3 Ways to Use AI to Become a More Impactful Coach with Tim Brownson

Tim Brownson

What I found with AI is, the harder I pushed it, the better it got. The more difficult tasks I gave it, the better it got. AI is going to be the huge differentiator that can help coaches, and they have to lean into it, not pretend it's not there or that they don't need it. You absolutely need it. If you don't get into AI, you will be out of business in a couple of years.

Tobi

Can we hop into one example? And very specifically, I'm thinking of something that you had also shared in your email newsletter, where the AI would act as your coach supervisor. How does that look? What does it mean to be an impactful coach in times of AI? A cheap shortcut that dilutes the coaching craft, or a tool that can actually sharpen it? My guest today has a very clear position on this. Tim Brownson is known as The Fully Booked Coach, and he helps coaches with their online marketing and building a sustainable business. He is one of the most controversial, but I find also fun and insightful, voices to follow when it comes to the AI topic, but also to values and ethics in coaching. In our last conversation we went deep into values coaching and Tim's Clarity Method, so if you prefer that over AI, just go back. And today we'll pick up on a very different thread. This conversation is about how you as a coach can use AI without losing your voice, your judgment or your integrity. Tim and I nerd out and show a bunch of different ways to do this. How can you use ChatGPT and the likes

Tobi

And that is becoming an impactful coach in times of AI. How did you get into that topic, and why do you think it's relevant?

Tim Brownson

I think I was possibly starting to get a little bit jaded with marketing when ChatGPT came along, just over three years ago now. When I started playing about with it, when it first launched, I'm like, okay, well this is really cool. It was more interesting than anything else, and I'd dip in and out. Then I started to listen to a bunch of podcasts of people using AI, specifically AI and marketing. There's one called Marketing Against the Grain, and I was listening to all the episodes of that. That's the CMOs of Zapier and HubSpot, Kieran Flanagan and Kipp Bodnar. So I'd follow their stuff, and you could see their progress, from this is quite interesting to, holy shit, this is absolutely running amok through marketing. And what I found with AI is, the harder I pushed it, the better it got. The more difficult tasks I gave it, the better it got. Now, I still don't use it very much for writing. I'll use it to help me, but it doesn't get humor. It absolutely sucks donkey balls at humor, just forget about it. It sounds like Benny Hill or dad jokes or whatever when I ask it to be amusing.

Tim Brownson

But now I use it for all clients. It's an integral part of how I operate my business. AI is going to be the huge differentiator that can help coaches, and they have to lean into it, not pretend it's not there or that they don't need it. You absolutely need it. If you don't get into AI, you will be out of business in a couple of years.

Tobi

So you got into the field with your hat of being a coach, being an online marketer and being an obsessed learner. That's what I hear.

Tim Brownson

Yes.

Tobi

Can we hop into one example? And very specifically, I'm thinking of something that you had also shared in your email newsletter, where the AI would act as your coach supervisor. How does that look?

Tim Brownson

I can, yeah. And this is for coaches rather than for me. I do use something similar for me, but it's not quite the same. So, for a lot of coaches, especially ICF coaches, they have to have mentor training, and it is often expensive. And this is why I am a little bit, sort of not anti ICF, but skeptical of the ICF, because there are a lot of coaches out there that only make money from doing mentor coaching. That's expensive. So if you are paying a hundred dollars an hour or 200 dollars an hour, whatever it is, that's lots of money. What you can do is take, with the permission of the client, we keep having to say this, that you need to get express permission from your client, you take the transcript from a call. I use the free version of Fathom. You upload it and you write a prompt asking it to give you feedback on the coaching session. And again, you have to be very explicit with its role and tell it, you know, it is an ICF mentor coach. Tell it what you're looking for. Like, where did you maybe get, where were you leading the client where you shouldn't have done, where were you imposing your values on the client, where did you miss an opportunity to ask a killer question? So you can go back in. Now, it's not going to help you with continuing education credits, but if you want to make yourself a better coach, especially if you want to stop drifting into bad habits, like I did fairly

Tobi

Awesome. Let's make that more tangible. Can you show us how that prompt looks?

