This week’s episode with the popular leadership coach, Fay Wallis covers a wide range of ground, from HR practice and coaching to marketing workflows and the realities of AI adoption across teams. As part of this week’s theme, I’ll be deliberately zooming in on just one thread from that conversation: how confidence with AI actually begins. So be sure to come back for the article, the resource, and the reflection audio as we explore it further.
Before anyone builds systems or develops deeper expertise, they usually start by simply seeing how someone else is using AI in their day-to-day work. Drawing on her experience as a coach, Fay describes this shift clearly, from hesitation and overwhelm to curiosity sparked by watching, asking, and being shown.
I’m looking forward to exploring this with you, and if you’d like these posts straight to your inbox, you’re very welcome to subscribe.
TRANSCRIPT
(00:00:00):
Welcome to the Sovereign Career Podcast.
This podcast, if you don’t know already, is part of the Sovereign Career Hub,
and its job is simple. It’s to gather honest, practitioner-led field evidence about how AI is reshaping work, what’s changing, what’s breaking, and what people are figuring out in practice.
What surfaces here becomes raw material for the rest of the hub, deeper articles, practical solo audios, and ongoing community conversations.
So no pressure on me then! I am joined today by the wonderful Fay Wallis and it’s fantastic to have you here Fay I’m going to of course ask you lots of wonderful questions but first I’d really like it if because we don’t have everybody watching the video I presume and there’s a lot of people might be listening I hope there are anyway!
Then I thought it would be a nice thing if you could just describe the room you’re sitting in, where you are located maybe in the country and really what you enjoy about that lovely beautiful office that I can see behind you. I’m used to looking at it because we often chat online but I’d like you to just describe it to others if you could. What makes you happy about it?
(00:01:14):
Of course. Oh well, thank you so much for inviting me to be on the show, Carolyn. It’s really exciting to be here and as far as where I am in the country, I am in a tiny little town called Banstead, which most people have never heard of, which is in Surrey, so it’s just outside of London in the UK. And I’m joining you today from my home office, which also doubles up as our spare bedroom, haha, and when I took over this room I ended up completely redecorating it because it was really, really dark and I do so much of my work online I thought, oh, I don’t really want people thinking it’s a bit dark and gloomy whenever I see Fay. So I spent ages. It’s a sort of duck egg blue and behind me there’s a grey minimalist sofa which doubles up as a sofa bed so that if we have got anyone coming to stay it means they’ve got somewhere to sleep, so those lucky people get to sleep in here with all of my office equipment. And I’ve got an abstract painting on the wall above the sofa as well and that’s probably what makes me happy because it takes me ages to choose any sort of pictures. I don’t know why, I find it quite difficult decorating my house or finding paintings. And I loved this one when I saw it and saved up for it, so I felt super excited when I got to put it up on the wall.
(00:02:30):
Oh, that’s beautiful. Oh, that’s lovely because actually it means more when you’ve invested in it yourself, doesn’t it? And, you know, you’ve saved up for something like that. Oh, that’s wonderful. Well, just to say thank you for that, and also just to set the tone for the conversation for everyone who’s listening, Fay, you’re not here as an AI expert today, are you? Instead, we’re interested in how AI shows up in real working life and the choices people are actually making, you included, of course, but also because you speak to so many HR practitioners, professionals, HRDs, et cetera, in the work that you do. And we will be talking about that as we go through, I’m sure, because we’re bouncing off some of those wonderful things you do, including, for example, the Inspiring HR Leadership Programme. But I thought it would be really nice to ask you to start off. I do this because it helps people to place you. Where would you place yourself on the AI spectrum right now? Can I ask you that?
(00:03:34):
I think if the spectrum is going from zero with no confidence about AI at all all the way up to 10 where you’re an AI expert I’d probably put myself at about a seven. I do feel fairly confident with trying out different AI tools. I’m fairly excited about it a lot of the time, although of course sometimes it can be a bit scary as well. I keep fairly up to date with watching videos and things like that and reading resources about AI so I am certainly not an expert, but I’m a happy dabbler and happy user of AI.
