Wendy McCallum (01:25)
Hello, welcome back to The Coaching Edge. I'm your host, Wendy McCallum. This one's an interesting one because it's actually the second time I've recorded this episode in full. And I was happy with the first version of this episode that I recorded, but then I realized that I had made a major mistake and I'm gonna talk about that today. So for that reason, it did not feel good to me to not rerecord this episode.
First of all, because I think there's a big lesson for everybody in the mistake, but also because I was, you know, ⁓ I am very committed to putting out valuable, truthful, honest, authentic, genuine content. And I just felt like if I put the old episode out, even if I had gone back in and sort of edited it out to kind of deal with the mistake.
⁓ It still wouldn't feel good to me. So I'm just rerecording it. It's been one of those weeks. So I'm going to tell you about this mistake, which is really, you know, spoiler, I got scammed. So we're to tell you about that so that you don't also get scammed because the good news is, I guess, in all of this is that I got scammed, but it sounds like thousands and thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands of people are also getting scammed by this scam. So I'm going to talk about that. But it also this just this morning sent out next week's newsletter by accident.
with a link to next week's podcast that isn't published yet. had to kind of recall that, send out the proper newsletter for today. It's just been one of those weeks. And I share that with you just to say, like, these things happen, and it's not the end of the world. And I would say I respond very differently to them now than I did a few years ago, even, in that, you know, the main question I ask myself, which is, frankly, a coaching question I use all the time when I'm working with clients, it's like, is this going to matter in five years?
And the answer to that is always no. And then usually the next question I ask is, it gonna matter five months? Nope, five weeks? Nope, five days? Probably not. So that helps me get through the newsletter mishap this morning. I mean, that kind of stuff happens. It's part of living in a world that is so tech-based. We schedule things and sometimes what happens is I pre-schedule newsletters and then after...
I've scheduled them, realize I want to add something to them or I want to change a link or I want to do something different. And so I unscheduled them and I forget to schedule them again. And I think that that's what happened this morning. Anyway, all of that to say this episode is going to be partly about an enormous goof that happened for me and also about more specifically why I switched from chat GPT to Claude this week as I'm recording this and just kind of talking you through
that decision and what I've learned from that and my experiences with both Chat GPT and Claude for any of you who might be considering a switch one way or the other. Before we get started on all of this, I am here to say very clearly at the beginning of this episode that it is definitely not my intention with this episode to tell you what's right or wrong in terms of what platform you choose for AI or whether you choose to use AI at all.
That's not what I'm here for. I'm just here to share my own experience with this. This has come up a lot of times in the BBB now in the last couple of weeks. have been, this issue has been highlighted around anthropic and ethical principles in AI. And obviously there've been some things that have happened in the news that I'm gonna talk about that prompted my decision to start looking into this further and then my decision to actually make the switch over.
So I know lots of other coaches have been thinking about this and maybe you're in the process of doing this. So I'm going to talk about why I decided to switch, what I've noticed since I switched, how to switch over. So some of the things to be thinking about if you are going to be switching over from another AI platform to, for example, Claude, I think this would apply to switching over to any platform though, if you're moving between platforms and there are lots of options out there for that. So I'm going to talk about how to do that in the most seamless way possible.
And hopefully there'll be lots of wisdom in this just from my own learned experience in the last couple of weeks around this that will help you if you're somebody who's been thinking about this. So I have been using chat GPT for the last year. I've been talking about it on here. I've been using like the equivalent of sort of the pro version of chat GPT paid for a year. I was using it before that as well, but really for the last year, since I invested in the paid version of it, I've been really trying to learn it and use it.
in as efficacious a way as I can as a solopreneur. One of the reasons why I do that is because not only am I committed to continuing to have a successful business of my own, but also because I teach coaches about the business of coaching. And so I need to be familiar with all of the new tech and apps and options that are out there for small business owners. it was partly selfishly motivated and curiosity driven and then partly
done as a way to be able to support other coaches and talk about it like I'm doing right now. So I've been using ChatGPT for about a year. When I first started using ChatGPT, we started talking a lot more about AI inside the BBB office hours. The BBB, for those of you who don't know, is my business building boot camp. It's my community for coaches in the first five years or so of building their businesses. And so we have these office hours meetings every week. on those calls, it's
topic of AI was coming up a lot more. were talking about how they were experimenting with it and they'd used it for this thing or that thing and we, you know, we started talking about it a lot more. And I, course, was also experimenting with it at the time. One of my coaches inside the BBB, at least a year ago said, you know, Wendy, you should think about Claude, which is the anthropic version of the AI because it is committed to some ethical principles and I'm using it for those reasons. And she explained why she was using it, talked a little bit about that. And I said, shoot,
That's so interesting to me and it sounds really aligned for me. I just committed to a full year on Chat GPT because I paid for the annual subscription. Little lesson in that. I have not done that with Claude. So when I moved over to Claude this week, I was like, I'm not committing to a year because I want to have the option, even though it costs a little more on a monthly basis than it would if I purchased the year upfront, I want the option to be able to leave it, change, downgrade my plan, all of those things. So.
