EP 346 - Why AI Is Killing Your Coaching Business in 2026 (for Women 50+)
If you're a woman over 50 building a coaching business and you've been leaning on AI for everything, this episode might be the most important one you watch all year. AI isn't the bad guy, but the way most coaches are using it is quietly destroying their messaging, their confidence, and their ability to actually sell their coaching.
If you're new to my channel, my name is Debbie Shadid. I'm a Business Growth and Life Coach and the founder of the Business Building Boutique. For over two decades, I've helped women learn how to become coaches, get clients, grow their businesses, and create meaningful income doing work they love.
This is a real-talk episode about something nobody else is saying out loud. When you outsource your brain to AI, your audience can feel it, your message goes generic, and your ideal client scrolls right past you. The good news is that this is fixable, and your unfair advantage as a woman over 50 is the thing AI can never copy.
In this episode, we'll walk through:
Why AI is making it harder for women over 50 to talk about their coaching
How to spot the signs that you've handed your business over to AI
What your unfair advantage is and why it can't be replaced
The three shifts that bring your real voice back to your marketing
Why your lived experience sells coaching better than any polished script
How to use AI as a tool instead of letting it run your business
The first thing to do before you ever open AI again
When you make these shifts, your message stops sounding like every other coach online. Your ideal client recognizes herself in your words, your confidence comes back, and you start attracting the women who actually want to work with you. Your stories, your scars, your wisdom, that's the gold mine. Let's put it back into your business.
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Transcript
AI is killing your business if you are a woman over 50. I wanna tell you exactly why. Please stay till the end of this episode. I'm gonna share with you three shifts that you can make to outsmart and earn more. Without relying on AI I want you to think about AI in a new way, and I want you to know that we believe AI is hijacking your brain. We think that it is making your business so much harder. It's harder for you to talk about what you are actually doing with your niche. And if I'm right, this episode might be the most important episode that I do all year long. So here's how this entire conversation started. we were on our team meeting for over two hours talking about this. We were talking about this question that has been on my mind for months. Why are coaches. Smart women over 50 who are doing what looks like all the right things. Why are they not making more money. There was a time not that long ago when people could just have a conversation about their coaching and they would just sell it. Now, that doesn't seem to be the case. So I have to share with you how this looks because I wanna make sure that women over 50 who are working on building their coaching businesses right now, those of you are blinded by this new shiny object called AI and you can't even see what it is done to your business. I'm Debbie Shadid. I help women over 50 build profitable boutique style coaching businesses. Over the last two decades, I have helped thousands of women build incredible businesses, and I want you to know this is actually something I'm more concerned about than maybe anything that's come up AI is not the bad guy. Let me say that right off the bat. But the way that women are using it now is literally destroying their businesses. The women that it is hurting most, I believe, are women over 50. Not because you're not smart, not because you're not capable. Because we are the generation who walked into AI a little bit later, we're a little bit more nervous about what's happening. We're a little bit more determined to catch up and in trying to catch up, a lot of us are using it far too much. We're using it in a way that we shouldn't. We've handed over our brains to this tool. That was never supposed to be thinking for us. So let me get back to you and share a couple of conversations that will make this so clear for you. We had a client. I'll call her Lisa. She just joined us about a month ago, and she's a smart woman. She's been running a business for over two decades, and she is coaching business owners. She's been very successful. She has real expertise. She was working on her marketing message, and as I continued to review it, she kept making revisions. Every version was a little bit different and even a little more polished, but none of it sounded like her. By the time we got to the end of it, I looked at it, I was like, wait a minute. You haven't even explained to people that you've had a business that pivoted during COVID, that lived through recessions that has been two decades in the making. That is a business coach that I would want to work with. None of that was on the document that she had now created. That is the very reason somebody would've hired her. I was thinking, why is she not telling people about this? And then. It became crystal clear she was using AI and she had lost her direction. AI kept editing the document for, and she kept going back to it again., It had taken the essence of who she was Completely out of the message. think about you. You are outsourcing your knowledge to ai. You stop owning the answers that you already have about your niche, and here's the deal. Your clients can feel it. Your audience can feel it. The woman who is scrolling, she's not even stopping at your post because it's so generic. People are scrolling by because they're not connecting with you because they don't even see themselves in the message. Let me give you one more specific reason why I want you to understand this about ai. I think this is happening and nobody is talking about it. When you use AI and you get on a