I sat down for the interview, and the episode will come out soon, but I wanted to give you a bit of a spoiler.

A few minutes in, the host told me he’d been scrolling my LinkedIn to prepare. With so much AI slop in his feed, he said, my posts stood out. They sounded like a real person wrote them.

Then he asked me how I do it.

I wanted to be sure I’d heard him right. “So you believe that I genuinely and authentically wrote out this content. Is that what you’re saying?”

He said yes.

And then I broke his heart. “Actually, AI helps me write my content.”

He stopped. He was honestly shocked. I’d just knocked over something he was sure of.

So we spent the rest of our time pulling it apart. Why does one post scream AI while another sounds like the person who posted it?

We landed on this. AI writes to a formula. Ask it for a LinkedIn post and you get the average of every LinkedIn post it has ever read. The scroll-stopping first line. The “It’s not X, it’s Y” twist. The tidy lesson at the end. It’s competent. It’s also everybody.

The problem is leaving that formula untouched.

Mine has been rewritten. My AI knows how I talk in real life, not how I sound when I’m trying to be professional. It knows my copywriting style and how I like to frame a post. And every time, before it writes a word, it asks me the same thing.

What actually happened?

That one question makes the biggest difference. It’s the gap between content that tells you something and content that shares something.

AI can copy the formula. The one thing it can’t make up is what actually happened to you.

And you have more of that than you think. Lived experience doesn’t need to be big or dramatic. Case in point: you’re reading a newsletter that came out of one 30-minute conversation last week.

This is how I work with my students. We don’t start with AI.

We start with their story bank. The moments they’ve collected over 20-plus years.

We start with their strengths. The ones they’ve carried from role to role, often without ever putting a name to them.

We build out their own brand voice guide. How they talk, what they’d never say, and how they like a post to land.

Only then do we bring in AI. By that point it has something real to work with, so what it drafts sounds like them when they hit post.

That’s what people remember. When the right people remember you, the work starts coming to you again.