AI Meets Authenticity: Amplify Your Voice with Laura T.

In this episode, I dive into the conversation around AI and authenticity. Many people worry that using AI, like ChatGPT, will make them sound robotic or replace their individuality. I share my personal approach and philosophy: AI is a tool, not a takeover. I walk through my 90/10 rule for content refinement, showing how AI can help organize ideas, polish writing, and repurpose messages while still requiring you to bring discernment, faith, and personality. I also offer five practical ways to use AI to amplify your brand voice—from turning brain dumps into clear messaging to capturing your unique tone with custom instructions. This episode is about using AI with intention, creating boundaries, and keeping your humanity at the center so you can sound more like the person you’re becoming, not less.

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 Laura T.🧡💚💙
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Transcript

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I'm Malara Templeton, founder and chief instigator at 30 Second Success. And this is the 30 Second Success podcast, where we ditch the bitch and start connecting with clarity, confidence, and compassion. Today we're talking about a topic that's exciting, intimidating, and just a little controversial in some circles. But first, if you are ready to fully step into your voice and communicate what you know you've been called to do, the Brand Success Hub gives you the clarity, support, and direction to do that without overcomplicating the process. So head on over to 30secondsuccess.com/slash hub to learn more. So, yes, today we are talking about something that's exciting, intimidating, and controversial in some circles, and that is AI, specifically ChatGPT. If you've ever thought is AI going to make everything sound the same, I don't want to lose my voice. I don't even know where to start with this thing. You're in the right place. We're going to talk about how AI used wisely can actually help you sound more like you, not less. This is AI Meets Authenticity. And yes, they can be friends. So let's take the fear and the myths around AI and break them down. So let's the elephant in the room. A lot of people are quietly thinking: is AI going to replace me? Will my content sound robotic? And if I use Chat GPT, am I cheating? Here's my stance: AI is a tool, not a takeover. So it's like a supercharged assistant. It can help you brainstorm. It can organize your thoughts and it can speed up your workflows, but it cannot replace your lived experience. It can't replace your heart, your faith, or your values. And it certainly can't replace your discernment. And it shouldn't. The danger isn't AI itself. It's using AI without boundaries, without intention, or without your own voice leading the way. So what's in that good at? And what can all of you do? So let's separate the roles. So what are I as great at? So for instance, turning a brain dump into a structured outline. I love doing that. That's one of my favorite things to do when I'm out walking. I will do a brain dump. I have these ideas that come to me, especially when I'm walking. I will just put them in there and I'll say, use keep this as a placeholder and I'll go back to it later and I'll play with it, how I what I wanted to do with it, tell it what I want to do with it. So it's really great for that. It's also great for generating options and variations and starting points on different ideas that you might have. It's also great on helping you to repurpose content from different platforms or updating some older content that may just feel a little bit outdated and you just want to bring it up, you know, free, give, give it a refresh, right? Offering language ideas you might not have thought about, right? There's a different direction that you can go in sometimes with what you're writing, and you may you may want to take it in a different direction and just kind of you know soften it a little bit or make it a little bit more sexy and just bring a little bit different personality. So the language ideas are always fun, and I love different, you know, asking AI's opinion on how you can make something and still have it sound like you. So it can also act like a sounding board. I love asking it to act as if. And I love using those prompts. So what only you can do, right? You can you are responsible for deciding what's true and what's not true, right? And only you can align content with your faith, your values, and your vision. And only you can share the personal stories that make your brand real. And only you bring compassion, conviction, and nuance to everything that you create within an AI platform. And say, that's not quite me. You can say, that's not quite me. Let's adjust it, right? This doesn't feel right. You have you have the control over what you use or don't use from the AI platform. AI can draft the words, but only you can bring the weight behind them. So here's something I like to do. I like to use what I call the 90-10 rule. About 90% of what AI gives you can be useful, but the top 10%, the refinement, the alignment, the truth check, that's your responsibility. So when, but when your prompts are strong and detailed, you can push that closer to a 95% rule, but it's never 100% zero, right? It's never 100% accurate. You never abdicate your role. You are responsible for for