AI PROMPTING Secrets You’ve Never Heard | Jonathan Mast (ep.193)

What if using AI could make you a better communicator without making you sound like a robot? In this episode, executive communication coach Dr. Andrea Wojnicki sits down with AI strategist Jonathan Mast to reveal a 4-step framework that helps leaders use AI effectively without losing their voice or their edge.

From writing difficult emails to brainstorming, summarizing data, or prepping keynotes, Jonathan’s framework empowers you to collaborate with AI like a pro. You’ll learn how to prompt like a strategist, refine your outputs, and lead by example in this new era of communication technology.

Copy & Paste Jonathan’s AI Perfect Prompting framework:

1. Focus on [insert area of expertise] and [insert second area of expertise].
2. I’m a [insert your role or job] working on [insert project or goal].
3. My question for you is: [insert your question]?
4. First, ask me any clarifying questions you need to optimize your output.

CONNECT WITH ANDREA

💻Website: TalkAboutTalk.com
💼LinkedIn – Andrea: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/
💼LinkedIn – Talk About Talk: https://www.linkedin.com/company/talkabouttalk/
📣Newsletter: https://www.talkabouttalk.com/newsletter/
🟣Podcast – Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/talk-about-talk-communication-skills-training/id1447267503
🟢Podcast – Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3afgjXuYZPmNAfIrbn8zXn?si=9ebfc87768524369

CONNECT WITH JONATHAN

💻Website: https://whitebeardstrategies.com
💼LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jonathanjmast
📺YouTube: youtube.com/@jonathanmast_withai
📱Instagram: instagram.com/jonathanmast

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell: https://amzn.to/45atGkM
16Personalities (Myers-Briggs assessment): https://www.16personalities.com/

TRANSCRIPTION

Jonathan Mast: Now is not a time to punt this to somebody else. It’s time for you to embrace what you wanted to do upfront and change people’s lives by leveraging AI to amplify your skill and experience. 

Andrea Wojnicki – Talk About Talk: What do you do when everyone around you is suddenly talking about AI? Like it’s magic? Here’s what you do. You slow down, you ask better questions, and ideally, you call on someone like Jonathan Mast.

Here’s What You’ll Learn

Jonathan’s been leading conversations around digital strategy and AI long before the headlines caught up. He doesn’t deal in hype. He helps leaders understand how to actually use AI without losing trust, authority, or human connection. In this episode, you’ll learn why tone, clarity, and credibility matter even more in this age of AI.

How to avoid sounding like a robot. Yes. Even when you’re using one, and you’re gonna learn the exact playbook that smart communicators. Yes, like me, are running right now to stay ahead without selling out. 

Let’s do this. Let’s Talk about Talk in case we haven’t met yet. My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. Please call me Andrea. I’m an executive communication coach at Talk About Talk, where we coach ambitious executives to stand out with confidence and credibility. I also write a newsletter where I share my coaching tips. You can subscribe to this newsletter by clicking on the link in the episode description.

About Jonathan Mast

Alright, let me introduce Jonathan Mast. Jonathan stands at the forefront of AI prompting mastery. Empowering us to leverage artificial intelligence for measurable growth. Jonathan has emerged as a leading authority on practical AI implementation with an engaged audience of nearly half a million AI enthusiasts and entrepreneurs.

His perfect prompting framework, which you’re about to learn, teaches businesses how to effectively communicate with AI prompts through ChatGPT Claude and Gemini to achieve exceptional results. As the founder of White Beard Strategies, Jonathan focuses on helping executives and businesses leverage AI to save time, increase profits, improve their communication, and deliver more value to their business.

His philosophy emphasizes AI as a tool that amplifies our skill and our experience, rather than replacing human creativity and judgment. His international speaking engagements across North America, Asia, and Australia are packed with practical takeaways. And now. We have him here. Let’s do this. 

Thank you so much, Jonathan, for being here today to talk to me and the Talk about Talk listeners about how to use AI to improve our communication.

JM: I’m excited to be here. I think it’s a tremendous tool and I’m sure we’ll get into some interesting discussions. 

How Executives Are Using AI Right Now

AW: Me too. Me too. So let’s start really broad. We all know that AI is big in the news, and it’s big at work. It’s big with everything we’re doing these days. Can you share with us some ways that executives, in particular, are using AI to improve their communication? I realize this is a very broad question, but I thought we’d start broad. 