Tim Brownson

So this is the prompt that I shared with my newsletter list. Now, I got this prompt from ChatGPT. I did training in Co-Active coaching, but it was over 20 years ago, I can't really remember a lot of this stuff. I can remember the basics. So I asked ChatGPT to develop me a prompt. I think I maybe went back and forth with Gemini. So we've got the deep analysis prompt. Oh, sorry, this is where you paste it from. "Please take your time to study the following prompt carefully and thoroughly." You always want to tell it that. Then we're going to the role: "You are a highly experienced ICF level coach trained in the Co-Active model. Your role is to help me become a better coach by analyzing this." Then I've gone into, "you understand and apply Co-Active principles, client led agenda, partnership," et cetera, et cetera. And then you put in a little bit about you, tell it more about you, so it understands your role and your experience. Give it the objective: what do you want from this? And, be honest. It can be, we all know it can be a bit brown-nosy. And that's not just ChatGPT, that's all of them. That's kind of baked into the training, because AI is trained on human data, and humans by and large want to be liked, so it's always going to be like that, certainly in the foreseeable future.

Tobi

So you're putting in the "be honest" in order to sort of overcome, or tackle, the sycophantic behavior tendencies that ChatGPT might have here.

Tim Brownson

Right.

Tobi

Because you want really constructive feedback.

Tim Brownson

Yeah. Now, you still can't, what I was trying to explain there is, you can't bypass that entirely, and you still need to go back in and interrogate it. It helps somewhat to tell it, you know, specificity and constructiveness. And then there's all sorts of stuff, like, how effective was the opening? How well did I establish rapport, presence, et cetera? Quality of the questions. This is all basic coaching stuff. Where did I miss something? And you can really, really drill down on this, because it's trained on, you know, the Co-Active Coaching book, which is the bible for coaching, will be in ChatGPT. It will have stolen that book. I mean, I don't think they've paid for any of them, which, the ethics of that aren't just dubious, they're downright horrible. But it's there. So it's going to find things in your coaching. You want it to find them, really.

Tobi

Amazing. So, all I need to actually apply this, and we can put this prompt also in the show notes, I think we have it online, right?

Tim Brownson

Yes.

Tobi

All I need is a transcript of my session, and then I will get this sort of constructive feedback on how I approached the coaching conversation. Basically having ChatGPT act as my supervisor.

Tim Brownson

And that's it. And it's brilliant at that.

Tobi

Awesome. And if I got you right, you can't unfortunately show us a result, because obviously that would mean disclosing a conversation.

Tim Brownson

Yeah, I can't, I apologize about that. Go and try it. I just say to anybody, go and try it.

Tobi

And we can actually show something here from my end, because you said you wouldn't want to expose your client data. I have something that I can show with the tool that you mentioned, that is NotebookLM by Google. So this is available basically simply because I am a Google user.

Tim Brownson

You do not have to be a paid Google user to use NotebookLM. You have a limit, I think you can only have 30 notebooks if it's the free version, but it is available. You need to have, probably, a Gmail account, but you don't have to pay for it.

Tobi

Yeah, exactly. And then I have this environment where I can create a notebook and say, let me put in my sources. So now I could paste in text, I could provide my website, I could provide YouTube videos.

Tobi

And just to do a quick showcase of an example that I built here: this is my podcast production assistant. What I've done here is, for this podcast, formerly known as the Making of a Coach, now The Impactful Coach, I basically added a bunch of YouTube links from all the different conversations that I have. So what we see down here is all the different podcast episodes that we had on the show, mostly simply thrown in there as YouTube links. And now I can quiz this assistant, and instead of searching the web it would actually refer to the conversations that I actually had with my podcast guests. And in a similar way you can do that with your own voice, with any content that you created beforehand, and use this as an assistant to quiz it on your content and also come up with content in this tone of voice. Right? Or what else would you do here, Tim?