reviewing that content. And I will tell you, I have seen people take literally, if you're familiar with ChatGPT, it has a it has a really sweet way of telling you, oh, that was a really good question. I like how you did this. So here's here's what I think would would really meet your criteria, and then it'll give you the answer. And then after that, it'll give you some ideas of what to do next. I've actually seen people copy paste that whole thing, with the exception of their original question, that whole piece with the you know, the the flowery, you did a great job message, and the here's what you could do next message. Put the whole thing into LinkedIn without without thinking about it, right? That it's just and now everybody knows that you're using AI. And you but so you need to really think about what you're sharing, what you're cutting and pasting. You need to go and edit it, make sure that it sounds like you. It's using words that you would normally use. And that comes with that comes with responsibility. That's your responsibility. You are responsible for making sure that you check it and that it's accurate and it sounds like you. That's where the authenticity comes in. So, as a quick reminder, if you're enjoying this episode, please take a moment to like, follow, and subscribe so that you don't miss another episode. Your support helps us reach more people with stories and strategies that inspire real connection because when you like and subscribe, the algorithm sends it out to more people. So I would really appreciate your love. So authentic authentic ways to use chat GPT in your brand are always coming up. It's something a lot of people will share. They talk about the authentic ways that you can use Chat GPT in your brand, that you can use different AI platforms. There are a lot of practical ways to do it. So let's get very practical here. Here are five ways you can use ChatGPT to support your brand voice. So turn you know brain dumps into clear messaging. You can say, here's a messy brain dump about what I want to say in my next LinkedIn post. Please turn this into a clear conversational post. That sounds like a confident, compassionate brand communication strategist. So now you're not starting with a blank page. You're starting from you, right? And it's organized. So if you if you kind of like throw a whole bunch of stuff into there, make sure that you tell it what you wanted to do. Like I said, sometimes when I'm walking, I will just do a brain dump. I'm like, oh my gosh, here's a really great story. Just keep this as a placeholder for now. We'll get back to it later. I'm not sure what I want to do with it. Or I'll say, here is an amazing analogy. Here's the story. I want to turn this into a great post for LinkedIn or an article for my for my inspo or for Substack or help me outline this for a section of my book. I will take the time to tell it what I wanted to do with it. Or sometimes I'll just say, I'm not sure what I want to do with this. Just keep it as a placeholder for now. Just hold on to it, right? So I can always come back to it. So repurpose one message across multiple platforms. So this is point number two. So you might say, turn this podcast outline into a LinkedIn post or an Instagram caption and a short email teaser all in the same brand voice. You can create multiple pieces of content in one thread on ChatGPT. You could actually ask it for a suite. Once you've established what you like to do with your content, you could say, okay, create, you know, you utilize this content, create the suite of content that I need for LinkedIn, Instagram, email, brand, you know, everything, all of my brand voice. Well, it should know what your brand voice is already. If you have your um your ChatGPT custom instructions set up, and that's something else that I've already spoken about. If you are not familiar with the custom instructions, or if you do not have your brand voice set up already in ChatGPT, definitely check out the brand success of. I talk about it all the time because I think that's one of the key elements of working with AI is helping AI understand exactly who you are so that you don't have to keep repeating it every time you create a new product. So creating this, right? Turning this, turning your content into key elements, different things that you can use it for, repurposing as a repurposing tool. This helps you stay consistent without reinventing the wheel every time. So point number three, draft questions and conversation starters. I love this, especially for my people who love to network. If you're doing interviews, networking, and leading workshops, this is a great way to get more intentional around the work that you're doing. So one of the things that you can ask it is create five thoughtful open-ended questions I can ask Christian business owners about how they communicate their faith in their work using a tone that's encouraging, direct, and non-preachy. This is this is it, guys. This is this is a great prompt. This is a prompt that I use. And so, you know, now you've got the conversational fuel ready to go. You can actually have that conversational outline so that your dialogue goes deeper because you've got these questions that are very intentional. You can actually help ask it to help you create an outline for leading a workshop. So, point number four, polish, don't replace. You, you know, you can write a first draft