discovery call or a consultation call, somebody asks you to tell them about what you do. I know what's happening. You're trying to read a script. You're trying to go find the answer because you can't even talk about your own business. You end up reading off of a screen, or you wonder if what you're saying is right. You lack confidence when you should be comfortable with what you're talking about. You know your niche better than anyone else, and you know it far better than AI knows it. The words that are on your social media posts. You didn't come up with those. AI did, they didn't even come from your brain and your ideal client. They can sense that. Can you sit down and describe her on paper? Can you tell me what she's doing on Friday afternoon? Of course you can. You do know what she's thinking about at three in the morning. You do know what she's thinking about while she's driving her car. You know what's on her mind when she's falling asleep. All of that. AI does not know. AI cannot map out your offer because it doesn't know what that woman has on her mind. It doesn't know what your knowledge base is. You end up having AI map out your offer, and it's a process that probably looks really good with the document that Claude made, the graphics that Claude made, but it doesn't even sound like you and worse yet, you can't even change it. You can't even go in there and edit it. If you went into Canva and you had thought through your own process, you could edit it. So often people are looking at those documents that Claude or Chat, GPT or whoever it is, they're looking at it. They couldn't even say what that thing said if they were not reading the document themselves. Are you guilty of this? I'm calling you out because I want to make sure that you see what is happening to your business. AI. It is not your brain. When you work on your business through AI you write emails, you do all your social media posts, you're like crossing things off your list. You're like, I've got it right? And it feels like you're working on your business. It feels like you've really written real emails, that you have connected with people, that you are connecting with people. But in reality. You are not connecting with anyone. In reality, you are not doing any work. We had a client this week who showed me her social media plan. and I knew it was AI generated. It was like, would you have written any of that stuff down? No. That is what is going wrong in so many different ways. For you and your brain, you're getting these dopamine hits, these rewards of all the work that you're doing, and yet you're not doing anything with any of that work. You are researching on AI and you're writing messages, and you're doing all this stuff, but you're not putting it out into the world. And the question is, why? Why aren't you? And I can almost bet it's because you're still not sure. And if you are putting it out. It's so generic. Nobody is interested. So many of you are feeling like you're building your business and you've not talked to anyone. I'm calling you out with so much love because I'm seeing it happen everywhere. AI can make you feel like you're super organized. It made the content calendar for you, but if it is not what you say yourself. It is of no value. It's why you're not selling any coaching. It's why you're not making any money, why nobody is interested. I wanna be clear with you, I love ai. Claude is my boyfriend. I use it every single day. I plan with it. I work through emails with it, but I only do that because I have provided Claude with all the information about you as my client, about me and the knowledge that I bring about what I want you to know and understand. AI is a tool. It's just like if you hire a virtual assistant, your virtual assistant is your assistant. You would never ask your virtual assistant, who's my ideal client? Never. You know who your ideal client is. You would never ask your virtual assistant, tell me what my offer should be. You decide those things. That is the exact relationship that you should have with AI in your business. You bring the brain. You bring your lived experience, you bring the emotional connection that you have to your client. Then you use AI as a tool to polish it, to check for typos, to format it, to organize it, to speed things up for you. When you reverse that process, and many of you are asking AI to give you answers. The answers for your business live in you. You end up with a business that is nothing like you. When you've asked AI to give you the answers, when you've asked AI to tell you what is the main pain point of your person, guess what? You can't even help the person with that main pain point because it's not connected to you. You didn't give the answer to that. AI did, so this is what sets you apart. This is what's gonna set you apart from everyone as we move forward towards the end of this year. I think there's gonna be a whole bunch of coaches that just flat fail. I don't want you to be one of those. I want you to have personality in your business. I want a message that belongs to you. I don't want you confused about what you're doing or what you're talking about. I want people to know why they hire you. I want it to be consistent everywhere. If they see you on social media, they feel the essence of you. If they read your message, they see the essence of you. When they talk to you on the consultation, they're like, there she is. This is what nobody is telling you. You have to be the leader in your business. You need to be the very thing, the beautiful thing that you are that will set you apart. Here's what I have over ai. My unfair business advantage, I've been in business 26 years. I have lived through three recessions. I have been in the housing market crash. Many of you guys know what I'm talking about. I have lived through interest rates, climbing, crashing, and climbing again. I have been through a global pandemic. I started my business when I was a single mom with