Tim Brownson

Well, obviously I haven't got a podcast, but for you, what you could do is definitely look for topics that you've not spoken about before, topics you have, and who you discussed it with. So, when did we talk about it and what did we say? And you can go and instantly find it. The other thing you can do, obviously, or I presume it's obvious, is you can pull other people's podcasts in, and you can look for ones that were really successful, got loads of views, and you can start a notebook pulling those in and looking for the topics, what they talked about with the popular ones. You can go onto YouTube and find a bunch of podcasts, or a bunch of tutorials explaining certain topics that are in your niche. You could go into NotebookLM and ask it to summarize them and write you a blog post with the most important bits. Now, we have to be careful on the ethics of this. If you don't understand a topic, you shouldn't, I would never write about something that I don't understand. But if you do, and you're just trying to think, okay, what are the real headlines that I can talk about here, then you can do that. Or, if you want to research a podcast that you want to apply for, go and pull in a load of episodes from YouTube and ask it to give you the things that they talk about that you can offer value on.

Tobi

Yeah. So in this case, maybe just to give one example, one thing that we could do is, I could say: with my most recent guest, Tim Brownson, I talked about the topic of values in coaching. Are there any other episodes where we dug into this topic that I could reference in the upcoming episode? So this is my prompt now, and let's see if I've talked about values previously on this show.

Tim Brownson

Yeah, I mean, the speed it did that at is phenomenal, isn't it? What did it take, 15 seconds? And it's going and looking at all those videos and finding, it's going through the transcripts, it's not studying the video, and finding what you've talked about. And now, if people can see this, you've got the citation button that you can click on and go to that part of the video if you want to have a deeper look yourself.

Tobi

Exactly. So now, if I say, okay, how did I discuss the topic of values with Todd,

Tim Brownson

And I'd like to give another use for this, if I can, because it's really important. People may notice that there's an audio and a video button on the right hand side near the top. And this allows you to turn this into audio. I've only used the video a couple of times, it's relatively new, but the audio version allows you to turn this into a podcast. Some people will have heard this. It's a female voice and a male voice, and it is phenomenal. When it first came out, the first one I heard, I had no clue it was AI, because they cut over each other and they hesitate like normal people do, and it's phenomenal. You can go and grab a two hour, like an Andrew Huberman or Lex Friedman, they do these super long podcasts, you can go and grab one, throw it into NotebookLM and say, create me a short podcast of this, and then you can go and listen to it. With me, I listen to podcasts when I'm out walking the dogs, or what have you. So there are some really super interesting applications. Plus, it's safe, it's not going to share your information. Now, ChatGPT, if you've checked the box, shouldn't share your information, and this is Google, so who really knows. But I think it's fairly safe that it is not giving you answers from the internet.

Tobi

Yeah, and in my example, all of the sources that I've put in here are obviously publicly out there anyway. And I could now use this as a way to fast track my learning. If I said, okay, I want to learn the approach to solution focused coaching from these three demos, then I throw in these three demos and I tell it, hey, can you summarize this? Can you create an audio podcast that summarizes the conversations?

Tim Brownson

It's a powerful tool, again, isn't it?

Tobi

Yeah. So there are many rabbit holes we could dig into, but this is basically on the topic of using AI in order to speak in your own voice, to be authentic. And I think that's often very important to coaches, and I'm sure to many listeners, and also to me personally, and that's why I like this tool.

Tobi

To go a bit strategic now about this conversation: can you give me a high level overview of what your most important use cases are that you are using AI for these days?