(00:04:09):
Well, that’s nice to know. I mean, do you find, while I’m just on that quickly before we leave that point, do you find that is fairly normal for people to be at that level or do you feel that you’re probably a little bit more advanced than some of the people you’re speaking with a lot?
(00:04:24):
I think it’s probably not normal and I’ve learned that the hard way actually when I have talked about AI with other people and then just seen this absolute terror and fear on their face and kind of shut down, no I don’t want to talk about it or even consider it for my work. So that made me realize, oh gosh, I’ve got to go a bit more slowly here and check with people when I’m speaking to them what their thoughts are and their feelings are about AI because I don’t want to be off-putting when talking about it with people. So I’ve always been quite techy. I quite like tech stuff. My sister’s a website designer and just from her helping me with my website she ended up teaching me how to do loads of it. I’d probably be a terrible website designer if that was my job, but I’m certainly not scared of getting stuck in there and testing trying new things on my website and with other aspects of my work as well. I’ve always liked embracing technology. When I was in my HR career I remember the company started using Microsoft SharePoint for the first time and they asked for volunteers to get extra training and become SharePoint super users and I put my hand up straight away and absolutely loved it and ended up building a whole HR intranet on SharePoint at the time. So I think I have always been quite into tech and I just see AI as the next evolution of tech really, but I mean there are so many people who know so much more than I do.
(00:05:48):
That’s really interesting because obviously your work with Bright Sky, Bright Sky HR, which is your consultancy, is really giving you access to a lot of people with a wide range of seniority, I would expect, and also responsibility. And so do you feel that they are starting to talk to you? Are people starting to talk to you about, oh, you know, a little bit of insecurity maybe about, because I know you talk about strategy a lot. So then that’s great, you’re coaching people, your coaches, to be more strategic if that’s what they want. And so in that pursuit, do you find that AI enters the conversation?
(00:06:35):
I think the vast majority of my work nowadays is delivered through my Inspiring HR Leadership Programme and because AI is such an important topic and impacting the workplace so much at the moment it’s something that I do talk about as part of the program and as we work our way through it I might share tools, so different AI tools and suggestions of how they could be used, and that really is where I realised that not everyone is comfortable with AI because I got very overexcited and the first time I started introducing some of the tools I could just see real resistance from a couple of people where they hadn’t started embracing AI yet and they were quite cautious of it.
(00:07:18):
How long ago was that, Fay? Yeah, and have you noticed, because obviously this is a very fast-paced development, isn’t it, so are you noticing any change maybe? I mean, I was listening to a podcast, one of my favourite podcasts this morning on AI, well I say favourite podcast, it’s why I do my research, a lot of it, and they were saying that’s been a change in the last six months, I think it’s since November, where are we now, you know, since November 25 there’s been a change in how people, this is an American survey by the way but it’s by KPMG or someone like that, and it’s millions, I think they actually, I’m sure they said they’d interviewed over a million people, which seems crazy, or at least surveyed over a million people. And the result is that there’s been a drop in the amount of people who feel very fearsome, who are fearing AI. And I think it’s quite a big drop. It’s gone from 23% down to about 17%, which is pretty amazing, that’s in that six months, and of course before that it was higher and before that it was higher but it’s going quite fast. Are you noticing that change?