a mortgage. I had to pay. I had a kid to feed. I made money every single year. Every single year I've been in business. That is the thing that AI cannot give your clients. That's the thing that you give to your clients, your scars, your fears, your worry, your stories. That time that I was up all night crying about my business. That's what I bring to my business because I know you feel the same way. The recessions that I've survived, I know how to help you survive one too. The kid that I raised during my business and now my grandkids, I know how to tell you how to create a business with the freedom, the flexibility, and the income that you need to do that. That version of me is the version that can help you. What is your unfair advantage? If you were gonna fill in the blank on that, what would it look like? You are the gift for your clients. As a woman over 50, you're the gift. You have so much more to offer than anyone else. You have life experience over a 28-year-old, like two decades more than them. You have something that the internet does not have. You have stories, you have wisdom, you have perspective. That is your competitive advantage. That is the one thing that nobody else can copy In a market where everyone sounds like everyone else, I could just almost tell you that is a reason why coaches are not getting hired. That is a disconnect that we are all facing right now. This doesn't have to be your reality. Let me share one more piece of evidence of how this works. I'm gonna prove to you guys about why you need to be using your brain. Let's think about the telephone and telephone numbers for a moment. When was the last time somebody asked you about a phone number and you were like, oh, let me look it up. Do you guys remember when we knew everyone's phone number? That is the difference between what you know then, and you've given away your brain to your cell phone. Because we put our numbers in there, we don't even remember what they are. We have totally lost the skill of remembering phone numbers. This is the same thing with AI. If you continue to let AI. Decide for you. It makes you less smart. and for those of you that are on it every single day, wasting your time, stop. Please stop. You've got to get back to who you are, the essence to who you are. So let me give you what you actually need to know about shifting this in your business, three shifts. The first one is before you ever open AI again to work on your business, sit down with a piece of paper and pen and yes, I said paper. I want you to go old school, sit down and write these things down. What is your client doing at 10 o'clock on Friday morning? What are they doing? What are they thinking? What are they feeling? What are they drinking? What are they wearing? What is going on in their life? Describe it. What are they worried about? What's their plans for the weekend? What are they wrapping up for? The week depends on who your client is. What kind of money has she made? What's happening in her relationships? Is she picking up her kids from school? Does she have grandkids downstairs like I do? What is she really doing? Thinking, feeling, and experiencing? What kind of promise did she make to herself that she was gonna keep this week that she didn't do? How can you help her? I'll tell you, you can help her by answering those questions. This is what you do week after week. once you sit down and get the answers to those questions, guess what those are gonna be, what your posts are about, your freebies, about your funnels, about. That is your marketing. The marketing that you have is the stories that you tell stories sell. Your offer will be clear when you know what your person is doing on Friday morning, or fill in the blank, whatever it is, when you know what wakes them up at night. You'll be able to sell your offer, the solution that will keep them from waking up at night. Make this applicable to your niche. You have the answers. Please take the time to journal about this. Make sure that you know what your client needs. Your soul knows what they need. I believe that. So deeply that you have the answers. The second shift is I want you to go back and assess one piece of content that you have written in the last 30 days. Let's have an honest conversation. For those of you who are posting on social media every day and get no result, let's go back and look at one of those. Go back and look at your email. Go back and look at your website. You tell me, read it out loud. Ask yourself, would I actually talk to this person? When I ask people this, sometimes they're like, no. That's not even interesting. If you're not getting any response on your social media. No comments, no likes, no nothing, and it's been weeks. You better go back and look and see what they say and ask yourself, would you be social with this person? I'm gonna bet the answer is no. Would I say the thing that's on that post or the thing that's in that email to a friend at a coffee shop? Probably not. Would I talk that way on YouTube during an episode? Probably not. If the answer is no, then that means you outsourced. Your business to AI rewrite that one thing that you're looking at in your own words. Even if it sounds messy, what I am finding is that people are trying to perfect what they're saying with AI trying to clean it up, make it sound smarter. What people are most interested in is your true voice. Just be yourself. Talk like a human one, human to another, and I'm gonna say something else that might make you uncomfortable. I think the reason why a lot of women over 50 are using AI is because they're afraid of what they really might sound like. They don't even trust themselves anymore. If we didn't have AI you would be doing it, but you're trying to measure up to AI and you can't. Your real voice is enough. Your real life experience is exactly what somebody else needs. You don't need to sound smarter, polished, or more professional. You don't need to sound better than some