JM: It’s a good thing, and I think there’s probably two or three key ways that I’m seeing that is really working, especially for executives. First is as executives, I’ve never yet met an executive who like SOPs, we all understand they’re important, but we hate them because it means we need to take time to get the stuff that’s up here or the thoughts, and at least in a lot of cases, maybe even add more than what’s up here. Because we’ve got ideas worth 30,000, 50,000 feet, but coming back into 500 feet for our staff, it’s painful. And ChatGPT and I I’ll use ChatGPT to say AI. I mean, it’s really any AI model can literally take and within a couple of minutes, grab the information that’s in our heads. Not literally, I mean, we have to share it, but you can get that information, and it can then create literally step-by-step SOPs for our team. And what I found and what so many of my students have found, especially the executives, is that we have these great ideas, but we’re often, and I’m gonna say it myself, we’re almost scared to go to that 500-foot view because we’re really good at 30 to 50,000 feet.

We’re not so good when we get down below because a lot of us don’t do well with some of that minutia. Some do, but a lot of us don’t. And so,we do better with vision and things like that, and ChatGPT is just amazing at increasing that communication and helping. The other part that I find is real important as executives, it always seems we’re the ones that are tasked with the difficult emails.

The ones that are really important, whether it be from a legal perspective or a compliance perspective, or whatever we’re dealing with, sometimes just to make sure that we don’t tick off the customer while we tell them where they need to go, and that can be difficult. And AI, again, does such a tremendous job of that because I can get an email from you, Andrea, and I can say, all right, I need to set these boundaries. I need to do this, and I need to be nice about it, and I don’t have to be nice. AI will do that for me, and then I can just edit it. And that really difficult email that I probably put off for three days, while my assistant was like, Jonathan, you gotta do that email. You gotta do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I’m not, ’cause I’m really not sure what to say.

I can now get done in just moments with AI. So those are two areas that I think are really impactful for executives in particular. 

AW: Amazing. So SOPs and difficult emails. So as you were describing this, I was thinking pretty much all of us have been using AI even before it was really on our radar in terms of, you know, using it as a thesaurus and for grammar check and spell check and all of those things. And now it seems like everyone that I know is using it for brainstorming, and many people are using it for writing, but I think there’s a huge range in terms of the adoption. What would you say is pretty typical right now? Can you share with us any statistics or observations, or trends that you’ve noticed in terms of adoption?

JM: So the most recent statistics I saw, and of course stats, as we know can lie, and they can be made to say anything we want, but we’re indicating people that what they called regular users of AI, and they define that as using it on a daily basis. What they didn’t do is define whether that was one prompt a day or whether that was a hundred prompts a day.

But the numbers that I saw on that were just shy of 18% of businesses are regular users. Given how broad that is, that means to me that most people still are not using AI effectively. Most executives are not using AI effectively, and certainly, our teams are probably not using AI effectively, and that presents a massive opportunity for us because of how the time savings and the value add that can come when AI is leveraged properly.

AW: Yeah, so I did not look at the statistics before I opened up this interview. I am shocked that it’s so low. So I’ve been using by that standard AI for over a year. I remember I bought a subscription to ChatGPT, and I put it as like when I open my browser, that’s what it goes to, ’cause that’s gonna prompt remind me to use it.

I’m looking at my screen right now, and I can see it in the corner of my screen. And then I just had a lot of fun, and I even on LinkedIn, I would see examples of prompts that people are using, and I would try it, and I’d be amazed at what it could do. And I started experimenting. So. 

The Biggest Opportunities Most People Miss

So, maybe you can share with us what some of the other low-hanging fruit is.

So if you’re one of the, you’re not included in the 18%, right? So you’re in the majority, you’re not using it, or you’re not using it regularly. What’s the low-hanging fruit in addition to the SOPs, the standard operating procedures, and the difficult emails? I love that point. Make that email that you thought was so difficult to write a lot easier with AI. What’s some of the other low-hanging fruit, in particularly in a business context? 

JM: Well, you mentioned brainstorming. I think that’s one that AI does a tremendous job at, and not enough executives are using it for. You know, sometimes it’s difficult because either we don’t have the people around us to talk to, or sometimes we’re just not comfortable sharing some of our thoughts, because let’s face it, sometimes we want to nuke everything, and that’s probably not what we should be doing.

AI gives us essentially a safe place to go do that and to have those conversations, and it’s really effective. So I think that’s one. The other area that I think how I recommend people get started, and especially executives, is take a book like Dan Martel’s, Buy Back Your Time. One of the things Dan talks about in the book is go through your day and literally for every 15 minutes, just write a one to two words about what you were doing.