Anyway, I had committed to a year and I said, this is something I'm going to keep an eye on and maybe I'll switch over at some point. So the idea of switching over to Claude has always been there and this coach is still in the BBB. And so we chat regularly about, you know, the different, maybe the differences between that platform and chat GPT and some of the other AI platforms out there. So there has however been, there have been a couple of things that have happened recently in,
⁓ the world and in the AI sphere that have caused me along with millions of others, I think, to really consider seriously whether I was using the right platform with Chatchie PT and whether I wanted to be somewhere else. So I'm going to talk about those. And I will get to that in a second. But before I do, I would just want to talk about the scam that I fell for because it doesn't warrant a whole episode.
but it's definitely something I want to share with you. And it really just came to my attention a couple of days ago and it was kind of funny how it came to my attention. So what happened is when I made the decision to switch over to Claude, I went and started looking for Claude online and try to figure out how to get registered, looking at the plans, the various options for joining that platform. I found the website and it looks like the Claude website. And the suggestion was that I was signing up for a plan with Claude Anthropic.
And honestly, it was very obviously convincing. am no dummy and I am definitely always on the lookout for potential scams and that kind of thing, but this was very professional looking and really seemed as though I was on the Claude platform. And as somebody who's never used Claude before, I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking for, but it was marketing itself as Claude, selling itself as Claude. And so I registered for an account on this platform.
Turns out this platform, which by the way is called Chatly, is what's called a third party wrapper. And it's a platform, and I don't understand the technicalities of this, but basically provides you with access to a variety of different AI, I think free or free probably versions of the AI platforms that are out there for a price. And it's masquerades as these platforms. And when I went and did research on this after I realized I'd been scammed,
I was somewhat comforted to see that this is a huge scam and has been reported as a fraud all over the place. And if I was to report this to Visa, they would know that this was a scam as soon as I said who I had spent the money with. So I'm just warning you right now, if you are thinking about switching over to Claude or any other platform, be wary and beware of these third party rappers because they're out there and it is an absolute scam.
And it turns out that I did not have a cloud account at all. And I'll tell you how I figured that out in a second. Anyway, I spent a week inside this wrapper, which was giving me access to cloud and other AI platforms, but it was not like a pure cloud experience at all. And in the course of that, you know, I spent a lot of time transferring over the learned sort of knowledge, the body of knowledge and all of the
resources and things that I had built within ChatGPT over to this platform. I was using it. I was working on, you know, using it to do all the things I do in my business, including like mapping out future podcast episodes and all of that stuff and noticing some differences in it. And I actually recorded this episode talking about moving over to Claude and talking about my experience in Claude versus my experience in ChatGPT based on that platform, which was not actually Claude.
which is why I'm re-recording this whole episode now, because now I have discovered the problem, I have fixed the problem, I have moved over to Clode and I now have experience working inside Clode, the actual legit platform now for the last little while, and I wanted to make sure that this episode was reflective of that. I'm also telling you about the scam so you don't fall for it yourself. So, you know, I'm not here to bash myself. It's about making this mistake. Again, I think it's a mistake that has been made by...
many, many, many people in recent days. And I suspect with this huge migration that's happened from ChatGPT over to Clode that Chatly, the scam platform has benefited greatly from that because there are lots and lots of people who fell for it like I did. Anyway, I'm not here again to like beat myself up over this. think mistakes happen and we are all trying to acclimatize and navigate this new technology and this new AI world. And so this kind of stuff is gonna happen.