young coach. You need to be you. AI should not be smoothing out. I'm gonna say like the wrinkles of your life. That's kind of how I feel, right? You're gonna end up sounding so generic and you will not get hired. The fastest path to getting clients is to sound like the woman that your client actually needs to talk to. The woman who has lived the experience, not the woman who has this polished brochure that they just printed up, not the woman who has a script that doesn't even sound like them. The third shift that I want you to do. That will change your business is to stop letting AI answer your business questions. Start using it to tell you the next question. If you ask AI who's my ideal client, you're gonna get a generic. Answer. If you tell AI especially voice text, you tell AI all about your person, answer all those questions that I just ask. You tell AI the answer to all of those, then you say to Claude or whoever your friend is, ask me a follow-up question so I can get more clarity on who I am talking to. That is you doing the work and AI being the assistant that you need, you are still the one who's going to answer the questions. You do that for your niche. You do that for your offer. You do that with everything you're doing so that it is your voice, it is your word. Let AI be the tool. You give the answers to AI and let it make very small changes to it. I wanna come back to the one thing I just mentioned to you halfway through. I have a gift for you. Use code AI 25. Access the new things that I have to support you. If you are trying to figure out your niche, don't ask ai. Grab the guide. Use the code AI 25. It will help you see this niche blueprint will help you see that you have the knowledge about your client. Don't ask AI to answer the questions. You go through that and answer the questions. I'm gonna show you what an expert you actually are. We also have a guide on YouTube. We have a guide on how to host your workshop and several other things. AI 25, use that code on anything else that there is. Alright. The biggest takeaway from this entire episode that I hope you think about is AI hijacking your brain. I want you to really hear that. We think about women over 50 that are using AI. I actually believe sincerely that it's making it harder for you to talk to somebody about your business. I am seeing this week after week, you need to have a conversation just like you're talking to your friend, which would not be the way AI talks. Think about the problems. That you face. Think about the opinions that you have. Think about trusting your gut again and knowing that you have the answer because you do. Once you have all of that figured out, then use AI for the tool. That's it. So the next time that you have this instinct to ask Chat, CPD, before you do that. Before you ask him a question, just talk into chat, GPT or Claude. Tell 'em what it is that's going on. I talked with a woman this week who had decades of experience. I was so sad. She's raised her kid. She's built businesses, she's survived a divorce, she's buried her parents. She was starting over. One of the most capable women I have ever met to coach somebody. You know what? She was talking to Claude about her niche. Stop it. This is not you being capable. That was somebody who was acting like they were not capable. You are capable of building an incredible business, of having everything you want. Trust yourself again. Sit down and answer the questions. Then reach for the tool later. You have the right answers in that beautiful brain of yours. Remember, you are the one that your client needs. Your future client does not want an expert. Or information. They can get that from Google, from Claude, from chat GPT. They want connection with you. They want human to human. They want your history. They wanna know that you understand 'em and that you get it. None of that can happen with ai. She doesn't need more information. She needs you. The woman sitting across from her on Zoom, that's who she needs eye to eye. That woman can never be replaced. That woman is the woman who's gonna sell her coaching this year. That woman is the woman who's gonna have a business that thrives. I hope I have motivated you to stop giving over your brain to AI. The reason that I started my business is because I knew I had a gold mine of information, of wisdom that people needed. You have the very same thing. You don't need another certification. You don't need AI to write anything for you. You sit down and do it. That woman inside of you, she is the one that people want to hire. This is where you can go to grow your business. I wanna inspire you, I hope I have. I want you to go do the work. Please pass this episode onto a friend that you know is overusing AI. This is gonna be a little bit of a challenge for you guys. Those of you who are using AI on everything. You're gonna have to go back to the basics and ask yourself these questions. Ask yourself all the things that you've outsourced to AI. Answer those questions so that you can basically start over with a clean slate, with your own voice, your own opinion, your expertise, using your own intuition, knowing that you have the answers. I cannot wait to see what you're gonna do. Tell me in the comments what you think about this episode. If you're guilty, I know I've been guilty of asking Claude to answer something for me that I should have answered, and I'm not doing it anymore. So grab a pen and a piece of paper and answer those questions. Sit down and use your brain to come up with the answers to everything you need for your business. You are so fully qualified and it's all up here, and you are ready to make a difference in the world and to have the income that is a reflection of the difference that you make in the world. Come back to me and tell me what you have discovered, what you have uncovered, and tell me what your biggest takeaway is from this episode. We'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.