Tim Brownson

So, I didn't do copywriting for clients, not because I can't do it, it's one of the things that I'm best at, but it is so time consuming. And people who are paying for it don't appreciate it. Certainly the kind of client that hires me doesn't want me to use 20 hours to write a couple of pages of sales copy, but it could literally take that long. But now, at the moment, I've got three clients that I'm writing their website copy for. I can go into all the conversations we've had, so I may have six, seven transcripts, so that could be, I don't know, 10 hours plus of me talking to a client. It can figure out their voice, it can figure out their positioning, their messaging, and their ideal client, their client avatar. Well, I'll give it their client avatar, because that's something that I do with a client earlier in the process, because I think it's the most important thing as a coach to know your client avatar. So I'll give it all that, and then ask it to write me a homepage, or write me an

Tobi

Yeah. So the em dash is this long dash in between two words, that is sort of an indicator, or has become sort of a trademark of, okay, this is written with AI, because ChatGPT really likes em dashes, while regular humans would rarely use them. Okay. So I hear that as a coach I could be using ChatGPT to write the copy for my website. And I think the interesting bit, because I think that's fairly known by now, but the interesting bit that I'm hearing, is you say you can really get ChatGPT to a level where it's really speaking the language, using the voice, of that particular coach. So if I would want to do that, how would I go about this?

Tim Brownson

Well, you've got to give it, within reason, well, not even within reason, as much information as you can. For me, at that stage, I've always got these conversations with the client, so I don't need to go gathering that information, I don't need to interview the client specifically. I've got the transcripts that can help with the prompt. So if I was using NotebookLM, I would just upload all the transcripts, upload the client's client avatar, upload the values, because they are important in your messaging, that your values filter through how you present yourself. If they'd already got some copy, I probably wouldn't actually upload that. But coaches that are doing this from scratch themselves, they haven't got those conversations. So what they can then do is, go and find articles that you've written, or posts that you've written, if you've got some, upload those, because they are your voice. You're giving it your voice, presuming that's how you should be writing. Give it as much information.

Tim Brownson

So then you get the answer and you just think, okay, well, does that sound like me? You can take that result, say from ChatGPT, or I tend to use NotebookLM, take that result and put it into Gemini and say, this is some copy, tell me what's wrong about it, tell me what can be improved upon. And it will come back. You can just interrogate the results. You can say, well, now I want you to take an alternate viewpoint and tell me why what you've just given me is wrong. I'll give it a marketer called Dan Kennedy. I'll say, okay, well, you're Dan Kennedy. You're in a bad mood, you've got a hangover, you don't like me, you've just landed on my site and you've seen that copy. Tell me what you think's bad about it. It will just rip it to pieces. But you can't ask it to do that up front. You have to give it a role. You have to tell it, you're a marketing guy, you're a world class coach. If you don't give it a role, it's just going to give you generic crap.

Tobi

So in a way, you would have the AI impersonate different personas. You would say, you are a marketing expert, here is copy that I have written before, this is my client persona, now please write the copy for my website. And then, next step, you would maybe open a new chat and you would say, this is a draft for my coach website, now please, you are the client persona: what do you dislike about this? How would you say this can be improved?

Tim Brownson

Yeah, exactly. I'll often give it a specific person. So there are certain copywriters that I really like, I'll give it, like, David Ogilvy, who was probably the best copywriter of all time, in the fifties and sixties, and everything that David Ogilvy wrote is available to it, so it knows the voice. It can mimic Seth Godin. It'll have all Seth Godin's books that have been stolen by the AI labs to train it on. So there can be maybe somebody that you really respect and like, and it can then write in their style. Obviously, don't take something that sounds just like them, you need to then adapt it to your own voice. And this is one of the other things as well: people just take the AI output and think, oh, that's good, let me use that, without adapting it to their voice. And it's clearly AI. There are lots of telltale signals. You know, the rule

Tobi

Can you show us maybe even a hands-on example where you've sort of done that?

Tim Brownson

Yeah, I definitely can. So this is something that I did in Claude, as an experiment. Now, I was in Claude Code for this, so it gets a little bit complicated. You don't have to write prompts as complicated as this, but you can. So what I was doing with this prompt, this is one where I'm asking Claude to basically write me a book and put together a sales page to sell this book. So it was only for fun, and to push it. So I'll just read a little bit of this. "You are Claude, acting as a senior direct response copywriter and lead magnet product creator for a UK based coaching brand." Then I give it context. I give it the name of the business, I tell it the platform that I want it built for, the email tool, MailerLite, that I want it to integrate with. I tell it the pricing that I want to do, and that it's not a free opt-in. And then I give it a load of rules: no fake testimonials, no fake numbers, no "as seen in" that you see on BS sales pages, no earnings claims, no sketchy marketing claims in general. This comes back to the integrity we talked about in the previous conversation. And a load

