EP 375 - How To Use AI the Right Way to Save Time and Get Clients as a Coach

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Written By Debbie Shadid
 

AI can save you hours every week in your coaching business, but it can also waste hours, sending you down rabbit holes that will never get you a single client. If you're a new coach looking to leverage AI in the simplest way possible, this video will show you how to streamline your coaching business and attract new clients without wasting time. Today I'll show you five ways to use AI the right way as a beginning coach.

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, without paid ads and without complicated tech.

Whether you're just starting out or looking to scale your existing business, you'll learn how to use AI to get coaching clients and grow your business. So, if you're ready to take your coaching business to the next level and make the most of AI tools, watch this video now and start saving time and attracting new clients.

AI should make your business simpler, not busier. It's a tool to support the handful of things that actually build your business, not another source of overwhelm piling work onto your plate.

Want to talk through where you are and how to build your coaching business? Book a call with me here: https://debbieshadid.com/schedule

Still unsure about your niche? My Profitable Niche Blueprint walks you through the entire process of finding the right niche, the one thing AI can never figure out for you: https://debbie-shadid-shop.fourthwall.com/products/niche-blueprint

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TRANSCRIPT

AI can save you so many hours every single week in your coaching business, but it can also cost you so much time. You can waste so much time doing things that will never get you a coaching client. And today, I want to talk about how to save time and get clients with the help of AI. If you are beginning in your coaching business, you probably don't need more things to do. You need to know which things actually matter, and then use AI to make those things easier and faster. I'm Debbie Shadid. I help women over 50 build beautiful boutique-style coaching businesses without paid ads and without complicated tech. Today, I want to show you five ways to use AI the right way when you are at the beginning stages of your coaching business so you can actually save time and it will help you get clients instead of giving you another thing to do. AI can absolutely save you time and it can help you get clients, but only when you are using it to support the things that actually build your business. So let's get into what those five things should be. Number one, start with what your business actually needs, not what AI can do. Don't let AI give you all kinds of new things that your business doesn't actually need. This is probably the thing that I want beginning coaches to understand most. Every week there are dozens and probably even hundreds of new AI tools coming out. That's just another tool with another feature, another bit of automation, and honestly, you don't need any of those. It is so easy to get caught up in that You have been listening to somebody on YouTube or on a podcast tell you all about it, and you think, "Okay, I need that before I can start my business." Before you can open up Chat GPT or Claude or or whatever AI tool you are using, what I want you to ask is, "What does my business actually need right now?" If you are a beginning coach, the answer is probably much simpler than you think. So what does your business need right now? First of all, you need to know who you're gonna help, right? Pretty simple. Who are you gonna help? You need to know what the problem is that you're gonna help them solve. You need to validate that niche. You need a clear coaching offer. You need to start attracting people who might need that offer, and you need to make invitations. That is inviting people to connect with you, telling people about your business. That is a business. AI should not help you with any of those things, and it cannot make those things faster or easier. It shouldn't consistently add things to your to-do list, and it will if you're not careful. This is where I think AI can actually make overwhelm worse if you're not careful. Because you can ask AI for 50 marketing ideas, and it will give you 50. And you know what else you can do? And if you put your ideas, your own marketing ideas into AI and you say,"What do you think?" Guess what? It will give you different feedback. That is the loop that is keeping people stuck over and over. I'm sure you can relate to this. You put something in a Chat GPT, and you say, "What do you think?" Or into Claude, and it tells you something different than what you started with. That is AI doing its job. It is supposed to be questioning you and giving you a different perspective. I know I have been infuriated because I have done something, and I think I'm done with it, and I put it in and say, "Could you check the spelling in this?" And it will come back and say, "You know, I've looked at that and you want the honest truth, and I think you should do this." It's like, oh, my goodness, I didn't ask that. I asked you to check the spelling. So I want you to be very specific with it. So before you ask AI, what could I do? I would rather you ask yourself, what am I trying to accomplish? What is it that I'm trying to do? And it should be get a coaching client, okay? Then you can use AI to help you accomplish that. That's the number one rule, okay? What is it that you need to use AI for? Because what are you trying to accomplish? Number two, use AI to understand your potential clients, not to invent them. I know, invent them, right? You should know who they are. AI can help you with research, but honestly, the research it's going to give you will not replace a conversation that you have with someone. If you are a beginner coach, you need to talk to humans. You need to talk to people about what they're doing and how they're doing it and what they've tried and all those things instead of asking AI, " Give me 10 profitable coaching niches." It'll give you 10 of them, but the thing is they're not 10 that you can coach on. You can say, "What's the biggest problem women over 50 are having?" And it'll give you a list. You could ask, what would someone pay a coach to help her with? Again, it will give you another list. All those answers are useful, but they are research. They do not prove that you have the right niche for you. It doesn't even take, into account whether you know anything about that particular segment of the niche. So it will give you answers that sound very complete, and you might feel confident, but when it comes down to doing all the regular conversation, all the everyday marketing, the sales conversations, explaining what you do at a networking event, you're not gonna be able to do any of it because you still need to talk about what you know with real people. When you talk to real people, you will hear what they actually say to describe their problem. You will hear the subtleties of your person. That is niche validation. Now, here's where AI can become incredibly helpful. Use AI to help you prepare those questions for those conversations. Use AI to take the transcripts from the conversations that you have And to pull out the common themes, provided you say you cannot change any of the words that the client or the potential client or the person I interviewed said. if you have talked to five women, here are my notes, then look at those patterns. You wanna look for what the problems are that came up, what is the outcomes. That is using AI in the right way to analyze whatever's going on. So do your interviews, get the transcripts. If you're meeting them in person, yes, you would have notes, but whatever those pieces are, you gather that together, put it back into AI and say, "Summarize this for me. Keep it in their words only, but tell me what are the patterns, what are the themes? What are people asking for?" This is so important because if you are talking to the right people, guess what? They'll tell you what your offer should be. They'll tell you what your content should be, what your workshop topics should be all about. You will get social media ideas out of that. You can use their exact words, And you could even know where they hang out because that can be a question you ask them. So don't let AI set the foundation for your business. AI should not be placing the cornerstone of your business. You should be. AI can help you build a better foundation once you have real information. All right, number three, use AI to create marketing that answers real questions. if you want your content to help you get clients, stop asking AI what you should post and start asking AI what your potential client wants to know. Can you see the distinction between that? A beginning coach says to AI, "Hey, give me 30 Instagram posts," and she gets 30 posts in 30 seconds. Well, that's amazing. So does everybody else. But they're generic, and they sound like everyone else's content. Instead, you start with the person. You tell AI all about your niche. This is when that voice texting comes in real handy. Go on a walk and talk all about your person. Tell them everything that you have learned through the validation process, what you were hearing people say, what conversation you saw in a Facebook group that was helpful. Then you can say, "What questions is this woman already asking about this problem?" Now you're gonna get better answers. If you're a grief coach, what is someone dealing with when it comes to grief, and what are they actually searching about that topic? If you're a career coach, what is the woman who's miserable at work trying to figure out? If you're a parenting coach, what question is that mother typing into