(00:08:31):
I’m not sure that I work with, you know, that’s a million people they’ve surveyed and I definitely don’t have a million people who I’m able to work with on a one-to-one or group basis, but I would say it’s the same as any adoption of a new thing. I remember reading a book by Seth Godin, who’s a marketing expert, and he talks about when a new product is released you always have people approaching it at different stages, so you will have some people who just love anything new and shiny and can’t wait to get their hands on it and try it, and then you’ll have people who are happy to give it a go and interested in it but they probably want to have heard a bit more about it from those super excited people, and then you have people who are slower to adopt it, and then you’ve got people who are just a bit fearful and resistant to change or to try a new product. And I think it’s exactly the same as anything else to be honest, so as time goes on I guess more and more people are going to become comfortable with it and certainly when I talk about it in my program I would say the majority of people are at least comfortable with it and maybe using it a bit, and we might have one or two people who are really advanced and really, really into it, and there might just be one or two people who aren’t massively keen on it. So I think that spread probably reflects what Seth Godin talks about far more articulately than me in that book, that you know it’s human nature, that’s how we tend to respond to any sort of new product whether it is technology and AI or whether it’s something else. I mean I remember when the iPhone first came out and my husband bought me one and I said why have you got me this, like my Nokia’s fine, it’s all because you’re gonna... oh sorry, he disappeared for a minute, they’ve come back now though, and he said oh well because it’s got apps and I was like well why do I care about apps? He loves anything new and will always get his hands on it immediately and I’m probably that one person down where I’m quite comfortable with tech but I probably need to be shown it a bit before I start really getting into it.
(00:10:34):
Yes, we are all at different stages, aren’t we? I mean if you think about the adoption curve, how people are, you know, some people are laggards, or they’re even called laggards, or they were when the adoption curve first came out, that bell curve thing that we’ve seen, and crossing the chasm used to be a thing that technology had to do. It had to leap over this chasm from the early adopters, the enthusiasts, the pioneers who, you know, like your husband and possibly me to some extent, would be clicking away and not worrying if it was ......... the White House or whatever. This is what we used to worry about. Will it ......... the White House was a thing people said. If I press this button, what will happen? So don’t worry, it’s not going to. But I think if we really sort of just are so enthusiastic about using it, it can be a bit overwhelming for people who are just trying it for the first time, and we can be a bit too enthusiastic and they’re sort of like it’s overwhelming. And I think that now we see so much on social media, like LinkedIn for example, which is where I spend a lot of my time, I know you do, and you know we see it there, is it a good thing, is it a bad thing, is it evil, is it good, and you have this crazy kind of dichotomy going on and it’s overwhelming to people who are not yet part of the conversation and that can send them in the other direction. However, I would encourage people not just to use tools but to get to know about AI a bit more, to understand it a bit more, because clearly that’s probably something that you do, isn’t it? You understand a bit more about how it works and have you thought about the ethics and things that go with it? Do these things occur to you from time to time, you know?
(00:12:28):
Oh yeah, very much so, and I think where the majority of my work is with HR professionals, you know, we’ve got to be so careful and mindful of ethics as a profession, and where I’m a trained coach as well there’s a huge part about making sure that your practice is ethical. So it’s definitely something I think about all the time as far as using it is concerned.
(00:12:52):
Yes, and how it might impact. I mean, there’s two narratives going on. There’s the big one, the societal one. How is AI going to impact our society and us as people and jobs as a whole? That’s the macro level. And then you’ve got more of the micro level within the organization where HR is quite concerned about what it’s going to do with the data and so forth. And, you know, have you got the guardrails in place in relation to your own organisation? Sometimes in relation just to your own family. I mean, you’ve got to start, you know, you look at all different levels of it. It’s relevant at all levels. But that can be, I think others, I mean, I’m working with several groups of people. HR is one of them. And I find that HR is quite reticent by comparison. It’s risk averse, as we all know, process driven as we know and when you look at some of the other groups that I work with who are more kind of like well we just have to get this thing done let’s just do it you know we take the risk they’re more interested in what AI can do for them and you know what the outcome the results if you like more of a results based approach does that bear out what you know about how AI is affecting and impacting the HR teams that you work with?