But it's just really, really important that you go direct to the source. So you're going to want, if you do want to check out Claude, you're going to go to Claude, C-L-A-U-D-E dot A-I. That is the official website. Instead of these third party rappers that exist out there, I had no idea this was even a thing. So this is really just a teaching moment for all of you. Okay. So why did I decide to switch? Well, I decided to switch because I...
a few things happened and it sort of was serendipitous that these things happened just as my chat GPT one year membership was about to expire. In fact, I feel like it expired today, March 16th. So I have a month left to use it, but my last payment was today, or the last month of it starts today. So anyway, I had chat GPT that was expiring and also what happened was that there was this recent exchange with the US Defense Department where
Anthropic, the company, only, I don't know what the corporate structure is, but Anthropic that owns Quad, was receiving pressure from the Pentagon to remove some safety guardrails from the AI platform, the AI contract that it had with the Pentagon for military use of the AI. Anthropic refused to compromise ⁓ because of its ethical boundaries and stepped away, like left the contract.
And that principled stance by the owners of Claude and the powers that be there really resonated with me and was really aligned for me. have lots of fears about AI and I definitely have lots of fears of AI when it comes to using AI with the military. So for me personally, that was really aligned and it caused me to think like maybe this is the time to switch over. Checked my...
chat GPT account was about to expire. was like, this is meant to be, I'm going to have to make this move now. Then we had, unfortunately, a very tragic situation happened in Canada where we had a mass shooting, Tumblr Ridge in British Columbia, which is a very unusual occurrence in Canada. And unfortunately, just a very, very sad situation. And there was, there were some facts that came to the surface that highlighted
some of the potential dangers of AI and open AI. So chat GPT handling of some concerning behavior prior to the tragedy. I don't need to go into details on all of that. And I don't, I'm not here to say I have all of the facts on it. I suspect it's a very complicated situation, but it did, it did just, it was just one more thing for me to be thinking about in terms of
using AI in a way that feels ethical and aligned. So all of that caused me to go and try to explore Claude. Talked about the scam that happened in the week of my time and energy and recording of a podcast episode that was wasted. But now we're here to talk about the real Claude and my experience with the real Claude. So here are some of the things that I've noticed since moving over to Claude. And again, I'm gonna talk to you about how to move over to Claude in a second.
But here are some things I've noticed that have been real positives. ⁓ And I do want to say I had a great experience with ChatGPT in the first year. I learned lots of things and ChatGPT was a very helpful tool for me. And I talked a lot about how I was using ChatGPT in earlier episodes on this podcast, if you're interested in that. So I'm not here to bash ChatGPT or my experience with ChatGPT, but it has been interesting for me to notice the differences ⁓ about clode. And I guess before we get into that, I should just talk about what anthropic principles are, because I think it's important to understand that.
Anthropics approach to AI and these anthropic principles that we talk about are really about prioritizing safety, honesty and responsible development with AI. those principles that are kind of at the foundation and the core principles for Anthropic, the parent of Claude, really resonate with my personal values and also with my business, my coaching business values around authenticity and honesty and
fairness and just practicing in real in really in an ethical way. And so for those reasons, along with what I've already talked about, it felt like the right switch for me. So here's what I have noticed inside Claude, a lot of things about Claude feel very similar to chat GPT in terms of how I'm using how I use it, you know, just the the practicalities of using it chats, you know, creating custom, like
know, GPTs for lack of better word like you would in chat GPT. There's lots of overlap in terms of functionality and the way that it works. But here are some of the things I've noticed that were really interesting to me. First of all, honesty over cheerleading. So one of the things that drove me nuts about chat GPT was how every time I would give it a prompt or ask it to do a task or start ⁓ a brainstorming session about an idea, it would immediately tell me how.
amazing I was and what a brilliant idea this was and how it was completely aligned with my business and how, you know, this was going to serve my clients so well. And it was just the perfect solution to the problem. So much so that I felt like I couldn't trust it. It was never going to give me pushback. It was just going to tell me I was great. It was there as a cheerleader for me instead of as an honest, you know, place to kind of bounce and develop ideas, bounce off and develop ideas. And so
⁓ Claude does not do that Claude is designed to be genuinely helpful rather than like reflexively positive, which is the experience I had inside chat gbt. It'll push back and it'll tell you when it's not sure. and it does that in a really like kind warm way as much as AI can. it's, not about being critical just for the sake of it, but it does feel more like you're having conversation with an intelligent
adult and like there's going to be some, you know, back and forth thing, which I appreciate. And definitely there isn't that just like the constant, cheerleading thing that I found was happening in chat GPT. Claude will absolutely tell you when it doesn't have the information or when the information that it has might be outdated. it's got transparency around its limitations. I did not notice that inside chat GPT. And I know that
there are definitely going to be some problems inside Claude as well as ChatGPT. All of these models are inherently going to have problems. But one of the things that ChatGPT has become known for is this hallucinating that it does, where it basically gives you answers and information and almost makes up and fabricates data. And I have not noticed that in the same way inside Claude. In fact, I've noticed the opposite, where Claude will tell me when it needs, it doesn't have the information or doesn't know the facts. So that's good.