Google or TikTok at night? Those questions become content, People search because they want answers. They're searching things like, "How do I… What should I… Why does… When should… What's the difference between… Can you explain this?" Think about the way that you ask questions. That's the way you should be entering into a search. Here's something else you can do. You can ask questions, you can teach something useful and get follow-up questions from that. You can do polls and get opinions, and go look for what people are saying. If you go to Amazon and you look for books that are around your topic, you can find exactly what people are saying. You can screenshot that, put that into AI and say, "Can you help me turn that statement into some kind of marketing?" Isn't that amazing? You could do that with things in Facebook groups, other people's Facebook groups. So you're not taking their content. Don't ever copy what anybody else says. But you can take the ideas and you can model after that. You can say, "This seems to be the thread, the common denominator in this conversation," screenshot it, put it over in AI and say, "Based on my niche and everything you know about me, what else could be a different angle on this same thing?" Then that becomes part of what makes sense for your niche. you could also make videos with that same content, you could write an email. There are so many ways to use that type of content. That is the best way to do it. So you are creating content to help you get clients, not by asking Claude or ChatGPT what to post, but by saying, " This is what I know my ideal client wants." That's the distinction I want you to remember.

All right, . Number four, use AI to multiply your work, not your workload. you can go ask AI for things. In fact, I'll do, like, a podcast overview, and I'll tell Claude what all I wanna talk about. I voice text it all into Claude, and it'll come back with some episode that's twice as long as what I wanted. It's added in all kinds of other things. You've got to be careful To make sure that the essence of who you are and what you wanna say doesn't get lost. So one of my favorite ways is to take a piece of content that's already done, like this particular podcast. Use that transcript to help you figure out other marketing you can do or to figure out how to promote the marketing that you've already done. I talk to our clients about recording a workshop for practice, but then they take the transcript from the workshop, they put that into AI, along with all the email templates we have. We actually have a complete AI guide that I provide for our clients that has all the social media posts, all the emails, all the reminders, the landing page, every bit of it, the Eventbrite listing page, all of it, is built off of my templates and the transcript that came from the practice workshop the coach did. It is so cool because it actually creates the content based on your exact words. This is so, so good.

