:00

You know, I really appreciated that though. Uh, and I know the listeners will too, because it's uh it is the differentiator, it is marketing, um, but said very well, in my opinion. Who's your ideal client?

SPEAKER_00 36:15

So my ideal client is service providers who work in these crowded industries. So we're talking accountants, lawyers, small firm lawyers, coaches, therapists, financial advisors. Uh, you know, it can kind of go into like health and fitness, maybe if you're a personal trainer, but it's it's people who work in a place where, first of all, there are a lot of individuals who are doing the same thing that you do as solo practitioners or as small business owners. But then there are also corporations that have those offerings. So you're talking about a lawyer who works solo with a paralegal or who maybe has two or three lawyers at their firm versus a firm that has 500 lawyers across the country. But you do the same sort of work and you are able to deliver the same sort of results. And for some people, they want like all of the infrastructure that comes with that big firm. But for other people, when they are deciding, do I go with this small firm or do I go with the big firm? They're gonna look and say, okay, this guy went to Harvard, this guy went to Harvard, like, cool. What is this guy? What can this guy, this this small offer, it's a small office, offer me? And sometimes it's just the personalized attention, and that's enough. But I I worked with an attorney a couple of years ago, he's an immigration attorney, and his parents were immigrants. And so his story started with watching his parents go through the convoluted American immigration process. And, you know, they at least had the advantage of of being pretty good English speakers. But but if you watch your parents go through that and you've also had to like be a child who is also translating legal documents for them, uh, you know, that's that's that's another thing that you can kind of contribute to the story. But telling that story is what allows you to put yourself out there. And so I love working with these people who are competing against other people of their size and large corporations who have the infrastructure and the money and the years and years of of history doing that same thing and they're trying to establish themselves as an alternative path, as somebody who you again, as as the client can feel really good about working with. Um, and beyond like working with service providers generally, I love working with women and minority business owners and service providers because they've often been in positions where they've come up in the corporate world in a way that they were always part of the team. And so they didn't get comfortable using I language. It was always we language. So, you know, we collectively did this, we launched this, we whatever. And suddenly they're in a position where they need to market themselves, they need to sell themselves, they need to stand out, stand on their own expertise. And so, so to get them comfortable with saying, like, here is my

Marketing That Sounds Like You

SPEAKER_00 38:45

story, here's what I personally am able to do for you, here's what I have done for clients in the past, it takes a big shift in mindset that a lot of men are just cis, and I'm talking cis men, um, have been very like it's it culturally ingrained in them that they can step forward and start saying I right away in a way that that women and minorities uh and people from other marginalized communities maybe necessarily have not been able to do that in the past.

SPEAKER_01 39:13

Fair enough. Fair enough. Um well, I appreciate you and this conversation. Every episode ends about the same. And uh so here I'm gonna pose the question to you. What is, although again, as usual, the whole episode ends up being advice. Sure. What piece of advice would you give to the listeners that you feel that they need to hear right now?

SPEAKER_00 39:38

So I think that a lot of people right now, this is, you know, we're in in September of 2026 as we're recording this. Right now, a lot of people are seeing AI as the be all end all. It's the solution to all of their problems. They're going to build their websites on it, they're going to write all of their copy on it, they're going to cede that part of themselves to it. And I will say, you know, having a website is better than having no website. Having some content is better than having no content. But when you are creating a website on Claude, it's going to look the same as everybody else's. It's going to sound the same as everybody else's, even if you are not in the same industry. A friend of mine uh lives in a different neighborhood in Philadelphia and he's got a barber shop on one corner, a sandwich shop on the other. And he says their websites look the same. Like you could not tell them apart until you actually get to like the services page or the menu page. And so, so we've all kind of just given up this part of ourselves. We've we've seeded this part of our humanity to the homogenization of language that comes with AI. And so the biggest piece of advice that I would tell people is take a little bit more time because when you're when you're prompting and everything, you're you're actually using a lot of time and a lot of energy anyway, and you're paying for your tokens. So instead, take some time and think about how you can tell your story. And you don't have to be a natural writer, like you can hire somebody like me to help you with the actual content that's going out there. But think about your story and what it is that makes you unique and what it is that you can you can put out into the world that you are comfortable sharing, but that also gives that unique insight, that little spark into who you are. And, you know, from a practical perspective, the advice that I give a lot of people is instead of spending at your computer, spending time at your computer typing in your prompts, go on a walk, take your phone or take a digital recorder with you, talk into it, tell your story into that, then come back and feed it into your transcription software, which yes, I recognize probably as an AI-based platform. Um, but then you have your story in writing and it is exclusively from you. It is in literally in your voice because you are the person who said all of those words. And then you have a passable first draft that just needs to be cleaned up. So even if you don't have the budget to work with a service provider like me, you have something that is going to be uniquely yours.

SPEAKER_01 41:51

That is brilliant advice. Take your time and give it care. I love that.

SPEAKER_02 41:58

Oh, I love that.

Final Takeaways And How To Share

SPEAKER_01 42:47

Jill just gave us a masterclass in why words matter, not just what you say, but how only you could have said it. Here's what I keep thinking about. Her explanation of voice, that you could hand someone a page of Hemingway with no cover and they'd know. That's not a writing trick, that's identity on the page. And her point about we language versus I language stuck with me too. How many of us were trained our whole careers to disappear into the team, right up until the moment we had to sell ourselves? And can we talk about the ADHD story? Diagnosed in her 30s after a therapist finally said, I've bought this for years. You just weren't ready to hear it. If that's you or if someone you love, I hope this gave you a little more language for it. Now here's how you can help spread the word. If this episode hit you, share it with someone building a personal brand who's leaning a little too hard on a chat bot right now. Send it, post it, drop it in the group chat. And if you're loving She Sweet Society and want to support the show, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or anywhere you listen. It takes 30 seconds and helps more women find these conversations. Your life is your stories to tell. And Jill's reminds us that the story only works if you're the one telling it. Until next time, keep living your truth and remember your life is your story to tell. Why not make it exceptional?