I’ll be honest. When AI exploded onto the scene, I was overwhelmed and a little hesitant.

And I don’t think I was alone in that. There was so much fear swirling around. Where is this information going? Who has access to it? Can I really trust this with anything related to my clients? The noise was loud and honestly, a lot of it was valid.

I had been dabbling more than Angie had, so I was a little more comfortable going in, but I was no expert. When someone in our community asked us about AI, Angie and I were both feeling the overwhelm of it enough that we decided to bring in our AI expert Bower Himes for a masterclass inside the Practice Lab. Something shifted for me after that. I finally had enough context to just keep going.

So I did. And I kept going back.

At first I was using it exactly like Google. Type in a question, get an answer, move on. But I noticed pretty quickly that something was different. It wasn’t just pulling up information it was actually engaging with what I was asking. That's what made me want to keep dabbling.

Then everyone on social media started screaming about prompts. Prompt packs, prompt libraries, prompt masterclasses. So naturally I thought, okay, that must be the missing piece.

It wasn’t. It’s not all about the prompt.

What I figured out is that AI is only as good as the context you give it before you ever ask it anything. Stop Googling with it. Start talking to it. Big difference.

Here is what that actually looks like:

If you’re not sure where to start. Try this:

Test it on something low stakes where you already know what good looks like. Ask it to help you write a follow-up email to a client. Ask it to sum up a concept you teach. See how it does. When you can check the output because you already know the subject, you start to get a feel for what it is good at and where it falls short. That is how you build confidence without the risk.

Tell it what tone you need.

I noticed pretty quickly that AI is always very nice. Encouraging, validating, glass-half full. And honestly, that is not always what I need or want. So I started telling it the tone I wanted. For me, that meant asking it to be brutally honest, not kind, not encouraging, just straight with me. But you might want something different. More direct. More like a brainstorm partner. Whatever it is, tell it. That one change makes a huge difference in what comes back.

Ask it to push back on your ideas.

Paste in a plan, an offer, a decision you are sitting with, and tell it to argue against you. Tell me what’s wrong with this. Give me the worst case. It’s like having a thinking partner on call who has no problem telling you the truth.

Use it to poke holes in your thinking.

Similar but different. This is less about a specific idea and more about going deeper. Think out loud at it and ask it to show you what you are missing. As coaches we are really good at doing this for our clients, and it is surprisingly good at doing it for us.

There’s more. Angie and I covered a lot more in the monthly Community Call inside the Practice Lab this month, including a tip from Angie that has nothing to do with coaching content at all. We talked about it in the video, go check it out.

And honestly, we did the AI session because someone in the community asked us about it. That is how we work inside SEAR. You tell us what you need and we go find the best way to bring it to you. Which is also exactly how our new AI course came to be. More on that coming soon!