It will also like go and do web searches when it needs to. It doesn't ask for permission first, which by the way, Chatly did. And so for a while there, I thought that that was something that Claude was doing, but in fact, I think it was just Chatly. But it will go and do that. ChatGBT also was doing the research, but I did have some very specific experiences with ChatGBT where it fabricated, it fabricated.
resources and references and footnoted things that don't exist. and again, I'm too new a user with Claude to know whether these things are gonna happen inside Claude too, so I'm not here to say Claude is by far better at all of these things, but these are just been my experiences in the last week. Claude, one of the things I really like about Claude is that the memory seems to work a little differently in that Claude will tell me when it...
is remembering something from before. So it'll access like a stored memory and it'll also tell me when it's gonna create a memory. So for example, yesterday I was using it and I said, remember, we talked about, these are the five different things that I need every time we are brainstorming a podcast episode. I need you to look, know, to create for me a list, for example, of SEO friendly search tags that I can attach to the blog post that goes with every podcast episode. I need you to do, you know,
a meta page description for my blog post for me. Anyway, I gave it those instructions again and it said, great, thanks for reminding me. I'm gonna create a memory of this that I can access and it actually creates a memory and it tells you that it's doing that, which I think is pretty cool. So now I know it's got that stored and the next time I am creating a new podcast, I can just say, remember you have stored as a memory the specific tasks that need to happen with every new podcast episode.
So I like that, like it feels like it's working with me and it's also keeping me in the loop and telling me what it's doing. The other thing that I noticed about Claude is that it does tend to engage a little more with the substance of what I am asking instead of just giving me what I want to hear. So we already talked about the cheerleading aspect of that with ChatGPT, but this is more, it just feels a little more thoughtful.
for lack of a better word, I know it's AI but that's how it feels, chat GPT's like eager to please style. So those are the things I've noticed so far. Here are some of the things that I had noticed in chat in chatly that I thought were clode that are actually I think just chatly. So the whole asking permission before researching chatly seemed to do that for me a couple of times. It would say I don't have the facts on this do you mind if I go get them?
which of course I would say, yes, that's great. I wanna always be working with facts, but that was a Chatly thing, not a Claude thing. And also there was a suggestion that it was, I think, gonna be really easy for me to import things over from ChatGPT to what I now know was Chatly. And I'm here to say, there is a way to do that, and I'm gonna explain to you in a second, but it's not seamless, and it's not as easy as just pushing one button and all of a sudden everything.
that's in your chat GPT history and your chat GPT's memory is going to just move over to the new platform. It just doesn't work that way. Here's how you do move over to Clode if you decide you want to do this. And you can open a free Clode account if you want to experiment with this. Don't pay for anything yet. Just give it a try for a while and see how the free version performs for you and just get accustomed to the new structure and format of it. And
then and only then I would say it feels like it's a good fit for you would I start thinking about canceling another membership. The only reason I moved so quickly honestly is because my, could see my chat GPT was about to renew and I have like, I have a month left. I had enough time to move everything over that I wanted to move over. So remember if you want to try Claude, the first step is to go directly to Claude.ai and set up an account there. Now,
If you are moving over migrating from chat GPT, example, Claude has actually set up a platform. It's a website landing page now that you can go to where you can create a new account and it will walk you through. It's just a very, simple two-step thing where you can import memory from your chat GPT account direct to Claude. So that you'll find at Claude.com forward slash import hyphen memory.
So that's clode.com slash import hyphen memory. Now that I will put in the show notes. I'll put that link in the show notes for you. But this is actually how I found out that I had a Chatly account and that I've been scammed is that I discovered this new landing page up and set up by clode after I decided to switch over to clode. So I went there because I thought, well, I need to make sure that I've done this step too because clode.
saw this massive migration of people over to their platform and wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to move, obviously. And so they responded to this mass migration by creating this landing page. And I think it probably got created after I decided to switch. So I go to this landing page and it keeps asking me to create an account. And I keep trying to log in using the account that I think I have with Claude and it's not recognizing it as an account.