(00:14:16):
I think the discussions that I tend to have wouldn’t necessarily be talking about it in that depth because when I’m talking to people or sharing tools that I think could be useful it’s very much thinking about how it can be helping them in their day-to-day work or with their team. We don’t necessarily do a deep dive into, you know, how it’s being used throughout the organization. One thing I have been conscious of is the fact that people have to be really aware of what their organization’s policy is when it comes to AI. So at first, I think when I was really super enthusiastic about it, I said, oh, look, everyone, I found this great tool, you know, if you want to give it a try. And one person said, well, no, I can’t touch it because actually it’s outside of, I can’t remember which AI system is that the right word, I don’t think system’s the right word, which AI platform they had approved within their organization. I know lots use Copilot, for example, lots use Gemini, and this would have been outside of it and so, you know, of course I don’t, oh yes, of course, you know, I work for myself, I have my own business so I can make decisions as to, you know, personally if I think I’m not sharing any confidential information in that tool, I’m just trying it to see if it can, you know, create a slide in a certain color, I’ll give it a go, whereas of course you haven’t got that luxury if you’re working for an organization where a decision’s been made that we need to make sure we’re being careful with what people are using. So we’re not just going to say people can just use these tools. So I think that probably my explorations of it with the HR community, I’m not working with them as an AI specialist looking at how they’re going to be using AI throughout their entire organization. I’m working with them as an individual and as part of the program that I have may share certain tools that I think could be helpful for the topics that we’re covering on the show rather than necessarily talking about okay what do we want to do as an HR community when it comes to potential job loss because of AI. If someone brought that as a challenge to the group coaching that we have we could talk about it, but it’s not something that’s actually shown up that someone’s wanted to talk about so far in the sessions, so at the moment it’s more about HR getting on board as individuals at the moment. In my sphere it’s just very much that my program looks at certain aspects that I think are helpful for HR leadership, so we look at confidence, we look at influencing skills, we look at building strategic skills and as we work our way through that if I think actually there’s a prompt or there’s a tool that I think could be a helpful addition to this session that people might like to know about if they want to learn more about AI or start feeling more confident using it or this just could be handy then I’ll share it with them. So that really is it, but as part of the program as well there are opportunities for one-on-one coaching and group coaching and you can bring whatever challenge you’re experiencing at work to that conversation, so if someone wanted to bring AI to that conversation they could, but so far that hasn’t happened.
(00:17:32):
That’s really interesting because you know my work with Jobscaping™ looks at how we make those decisions as to which tools we’re going to use and for what type of work, and I break down based on tasks because I think if you look into workflow rather than a department, so if you look at a workflow you might say onboarding a new member of staff for example, well that’s going to cross over maybe a few departments for example, so if you’re breaking down the tasks and then you’re looking at it and saying which of these things are above the line below the line in terms of what I’m prepared to give to AI and what I’m going to keep as a human task, you know, you’re making a decision really whether or not you’re handing it off completely to AI, whether or not you collaborate with AI or whether or not it’s a no-go, no AI, thank you. Do you have any no-go, no AI tasks that you would say absolutely not, this is a human judgment thing and I’m doing it for myself?
(00:18:27):
I don’t know that I’ve thought about it from that perspective because as far as how I use AI for myself in my business of course I’m not an HR practitioner anymore. I am a coach and a trainer and have my own business so the ways that I use AI are probably slightly different. So things that I might use it for that are incredibly helpful are I’ll be posting on LinkedIn for example, I know that you already mentioned that you like being on LinkedIn, so do I, and in the old days I would have completely written the post by myself whereas now I might just do a brain dump and say this is my very rough draft of what I would like to say in this post, please can you improve it for me, so it’s like having my own personal copywriter that I have with me. If I need to create a graphic to go with the post I’ll say this is what I would like to have in the graphic, can you create it for me? Here are my brand colors. And then I can use that. I have a podcast, HR Coffee Time, so for that I might have interviewed somebody and then I’ll have the transcript and I will put it into AI and say this is the transcript of my episode. I want to record an introduction and I want to record an outro where I entice people about why it’s an interesting episode to listen to. Can you give me some suggestions? Here are some key points I want to include. So, you know, I’m very much using it in a practical way to support me rather than thinking deep. Obviously I’m interested in the impact of AI within workplaces, but I am conscious that I’m not an AI specialist. The challenges that HR professionals tend to come to me with aren’t necessarily around deep use of AI and the ethics etcetera, so I’m just tending to look at it from a very practical how can this help me within my work or how do I think this could help my clients actually if I find a new tool that looks like it could be quite handy, whether that’s as a thinking partner or refining a presentation for them or helping them draft a board report for example. So yeah, I think that I strongly suspect, or I know, you will have such a deeper level of expertise about how a whole organization may be implementing AI and having recommendations for how they can use it, but that’s not really what falls within my wheelhouse.
