The Send Button Is Still Yours
On Tuesday I taught a live masterclass with around 1,500 people registered, and I was shaking before it started. The voice in my head was one I know well. "Colin, who do you think you are? You're just some scruffy kid from Liverpool. Nobody wants to hear what you've got to say."
I've worked with AI every day for nearly four years. It writes with me, it builds with me, and it carries a lot of the work around my teaching. It has never done anything about that voice.
I'm telling you this because of a question a coach asked me the next day. I think it explains the fear of posting on LinkedIn that so many coaches still carry, even with AI helping them write.
What coaches keep putting off
I opened that next session, a talk for a group of coaches, with one question. What part of growing your coaching practice do you keep putting off?
The answers came into the chat straight away. Social media posts. Marketing. Referrals. Recording a video and posting it. Posting about my story and how I help people.
Look at that list again. Every one of those is about being seen.
This is where AI can do a lot of the heavy lifting. Give it your context (why you coach, who you help, how you help them) and it'll help you build a body of work around what you do. I spent an hour showing them how. If you want the starting point, it's the same idea as whatever you leave out, the AI will fill in.
Then I told them the part AI doesn't change. It doesn't stop you having to have the courage to press the send button on that video you've recorded or that post you've written. That takes a very human courage.
The drafts that never leave your notes
Later in the session a coach asked about perfectionism. When you write with AI, the result never feels enough like yours, so you spend too long rewriting it by hand. How do you get past that?
I gave the practical answer first, and I'll give it to you further down. Then the coach told me about a stack of finished pieces saved away and never posted. I asked why not.
The writing wasn't the problem with those. It's a question in your head. Would anyone listen to this, coming from me? Other people are already talking about the same thing, so what makes mine different? So the piece gets done, it goes into your notes, and it's never seen again.
You might have work you've created and never published.
Two problems that feel like one
Two different things can stop a post going out, and from the inside they feel the same.
The first is that the post isn't good yet. That one belongs to the technology, and AI helps with it. I teach people to never accept the first thing AI gives them, because you can always iterate to something better.
The second is you stopping you. I know this one from my own desk. I'll think something through with AI, edit it into something that looks good, and then my mind starts. People might take offense at this. People will laugh at you. The writing is fine by that point. What's happening has nothing to do with the tech.
It's important to tell these two apart because my own advice can feed the second one. If you never accept the first output, you can keep iterating forever, round and round like a hamster in a wheel.
So you need a point where you stop, and here's mine. I ask two things. Does this have the essence of what I'm trying to say? Would I say it this way? If the answer is yes to both, the technology has done its job and the next step is the courageous one. Press the button.
I don't want AI to get me to 100%. I want it to get me to about 80%, and then it has to feel like me. It's better to be prolific and messy than to send nothing at all.
One caution. If the post is actually not good, don't send it. Keep working on it. The two questions are how you find out which problem you've got.
Start with what's alive in you
Here's the practical answer I gave in that session.
When an AI draft doesn't feel like yours, it's usually because the idea didn't start with you. Don't open your AI and type "help me create some content."
Start before the AI is involved at all. What do you want to say? What matters to you about it? Say it out loud, or write it on a piece of paper. I'm dreadful at typing, so I dictate. I think out loud into the AI, the same way I'd talk to you.
Then let AI shape it. Then you put the final polish on it, and you're the judge. I call this the human-AI sandwich, and I wrote about it in Your AI Leaves Fingerprints.
Do it that way and the draft carries your thinking from the first line. You'll get to "yes, I would say it this way" a lot sooner.
What helps me press send
There's a line from Nietzsche that I first read in Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
For a coach, the why is the people you're here to serve. You know they're in pain, and you know you can help them in that pain. So you owe it to them to share.
When that voice comes up in my head, this is what I say back to it. "Colin, it's not about you. Get over yourself." I try to get myself into that place whenever I'm struggling to press record or press send. The voice is still there. It was there on Tuesday with around 1,500 people registered. I showed up anyway because I was thinking about them.
When I say the magic is you and not the AI, this is what I mean. The magic is sitting in your notes, and nobody you could help has seen it. If you're wondering whether your experience counts for anything now that AI can write, I've made the case that AI won't replace you, it will reveal you.
So here's something to do today. Open your notes and find one piece you finished and never posted. Ask the two questions. If it has the essence of what you wanted to say, and you'd say it that way, think of one person it would help and post it for them.
Before the session ended I made a deal with one of the coaches. Publish one of those pieces, tell me you've done it, and we'll celebrate together. They did it. Seeing that post lit me up, because that moment is why I do this work.
This is the path we each have to walk, me included. AI will carry a lot for you. The send button is still yours.