So then I'm thinking, well, maybe there's a typo in my email address or, you know, I've done something wrong in setting up this account in the first place. I go and check, make sure I wasn't using a different email address to set it up. Nope. It all seems like I've done it right. Should be with my business address. And then I start sort of Googling and trying to figure it out. And in the course of trying to figure out why I can't get this Claude account to open up, because basically what Claude did was set me up a free account with that address. And I knew I had a paid plan.
because I had already signed up the week before. So that didn't make sense for me. And then I thought, how is it possible? have two accounts with Claude with the same email address. Not possible. So I go and I open up the one that I think is Claude, the Chatley one, to look at my plan. And I look and see that I've got a quarterly plan with that platform. And on Claude, when I look at the plan options, there isn't a quarterly plan option. So this starts to get my brain going and...
I start going down the rabbit hole of researching this and I find out that this is a scam and this platform I'm on is not actually clode. So I have to cancel the Chatlee account. I have to ask for refund, which everything on the internet tells me I will not get because they are a fraudulent, it's a fraudulent organization. They will not refund me. I'm going to have to go through Visa probably to try to collect back the payment I made.
I was very grateful that I only did a quarterly payment and didn't do an annual payment with them. That was, that's another reason I guess to do it because these types of things do happen. Anyway, when I found the right platform, I used this site, clode.com slash import dash import hyphen memory to import over my memory from chat GPT, which then becomes part of the clode memory that it uses for everything that it does for you. But you can only import so much. There's a character limitation to it.
And so if you use the prompt that landing page gives you with ChatGPT, ChatGPT will create a document that is the right length to then cut and paste basically into the clode memory area. So that's the first thing you want to do. The other thing that everyone recommends you do is actually export your entire memory from ChatGPT into a zip file, which you do through settings in ChatGPT.
do a search online to find out the specific steps for it. But in settings, you can export very easily. Your link will become available after it took about maybe 12 hours for the link for me to become available. And then I can download that data and I can save it somewhere. That's a backup of everything in ChatGBT, just in case. But it's not something that you can then upload, for example, to Clode. It's just a backup that I have for myself. Here are some of the other things that I did within Clode to...
to try to recreate what I had going in ChatGPT in a seamless way as possible. First of all, I went into ChatGPT and I asked it to create a manual for me for as though I was hiring a new virtual assistant and that virtual assistant was gonna have a hand in everything that I do in my business. So was potentially gonna be helping me in all of the different areas with all of the different offers of my business.
create a manual for that person that gives them everything they might need to know about me, my brand, my business, my offers, and the setup of my business and how I do things. And I went back and forth with ChatGPT for a while and created like an 80 page manual. I then downloaded that onto my laptop. So saved it on my laptop. And then when I went into Claude, I opened up a project file in Claude and I actually asked Claude for instructions on how to do this, because I wanted to make sure I did it right. I opened up.
project file in Clode, I called that like Wendy's business. And then in there, I started a chat and I basically copied and pasted. cannot upload like, you can't upload a Word document for Clode to read, you have to cut and paste it in. So I cut and pasted that brand, I'll call it like a brand book. Really, it's a manual for Virtual Assistant in there. I also had a brand book that I had created before, copy and pasted that in. And because I put that into that project,
that then becomes the stored memory of Claude. And so Claude will now use that, all of that background information and some other things that I uploaded into there, anytime it's doing a task in that project file. So I will use that project file for all the chats and tasks and prompts that relate to my business. So I just, you know, I'll have basically like a personal file in Claude where I do personal stuff, like ask it to help me plan vacations and that kind of thing. And then I'll have my...
business file, is where everything else will happen. And that's where I uploaded the brand book that I've had done for a long time about my business and also this manual that I created in chat GPT. I then asked Claude what else it needed. Like, what are you missing from this? And it gave me some suggestions that said like, I'd love to have some examples of podcast show notes and outlines that you have done and also as many newsletters as you want to upload here so I can get a sense of the structure of your newsletters and how you organize things in your business. And then it asked me, you know, like,
it recapped my offer suite and I said, you're missing a lot of things. I also have these things and these things. so with a back and forth conversation, I managed to kind of fill all of that out with Claude. So it is not a seamless, just move it all over thing. It doesn't work like that. It takes a few steps, but it's not, it's really not that overwhelming. I would recommend you do at least, and I'm not an expert in this area, but at least the import of the memory through that landing page that Claude set up as I suggested, and I'll put the link below.