(00:20:57):
Exactly and it’s really interesting because that is exactly the perspective we want, you know, it’s your perspective. I think a lot of the stuff that we hear about how organizations are implementing AI, quite a lot of it is PR-based and PR-driven. And in reality, what is changing is much more interesting. What is changing in terms of how you and I and other people use AI for ourselves? I mean, I use it for brainstorming a lot, okay? And I do use it as a thinking partner, but I push back a lot and I think that’s important, so that would be my contribution to a conversation like this would be yeah, I do use it a lot but I push back a lot as well because I don’t accept everything it tells me. Yesterday, or last week actually, speaking with Sharon Green and she was, I mean Sharon loves to write, doesn’t she, and she said yeah okay AI can write really well probably lots of stuff but I don’t want to give it that task. So is there anything that you know AI can do but you don’t want to give it, or there might not be, but I’m thinking about your coaching practice now because it’s a very human-to-human thing, isn’t it, coaching? So is there a point at which you sort of have to say no AI here at all or do you find that with almost all your coaching practice there’s no AI involved? I’m trying to think if there would be any, like if as part of the coaching someone’s saying something and I think oh this AI tool might be useful for you, I might share it with them, but I’m not using AI in the coaching itself at all. Do you use it for something like a bit of research maybe in your coaching practice? If somebody had brought something up and you thought that was interesting and you started to look at it after the conversation you’d had with them, after the coaching session, would you use AI to help you research anything or do you still do that yourself?
(00:22:59):
I might use it to research something. For example, if I’ve got a topic for my podcast I want to talk about then I definitely prefer it to just using Google because it’s much more likely to give me good links. I am, just like you said about pushing back, if I want to share a theory or an idea I want to make sure it’s a valid one, and I find it’s easier with AI tools to say okay make sure that you’re giving me the references for this and give me the links so I can read those references myself. But I think as far as coaching is concerned, when it comes to coaching I take quite a purist perspective with coaching and so from a purist perspective what that would mean is as a trained coach rather than telling people what to do or giving them mentoring and advice about a situation I’ll normally be asking them questions and helping them explore their own thinking. So within that kind of framework I’m not normally going to be using AI in any capacity, but the only time there are times with coaching where I am more directive and I will give more advice and so that might be in something like interview coaching, and in interview coaching yes I may use AI. So if someone says to me I want to prepare for an HR business partner interview for example, I’ll say okay do you want to first of all ask the employer, ask the interviewer, if they’re happy to share the questions with you because people are always surprised that often companies will do that, not always but there definitely is a chance they will. And if not I’ll say ask them for the full job description and what context do you know about the organisation, and then I’ll be able to put that job spec into AI and say I have a client who’s going to be interviewed for this role, you can see in the job description what the key competencies are, can you generate some potential competency-based interview questions for me to practice with them? And then I’ll be able to say to them, because if you say to someone what questions are you worried about they’ll often sometimes go what, I don’t really know, or I haven’t had an interview in ages, I’m not really sure what to expect, but if I’m able to say okay well here’s some potential questions they’ll often go oh yeah, that one, that one would be really hard, I’m not sure what I would say, so then I’m able to say okay well let’s have a practice. So that is one way actually I suppose within my coaching practice that I do use AI.