All right, number five: use the time that you save with AI to do more things to actually get clients. This rule ties it all together. Let's say AI saves you five hours, and so many tools now will tell you how much time it has actually saved you, which is so, so cool. But what are you gonna do with those five hours? Let me tell you what you should do with those five hours. You should not create more content. Now, marketing is the ATM to your business, and I do say that. But once you get your marketing done, don't sit at your desk and create even more marketing, because I'm gonna bet that feels very useful, and it keeps you from doing the thing that feels uncomfortable, which is going out and meeting people, telling them what you do, and offering to help them. I want to encourage you to go meet people in person. Take those five hours and find people to talk to about what you do, what you are most passionate about, because that will create the fastest result for you. I don't want you creating just more stuff. I don't want you creating your next course, 'cause you don't need to. I don't want you creating workshops and guides and more freebies. Everybody can do that same stuff. But you know what most people are not doing and can't do, is go have a conversation with somebody, and you can. Think about this. You don't have to have a perfectly scripted message to tell somebody about what it is that you do, to tell somebody about, "Gosh, this is what happened for me because of the transformation that I've had. Because I applied these principles to my life, this is what's happened for me." So please go out, meet people, talk to them. Send out personal emails, you know, individual emails to people you've been friends with. Send out DMs to your friends on Facebook or on Instagram. Go personally connect with people and invite them to come have a coaching conversation with you. I built my entire business the first six months from zero people on my email list to a hundred people, and I made $100,000. I did that because I talked to people, I would offer them free coaching, and then I would say, "Hey, who else can you refer me to? Who could I help in business that's struggling?" That is asking for referrals, it's coaching people, it's building relationships. It is building the skill that you need most, which is talking to people and coaching people. AI cannot do any of that. You need to actually make offers. All of this is gonna get easier based on the more conversations that you have. I promise you, if you talk to 10 people in person about your coaching, your business and the way you talk about it will completely change. Because in 10 conversations, you will know exactly what to say. You will also know how to call out AI and say, "Look, what you're giving me back for content is not good, because this isn't what my person's talking about. Instead, this is what my person's talking about." So one more question I want to ask you. Before you use AI for something in your coaching business, ask yourself this: Is this actually helping me get clear? Is it actually helping me save time, serve a client, or get closer to that potential client? I love to ask our own coaching clients, what is the one thing that you could do every single day that actually moves you closer to the one thing that you need, which is a client and revenue? One client-producing activity a day, and that is typically conversations and connections and follow-ups, meeting people, tell them what you do, and telling them how you can help them. That is what you wanna be thinking about. So yes, you could say, "Is it getting me clearer? Is it saving me time serving a client?" All that, but honestly, what is the one thing that you can do today and every day, the first thing on the list, that will help you get closer to having a client? AI cannot do that for you. AI can produce those hundred pieces of content that you do not need. It can get you another freebie that you do not need. What you need is to go build your business. AI should be making your business simpler. It should not be frustrating you, it should not be overwhelming you, and it should not be creating more work for you by saying, "Hey, post all these posts." Don't ask AI what your marketing plan should be, 'cause AI will give you a big, giant marketing plan, and I'm telling you what, your business could be simpler. There was a time and a day, not that long ago, when I would just go meet people, and I would talk to them, and let me tell you what, I have made millions doing that very thing. So those are the five rules that I want you to live by when it comes to AI. Number one, start with what your business needs, not what AI can do. Number two, use AI to understand your potential clients, Not to invent these ideas about your potential clients. You know your clients. Number three, use AI to create marketing that answers real questions. Number four, use AI to multiply your work, not overload your work. This is the one I was talking about, the transcript. And number five, use the time AI saves you to do the things that actually get you clients, which is talking to people. That's the opportunity that I see that most beginning coaches are missing. They're just thinking AI is the greatest tool ever that's gonna tell them what to do and how to do it. You don't need to do more. You do not need more technology. You don't need any other Chat GPT, Claude. You need one of them. You only need one AI tool. You do not need any other ones, okay? One. Most of you guys are comfortable with ChatGPT. I happen to love Claude, but use the one that you are most familiar with. And I'll tell you, ChatGPT is the least expensive, and it is the most accessible, and the easiest to use. So that's the way I want you to work. Keep your business easy. If you are building a coaching business right now, I would love for you to subscribe so you don't miss any episodes. I love to teach all the practical how to build a profitable coaching business without paid ads and without complicated tech. One last thing. If you are still in that niche phase and you're like, "I don't know what a profitable niche is for me. I'm still unsure," I'm gonna link right here the Profitable Niche Blueprint. I'm gonna tell you what, it takes you through the entire process of finding the right niche so that you know that you are on track. It will help you figure out how to solve things that AI could never solve for you. The link is in the comments. You guys have a beautiful, amazing week, and we'll talk to you very soon. Bye-bye.

Debbie Shadid https://www.DebbieShadid.com
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EP 374 - ChatGPT for Coaches: 7 Ways to Use AI