and then say, please refine this for clarity and flow while keeping your tone warm, confident, encouraging. Right? You stay the author. AI becomes your editor. And that's the power behind this, right? I love asking this. This is great. Let's go a little deeper. I, you know, let's let's you know address this from a faith, faith-based event, you know, purpose. And let's go deeper on what I want to say here from a Christian perspective. And it for me, it's really about connecting and going deeper. So I love when I when we're doing the first draft, and I'm like, yeah, that's okay. Maybe it doesn't sound as fun and exciting as I wanted it to be, right? I it sounds too deep or intense, you know. Let's get a little bit more light around this. So don't be afraid to ask it to readdress it, right? First draft, second draft, third draft. It's amazing how the content gets really intentional. So, point number five, capture and codify, codify your brand voice. You can feed it your posts and blogs and emails and asks, analyze my writing and describe my brand voice in five adjectives. Then use that style in future responses. This helps ChatGPT learn how you naturally communicate. So it supports your voice instead of flattening it. When you use AI to support your voice instead of shortcut it, you actually sound more like you, not less. So it's really important to train AI to honor your voice, and that's what we're talking about. So one of the most powerful features and tools like ChatGPT in ChatGPT is custom instructions and essentially telling AI how to think about you and your preferences before it responds, right? So you can include who you are, what you do, who you serve, your brand values, right? Your clarity, confidence, compassion, faith, legacy, what is it? What are your brand values? The tone you want, encourage, you know, you can be encouraging, direct, thoughtful, a bit witty. You know, the length of your of the how you like to write. If you're not somebody who likes to write big, flowery, you know, lots of words, tell it. Keep it short, sweet, simple. That's me, you know, very just on point. Um, what you don't want, be careful because you know, you want to make sure that you tell it what you want, but you also want to tell it what you don't want, right? You don't want hype, you don't want fear-based language, you don't want manipulative, manipulative tactics. Like that word just tricked me up there. So, for example, you might say in your instructions, I help Christian business owners, coaches, professionals communicate their message with clarity, confidence, and compassion so they can attract opportunities and honoring their calling. Please write in a tone that is direct but kind, encouraging, and grounded in integrity. Do not use guilt, fear, or false urgency. Now, every time I use ChatGPT, it has a baseline for how I show up. And you can do the same thing. So, by creating this custom instructions, you're giving it the baseline on how you want to show up. So, some of the guardrails for using AI with integrity are very important and you want to make sure that they are set in place. So, before we wrap, let's just talk about these guardrails because tools are powerful and power needs boundaries. A few comments I always encourage, right? I'm sorry, a few commitments I always encourage. Fact-check important claims. AI is smart, but it's not flawless. It's grabbing information from the internet, it's grabbing in information from humans that have fed it knowledge. So you want to make sure that if you are using studies or quotes or things like that, make sure that you fact-check import complaints. Never outsize your outsource your discernment. If something feels off, it probably is. Keep your humanity at the center. Your stories, your faith, your empathy. They're not optional. They're not adults, they're the core. And you want to make sure that you keep your humanity at the center. Use AI to create space, not more noise. We're gonna help you reclaim time for the things that matter. Relationships, rest, and real conversations. One of the things that I have found is I love playing with AI, but I can tell you right now, I have a lot of conversations with AI. I have a lot of content created with AI. And sometimes I realize that I am repeating myself in the questions that I ask it. And I was actually playing that before. Like I constantly, you know, second-guess myself because I ask it the same questions, just in different ways. Really interesting to have that conversation with AI. AI is at its best when it helps you sound more like the person you're becoming, not less. And that's one of the things that I love about it. So if something in today's episode resonated with you, don't ignore that. The brand success hub was created for one reason to help you get clear on your message, communicate with confidence, and connect in a way that actually converts without feeling salesy or overwhelmed. This is for those who are done second guessing, ready to show up with clarity, confidence, and compassion. Simple, practical, real support when you need it. If you're ready for that shift, join us at the 30 Second Success Hub at 30secondsuccess.com slash hub. Thank you guys so much for joining us on the 30 Second Success Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss next week's inspiring conversation. And until then, stay tuned. And remember, success was just 30 seconds.