(00:25:30):
And it’s great for role play as well, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t know if you’ve ever used it for that, but if any of your clients have ever used it for that, that’s becoming quite popular in the sense that if you download, for example, ChatGPT to your phone, you could just have a chat with it about the job you wanted to apply for, tell it to interview you. You could even give it those questions that you’ve just mentioned and then say that you want it to give you some feedback on your answers because obviously that’s the whole point, so you want to move forward, so that’s an interesting way that it’s being used. And I read that it’s because people feel much less judged when they’re just talking with a machine and of course it’s being completely objective, isn’t it? Well, as objective as it can be based on the information it’s being given of course, but I mean objective in the sense that it isn’t looking at you and judging you based on your age or your location, your demographic, your race, anything like that. It’s just basically helping you with that role play you’ve asked it to do.
(00:26:43):
Well, and I think with that example it’s probably why lots of coaches are worried about AI doing them out of jobs. People are so comfortable with just asking AI for support, like whether coaching is still going to exist as a profession. I like to think it definitely will because although yes, it’s helpful to be using ChatGPT for these things, I think it’s not quite the same as speaking to an actual person.
(00:27:11):
That’s interesting, isn’t it? Because this conversation about the expert comes up quite often, not just in relation to coaches but in relation to all sorts of subject matter experts, and I’ve been looking at it in terms of learning, for example learning design. So yeah, it doesn’t replace the expert I’m told, but what it does do is speed up the process dramatically and let them get to the interesting bits more quickly. There’s a lot of the stuff that the subject matter experts are really pleased that they don’t have to sit through, hours of drudgery about a topic that frankly they’re never ever going to care about or see or do anything with in the future, but which they absolutely need to get a handle on in order to write the content. So their real skill is different. The designer has to listen to the subject matter expert telling them all this, but the designer’s real skill is something else and they don’t need to know all this stuff from the subject matter experts, so they can use AI for that side of it now which is really helpful. But the expert in that loop is really, there are two experts in that loop, and the subject matter expert I find usually doesn’t want to be there any more than the instructional designer in that conversation because they’ve both got other things they would like to be doing and which they’re very good at. So maybe AI is just helping us to cut through some of the boring grunt work maybe in that respect. I certainly wouldn’t want to sit down with an AI coach, oh my goodness me, it would be awful. I mean it makes all sorts of things up for a start and I wouldn’t have a clue if it was going in the right direction or not. No, I think you’re safe there. I think your skills as a coach will be required for many many years to come, let’s hope so, yes let’s hope so.
(00:29:10):
I think although as you say you’re not in HR now, you are in the sense that you interview a lot of people on your HR Coffee Time podcast, which is doing extremely well. As I mentioned earlier at the beginning of this interview, actually is it top two percent? Do you want to tell us a little bit more about that because I’m in awe?
extremely well as I mentioned earlier at the beginning of this interview they
(00:29:33):
Oh gosh, thanks Carolyn. Yes, so my podcast HR Coffee Time is ranked in the top 2% of all 3.3 million podcasts in the world, which I still can’t quite believe. I was in complete shock when I found out. And it’s a podcast that focuses on professional and career development for HR professionals, and so it’s a combination of solo episodes from me talking about a particular topic that I think might be helpful, whether that’s confidence in speaking up in meetings or how to do well in an interview or what skills are going to help you step up into an HR director role as examples. And then I also have interview episodes which might be with experts who have got expertise I don’t have. So as an example I’ve got someone coming up who I’m interviewing about employee experience. I just interviewed someone about employee communications, there are too many words with employee. So they’re two topics I don’t have deep expertise in, but they do, and they’re helpful things for people who work in HR to be aware of and they’ll be able to share lots of tips and advice about how to do that well. So there are lots and lots of HR podcasts out there, more coming out all the time, and we’re really really lucky that there’s such great choice. When I started HR Coffee Time though I felt like there wasn’t really anything that was very career-focused and that looked at it in that way, so that’s why I decided to take that approach for that.