I would suggest that you do that exercise inside whatever AI platform you're using now where you ask it to create like a very comprehensive manual as though you are hiring a new ⁓ virtual assistant who is going to potentially be involved in all aspects of your business from content creation to marketing to sales to all the things. And you want to make sure that she has she here she has all the information that it needs to.
to just step in seamlessly into those roles and then go back and forth and create as robust a document as possible, save that somewhere else. So save that on your computer. And then I would import all of that into, like I said, a specific project that you have labeled your business in code. And I would have a back and forth with code about what else might be helpful to it going forward in terms of doing work for you. And...
And then as I hinted at earlier, in the course of doing that and starting to actually use CLODE to do work, I have instructed CLODE to create specific memories, or it has suggested to me that it's going to do that, and I have said, great, go ahead and do that. So I know I'm building the memory as we go. it actually, the whole process probably only took me a few hours. Now, when I first did it with Chatly last week, it took me a lot longer because I had to create all of those things. So.
As frustrating as it was to have to start again, I had done some pre-work that was helpful to me in doing it over in-clode. So it's not quite as seamless and automatic as some might have you think. There's some manual work involved, I think, to have it work. Now, if you've built custom GPTs, which I have not done, or have important documents that are uploaded into ChatGPT, you're going to want to do some work to bring those over. That's outside the scope of this podcast today, but there ways to do that.
And then like I said, give it a test drive in the free version first and ask it to do some projects for you that maybe you have done previous versions of in Chatchi BT, see how it responds to those, see what's better, see what's not as good, see what's different. And then, know, ask it maybe to push back on some ideas and see what it does, you know, to give you some constructive feedback that you can use on a particular idea, see how it handles.
complexity and see how it handles the nuance and just notice if one feels different than the other for you. Again, I'm not here to tell you what the right platform is. It's different from person to person, but I do know that a lot of you probably have been thinking about whether you're on the right platform since all of this happened, you know, over the last few weeks when I'm recording this podcast episode, which is in mid-March. You've probably been thinking about this. And in fact, many of you may have already moved over, but you may also still have two platforms open.
because you still have a membership or a subscription on the old platform. So, and maybe you haven't done all the steps that I was talking about today. So there's more, more that you can do. You can keep both tools too. A lot of people use both tools, certainly the free version of the other tool that you'd decide maybe not to spend all of your time on, because some people use the tools for different purposes, right? So you just have to find what works for you. My experience with all of this has been,
first of all, a relief now that I'm actually moved over and I'm on the right platform after the great scam of 2026 last week. I use AI in many different ways in my coaching business. I've talked about this on previous podcast episodes, so I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on it, but some of the things I use it for, I'd say the number one thing that I use AI for that I find it most helpful for is brainstorming. Because as a solopreneur,
I'm in my own head having conversations with myself all of the time. And I know that you feel that way too, as a sole business owner. This is one of the reasons I love the BBB so much because we have a community in there and we can actually talk about these things. And we have been talking about my experience in ChatGPT and transferring over to Claude and the scam and all of that inside the BBB. And I love that, but a lot of us don't have anyone else to talk to. And when I'm brainstorming new program ideas, I love having a place.
to use as a sounding board and to be bouncing things off of and to be saying like, what have I not thought of? And do you have any other ideas that might be, know, things to be thinking about here? So I love it for brainstorming. I use it as like a collaborative partner. That's the best word I can use for it. And the more it gets to know me and my business, the better this works. It is great for personalized client engagement. So if there's a segment of my audience who I know are struggling with a very specific challenge,
or maybe with an obstacle to joining a program or an offer that I have, I can get AI to help brainstorm solutions to that and ways to approach that. So it's good to like, for sub segments of my audience to help me really like get into their minds and figure out like, what is going on there. And if there's resistance or there's some objection or there's some problem that I haven't identified yet, AI can help me to identify that.
So that can be really helpful in terms of, first of all, like being a better coach, frankly, and being more responsive in my programming and offers, but also it can be helpful from a marketing perspective, obviously, in creating copy that actually resonates with those people and joins them in the conversation that they're already having in their head, right? It's obviously super helpful for content creation. I don't like to use it to actually create, you know, like cut and paste type.