Tobi

I love it. So what we see here, if you scroll up again, is that you really applied what we also discussed earlier. You told the AI who it is, so, you are this senior direct response copywriter and lead magnet product creator. You gave it this hat. And then you also set the constraints. And I think many people would consider writing a prompt like this difficult. But what I like, when thinking about this, is: just imagine you have exactly this person, the direct response copywriter, sitting in front of you as a human. How would you lead this person? How would you delegate a job to this person? And that's exactly how you do it with the AI. And obviously that also comes along with some hard rules. Maybe these would already be implicitly known if this was a human, because at our company we don't do fake testimonials, et cetera. But then all the other things, that's sort of your mission that you would also give an employee. And I think thinking about the AI like that makes it much more intuitive.

Tim Brownson

Exactly, you've absolutely nailed it. And some of this information, by the way, whether you are using ChatGPT or Claude, you can upload information to your profile, so some of it it will know. But it's just reiterating, basically. One of the mistakes that some people make is, they talk about ChatGPT as if it knows them and it knows to do this and do that. None of them have infinite memory. That is probably when we get to AGI, that is not possible at this point in time. So it will do things that you think it's forgotten about. So it's always useful, with a prompt, not to presume it knows nothing, but to presume it only knows really basic stuff about you.

Tim Brownson

Now, I use a tool called Willow Voice. I suck at typing, so now I've just got a hotkey, I hold it down and I talk to it, basically. And so I can write really long prompts and not worry about it. And that's made a huge difference to how I can use ChatGPT, because it needs that information, as you were just saying. I've asked a few times in my Facebook group, you know, if you've got five grand to spend on your business, what would you spend it on? And often it's either a website or a copywriter. If I give you five grand to spend on a website, you're not going to go to a website developer and say, build me a website. You're not going to go to a copywriter and say, can you write the copy for my website? Like, yeah, I can, here it is, and it's shit, it's just generic. Or you've got a crap website as well. You have to tell those people. And sometimes people think they don't need to do that with AI. Well, of course you do. It does a lot of really good and useful things, but it's not a mind reader yet. Give it this information. And the old saying of garbage in, garbage out from computing way back when, it's exactly the same: if you give it crap information, crap instructions and directions, just like if you hire somebody, you're going to get bland, boring results back, and you're just going to think, well, this isn't very good. And

Tobi

So you need to treat the AI, maybe Claude or ChatGPT, like a human colleague, employee or freelancer that you work with, and give it all the context. And one thing that I would like to highlight, because I think that's really an undervalued resource, is, you just said you don't actually write the prompt, you speak the prompt. So, just like with an employee, you would actually talk to the AI, basically holding down some keys, and then you have another AI driven tool that translates your speech into text in a well structured way. What is the tool you're using there?

Tim Brownson

I use Willow Voice, but there are a few now. There's Wispr Flow, I think one's called. I think you can maybe do that in Otter now, I'm honestly not sure, I've not used Otter.

Tobi

Yeah, awesome. So I'm using Wispr Flow, which also works on Windows, and I'm even on the free tier for that, and I use it mainly to talk to ChatGPT. So if I would be writing an email or a chat message, then I'm still typing, but whenever I talk to AI, exactly for that reason, I don't need to be as concise as I would want to be in an email that I would write to a human. So there I'm using my voice a lot. And we can put both of these tools in the show notes.

Tobi

So, we have this elaborate prompt now that we spoke to the AI. What's next?