(00:31:06):
Yes, yeah, quite. I mean, that is, I wonder how much confidence, because you mentioned confidence there, and I wonder how much confidence is, or lack of it, or being a bit insecure about your confidence perhaps, is holding people back. I know it held me back when I was at a certain part of my career. People used to say to me, oh you’re ever so confident, but deep down I wasn’t. And sometimes that, I’m sure you must come across that, don’t you?
(00:31:32):
Oh, all the time. I’d say that’s the core thing and the longer that you’re coaching for I think when I first started as a coach I was really surprised when I realized just how many people, if not almost everybody, it’s confidence that they often want to work on. They just want to build their confidence, whether that’s in one particular area or confidence-building generally. So when I was mentioning the Inspiring HR Leadership Program earlier, one of the core focuses of it is on building confidence.
Yeah, and of course anybody just sort of fly on the wall would be so surprised I should imagine at the people that are feeling that way when really others might look at them and think oh I wish I was as confident as they are. Oh absolutely. People say that about me when I’m working with AI, you know, they sort of say well of course you know all about it and everything, but it’s so fast moving, Fay, you can’t stand still for two minutes. So I’m very much aware that I need to stay extremely vigilant and I certainly wouldn’t say that I was confident about it, but nevertheless I take great reassurance from the fact that nobody else knows either, and I think that’s one of the things, because it’s all moving so fast, isn’t it, and that’s one of the things that this podcast is about. It’s about understanding what’s changing in the way we work. I mean, if you looked back four years to your practice four years ago, or your daily work, just your work really because there’s a lot involved with running your own business, it’s not just doing the delivery, I mean I don’t know how much time you would allocate, 50% something like that to delivery, 50% to keeping the show on the road really, I don’t know, but when we look at that, how much has that changed due to AI entering into the picture? How has it changed for you? Can you tell me how that’s changed when you look back at that picture from four or five years ago compared to now?
Oh yeah, hugely. If I think I have an email newsletter that I send out every week that used to take me hours and hours and hours and hours of agonizing over getting the wording right, whereas now I’ll write the draft and put it in AI and say can you make this better, or I have a tendency to be quite waffly so I’ll be like can you please condense this down and improve it so it’s more engaging, or start with a better question. I mean that has just saved me hours every week. With almost all aspects of my work that aren’t the actual coaching part of it, it’s just been an absolutely amazing enormous help at just making me much faster at doing things or meaning that I don’t necessarily have to pay someone else to help me with stuff that I might have done before.
hugely if I think I have an email newsletter that I send out every week that used
(00:34:34):
Yes, I was going to ask what are the benefits of it because just talking with Tom McDowell a couple of days ago about the efficiency trap, it’s easy to think oh we all need to be more efficient, we all need to do things faster and quicker and everything else, but actually it’s a bit of a trap, it can be, for various reasons he was saying. But I think if we look at what we’re doing with the time that we save, what does it mean to you? Does it mean you save costs, does it mean that you can do more stuff that you want to do, or do you just have time off? I bet you don’t.
No, I probably should think about having more time off. I really do think the main thing is just the amount of time that it saves me, all those little things are really helpful, but also other aspects. So I started having my podcast on YouTube last year and that was really daunting because it had been audio only for years, and the idea of being on video and oh I don’t know, I definitely didn’t feel confident about that, I had to really work on my confidence. And for YouTube things like keywords really matter and your title really matters and your thumbnails, so that’s the picture that represents your video that people can choose whether to click on it or not, all those things really matter, and I knew nothing about YouTube. I wasn’t really a big YouTube user, but there are AI tools that will give recommendations for titles and thumbnails and keywords to be including, and I’ve just found that so helpful. Even YouTube’s got AI built into it now so I can think oh I think this is the title I want to use for the podcast, but I can do A-B testing with it and put in two different titles and then it will let me know which one is more popular and then that’s the one I can tackle on.