I generally don't use AI for that. Again, I'm not here to judge, but I would say if you are using it that way, please make sure that you read everything very carefully before you actually publish it. I use it more to help me create, take the big ideas that I have, I'll often hit the microphone button and just dump my ideas in in a big long paragraph and ask it to help me structure that.
into, for example, a podcast outline. So how to organize all of those thoughts and ideas I have about things I want to talk about into an outline for the podcast. I also do use it for things like show notes. I find it incredibly helpful for that for the podcast and coming up with SEO tags. as good, valuable SEO keywords and tags that I can use to increase the likelihood that people actually come find this podcast when they're searching for, for example,
you know, information about whether it makes sense to think about transferring over to Claude from ChatGPT as a coach, right? So I want people to be able to find my stuff and ChatGPT, or sorry, not ChatGPT anymore, Claude AI can help me to do that. It's good for market research. can help me, it can help me to figure out what other coaches are doing in the area that I am creating programming and offers. So I love it for that because it can scan really quickly and tell me like what's happening and who's doing what so that I can
adjust my offers accordingly, both to meet my audience, where my audience is right now, and also to be competitive and to stand out, frankly. And, and I would say those are the main ways that I use it right now. But there are so many other ways you can use it. I don't use it as a virtual assistant, like many people do. That may be coming for me. ⁓ That may be something that I, you know, continue exploring. Claude has this really cool
thing called co-work that I don't know enough about yet to be talking about on here, but it can access, if you give it permission, it can access the files on your computer and it can start doing work for you based on like your Google drive. If you want it to go through and scan all the documents and, you know, come up with, you know, a summary of that, for example, or just help you, just help you do projects that involve material that lives on your.
on your desktop. think it can also help you clean up files, which is something I definitely could use help with. I'm going to be exploring that as I go forward. And I'll probably talk about it on podcast episodes to come. I want to just like, before I close out on this, I just want to say like, everything that happened last week made me hate AI more, right? So I want to be really clear. I have all the resistance that most of you have, I think, to AI. I have all the same fears.
And last week, the whole experience of getting scammed just made me even more, I think, fearful in many ways of how easy it is, you know, for us to go down the wrong road with this technology. But I also strongly believe that it can be incredibly positive and powerful. And there's lots of good that can come from it. And that we are just at the very beginnings of this.
making this decision to move to what I see as a more values aligned platform was the one thing I could do. I believe in voting with my dollar. I've always talked about this when I used to work in food and I was a food coach in Wellness Coast. I used to talk about voting with your dollar and your fork. Every time you go to the grocery store, you're voting with your dollar. Someone's paying attention to walk up purchase that day.
and that's influencing things like subsidies and, you know, it has all kinds of implications we don't think about. This was an opportunity for me to vote with my dollar on an issue that mattered to me. And, and so I did it. But the thing is, is AI is not going anywhere. And I think if we don't embrace it, we're as solopreneurs, we're really putting ourselves at risk of falling out of the market. And so that's why I'm talking about it.
That's why I'm using it. Even though I have the same resistance you do, I am trying to figure out how to make it work for me and to make it work in a way that feels good to me. And I think it's important to vet your tools really carefully, lesson learned last week for me, and also to really pay attention to what the outputs are and make sure that you're vetting those really well. So whatever you're getting from AI, be vetting that.
All of this to say, you do you. But I feel really confident that you also have had some experiences with AI that have been good, that have been bad. You probably have some hesitations around using AI in your coaching business. I'd love to hear from you. As always, really encourage you, send me an email at wendy at wendymcallum.com. I love hearing from you. I love starting conversations with new coaches. I'd love to know what's going on with you. And if you have
some really awesome stories about how AI has helped you. I'd love to hear those. And also if there are any like cautionary tales out there that I can share with other coaches, I'd love to be the conduit for those stories if you want to share them with me. So send them my way at wendy at wendymcallum.com. I am now finished for the second time with this episode on why I moved to over to Claude from ChatGPT with an additional
bonus section on and how I got scammed on the way. And I hope that that at least prevents a couple of people from getting pulled into those third party rappers as they're around AI and making the same mistake that I did. Thankfully, it doesn't seem to be a hugely costly mistake. I think the worst thing is I'm out $65, but it did waste a week of my time last week. And obviously I'm having to rerecord this episode. it was a good, there was a good lesson in it, but.
stuff happens. We just keep going. On that note, thank you for listening and I will see you next week on The Coaching Edge. Have a fantastic day.