Tim Brownson

Right, next is just letting it run. Now, something like this, as I said, I'm asking it to write me a book from scratch. I'm asking it to give me the code to develop a landing page to sell the book, and to come back and give me step by step instructions on setting this up so I can sync it with MailerLite, so I can gather people's information for my newsletter list. Interestingly enough, and this is because it knows me, in the instructions I gave it, it came back and told me that because of GDPR regulations I couldn't automatically add people to a list because they bought a product. You can in the US, I mean, US regulation, there's very little regulation outside of California, but in the UK and also in the European Union you can't. So that was a cool thing to take into account. Then I just hit run, and I'm actually not sure how long it took to come back with the results, because I then took the dogs out, and it said "done it" by the time I came back. But this is a bit like using deep research in Gemini and ChatGPT, which very few people do. Sometimes people think they're using deep research by asking it a complicated question. But deep research is a

Tobi

And, knowing that integrity is an important value for you, and that you wouldn't want to put out generic AI text, what would you do to make this really get your own voice, your own spin?

Tim Brownson

Right. What I'm doing basically is writing a long introduction, part of which is how to use prompts. So, okay, I've got this prompt, but it's not quite right for me, what do I do? So there's an explanation of how to use prompts, giving it context, giving it a role, giving it who your audience is, who whatever it is you're creating is for. And also some other stuff around AI, around what you can use it for. But, having said that, at the end of the day it's all about value to the client. So if I just stuck these hundred prompts in an ebook, that ebook is worth 20 dollars to any coach that's going to use AI. So, is there a lack of integrity in doing that? No, of course there isn't. I wouldn't claim I'd written all the prompts. I would explain, as I said before, in the hundredth prompt I would say, this book was written by AI and this is how I did it. So to me it's about value to the

Tim Brownson

hang on a minute, did you use Sage to do this? Well, that's cheating, I don't want my accountant using Sage, go and do it yourself, get your calculator, or better still get your abacus out and go and do my accounting. For me, this is just a tool to produce a product that people value. You can look at loads of industries, handmade versus something that's made by a machine. It is no different. So I wouldn't claim I'd written it, I wouldn't say, you know, I've sat down all weekend and thought about these prompts. No, that's bullshit, and it's clearly a lie. But it's value to the reader, really.

Tobi

Great.

Tobi

So, if I am new to AI, somewhat skeptical, but now listening to our conversation has made me curious, what would be your closing words for me? How should I get started?

Tim Brownson

Go and use it. Go and play about with it. I would say definitely use a paid model. With Claude you're going to run out of tokens, which are basically lumps of letters, quite quickly. I would say go and pay for ChatGPT, it's 19 dollars a month. Try it out for a month, push it as far as you can and see what you get. I mean, I pay for Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT. Most coaches don't need all of those. Claude's better at writing, if you want to just do writing. And also Claude Code now, which is allowing people to vibe code, which is pretty much what I did, what I've shown you before. So Claude is sort of breaking away from the pack with that at the moment, it's got a lot of buzz about it. And again, I think it's 19 dollars a month or thereabouts. And going back to what I said about the book in the previous episode: if you can't afford to spend 19 dollars to try this out, can you afford to run a business, really? I know that's harsh, but that's the reality of running a business, it costs you money.

Tobi

Awesome. Thank you, Tim.

Tim Brownson

You are welcome.

Tobi

It has been a fun ride across many different topics. Great to have you.

Tim Brownson

It was great to be here. I really enjoyed it. Thanks very much.

Tobi

This was my conversation with Tim Brownson. I know we went in many directions, so I hope you were able to follow. And if you, for example, want the prompt that Tim showed for using AI as your coach supervisor, check out the show notes. Tim also hosts a masterclass on leveraging AI as a coach, and I can generally recommend following his email list. Of course, before feeding any client material into ChatGPT and the likes, it's sensible to get explicit consent from your client, and also to anonymize the material. That being said, I generally agree with Tim that lots of learning and leverage can come from embracing these tools. So if you are not doing so yet, give it a try. Also, let me know if you want more content in this direction, or if we should better stick with topics like values, which we discussed on the last episode with Tim. I'm curious to hear from you. I'll be back here in two weeks with our next guest. I'm Tobi, co-founder of metaFox, and I wish you all the best on your path towards becoming an impactful coach. Cheers.