(00:36:28):
Yeah, well I mean it’s taken me years to get to that point. Yeah, but you know, you wouldn’t have had the time, would you, a few years ago, to do A-B testing on all this stuff. I mean even if you did you wouldn’t have had time to tweak it because that’s a marketing department type thing, wasn’t it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s it. I suppose that’s where it helps me the most, with my marketing. I would say that’s definitely where I’m using it the most, and even choosing titles for my podcast, I mean I do still spend ages on it, but I used to spend hours agonizing over every title. There’s a tool that will analyze your titles for you and tell you a ranking as to how likely it is. It’s called, I’ve just forgotten what it’s called, I think it’s called Headline Analyzer or Headline Co-Schedule. I pay, it’s not very expensive, I pay an annual subscription for it, but you’ve got to think of the title to put in there in the first place and then it will give you recommendations on improving it. So now I can go on to ChatGPT and say this is my episode, this is the focus of it, what would be some compelling good titles to use, and I can then put them into the headline analyser tool and it just makes it start shaping up what the final title is going to be so much quicker than how I was doing it before.
(00:37:50):
Is it having an impact? Is it actually, are you seeing the results of it?
(00:38:00):
Well I know the impact it has on me really is just the time it’s taking because I will keep on going until the headline analyser tells me I have a strong title. So before I might be spending at least two hours on picking one title whereas now I might be able to do it in half an hour.
(00:38:21):
But you’re getting the same high score and you’re getting the same results with people clicking presumably because that’s the goal, isn’t it?
(00:38:27):
Yeah, hopefully.
(00:38:30):
I know they are clicking because you’ve got quite a high profile on LinkedIn now. So what I want to ask you before you go, because there’s been so much that we’ve covered, but I’m rushing to this because I’m hoping you will be okay with it, I’m wondering if you would give listeners some advice about how they can join the conversation about AI, not in terms of being, you know, just like the conversation we’re talking about now, just being a bit more confident to try stuff out. How would you advise people to be just a little bit more confident in themselves to start trying stuff and using it?
(00:39:12):
My advice really would be about asking people how they’re using it and asking them if they’ll show you. That’s what I found the most helpful thing. I have a friend who’s really great at using AI, absolutely loves it. She’s ahead of me. I know you said I had to rank myself and I said a seven, she’s probably at least an eight. And so she’ll often try stuff out before me and be all excited about it and talking about it, and I’ll say oh could you show me how you did it? And she’ll just share her screen with me and go so I went in and asked it this and then I did that, and I think as soon as someone shows me how to do something or they tell me how they’re using it, I think oh that’s how you do it, but I wouldn’t necessarily have had the idea on my own. And I know for other people, someone said to me once well could you just help me get the tone of this email right? And I said oh sure. So, you know, had a look at it and then I went onto ChatGPT and said how could we tighten this up or make this point clearer? And they went oh, that’s how you use it. And I was very lucky that I got to sit in on an HR team away day and they had brought in an internal IT person to talk everyone through how to use Copilot and when he showed us all just on the screen, he was a really really good trainer, really good, and I just thought oh my gosh, I didn’t realize it, I hadn’t even realized I’ve got Copilot. I do watch quite a few TikTok videos as well, there are loads of great little short videos which can be helpful, but what I find with those is they’re often geared towards, it’s about finding the right one, they might be recommending stuff they’re wildly excited about but you think I’m never going to use that in my work or I don’t really see why that’s such a big deal, so you do have to be intentional otherwise, because I mean we don’t have time to consume all this stuff do we? The irony of it all really, we’ve got less time. But I’ve definitely learnt the most from other people being generous enough to show me how they’re using it. So that would be what my recommendation is.
Yeah, people are flattered when you ask them. I mean, you know, they’re quite sort of helpful, I think. They say oh yeah, of course, watch this or let me help you or whatever. So it’s always a good thing to ask. People always love it because it shows you value what they can do and you value their expertise.
Sorry?
(00:41:19):
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Fay Wallis, it’s been a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you so much for opening up your office to the Sovereign Career Podcast. I appreciate it very much.
You’re so welcome. Thank you so much for having me on.
Not at all. We’ll see you again soon, I hope. Take care.