Do that for every day of the week, but at the end of every day by yourself, or sit down with your assistant and highlight everything that energized you that made you go. Yeah, man, I love that highlighted in green. Everything that made you go, I wish my assistant didn’t even have to deal with this. Take a pink highlighter. I’d say red, but they don’t really have any that I’ve seen. And take a pink highlighter and highlight that pink. Then use AI to help you get rid of all the pink stuff, or to help you leverage all the pink stuff. Every person I know, executive or not, has got items that they, we just do because we’re in the habit of them, or we somehow are in the, even though we know better, it’s just, it’s easier if we do it.

We know that’s not the case, but we get stuck in that. Take those pink items and start there. Those are things we don’t wanna be doing anyway. That means we’re probably not doing a very good job, and if we are doing, we’re procrastinating. And that means as an executive, we’re wasting really valuable resources, telling our assistants, I’ll get to it tomorrow. I’ll get to it tomorrow. I’m guilty. I’m not pointing any fingers. I’m guilty of that. My assistant will say, Jonathan, what about this? I’ll get to it tomorrow. She’s now learned that when I have difficult emails to write, guess what? We have a custom GPT that’s trained on Jonathan’s tone and style. She writes it, and she sends it to me, and she’s like, can we just send it this way?

Guess what? That’s easy. That’s. I like easy. We do the same thing for a lot of the other things that I need to do. One of the things that I need to do, a lot of executives need to do, we need to review reports. Most of us don’t exactly get that’s not, that’s not our jam. That’s not what gets us all excited.

But imagine being able to take those reports or have our admin take those reports and literally have ChatGPT in a predefined way analyze that and give us a summary. And now I can get that. Every Friday, for example, I get a report from my team, and it’s done in audio format. It’s all created by AI. And when I do my 45-minute walk in the morning, guess what? I listen to the report. What that means is one, I’m walking anyway, so I need something to do. In other words, just walking ’cause my ADD kicks in and I can’t just walk. Two, I actually get to review data that I might not otherwise review on a regular basis, ’cause the report would come through and maybe I’m the only one, but sometimes those reports didn’t get read.

Sometimes those emails would get archived. I’ll get to it later if I need it. Now I’m getting them in a way that’s digestible. It’s easy. We tweak it so it fits my tone, what I wanna listen, the key points that I want information on, and then if I’ve got questions, it’s really easy. I can ask my team, Hey, help clarify this, or what happened here? What’s going on? We had a 20% drop. Doesn’t seem like we should have. Are you sure that’s right? All those things are really quick follow-ups. And we’re getting ’em done faster as opposed to delaying them and missing them, and possibly if there is a problem causing more damage, ’cause we missed something.

AW: Okay. So, to your point about people not reading the reports, this is an aside, but I have to tell you, I know they don’t. ‘Cause I remember years ago I wrote a detailed summary of a day-long meeting that we had at an offsite, and I asked everyone to read it, and embedded in the document I wrote, if you’re reading this, email me now, and I’m gonna take you out for a very fancy lunch. No one emailed me. 

JM: I was gonna say no. You didn’t buy any lunches, did you ? 

AW: No. I bought zero lunches. Fascinating. So I love that.

How to Use AI for High-Stakes Presentations

I wanna get real here for a minute. Imagine that you are a senior executive, or you’re coaching a senior executive on how to create and then deliver a really important presentation. So it could be your annual general meeting report to shareholders. It’s a big presentation. Maybe it’s a keynote, right? Related to your thought leadership. How can you use AI along the way to help you optimize your preparation and your delivery for this high-stakes presentation? 

JM: If you’re an executive, the first thing I recommend you do with AI after you play with it once or twice is go, and you’ve probably got multiple personality tests you’ve taken. If not, go up to 16 personalities. Take their Myers-Briggs assessment and take the personality test, takes you 10 to 15 minutes. One. If you haven’t done it, I’ll be shocked, but if you haven’t, the insights will be amazing. Take that and give that to. ChatGPT or whatever model you’ve got, because we need to first train the model on who we are, our tone, and our style.

And this fits directly in with your question because if I’m preparing an important presentation, it need to know who I am and how I would say things. Because if I just let AI do it, it might sound like AI and not sound like Jonathan, and that’s not good for my brand or anything else. So step one, train it on how you sound, it’s as easy as I said, giving us some personality results. 

Secondarily, make sure you talk about the audience that you’re presenting to and what’s gonna be important to them. Generally, the good news is we tend to know both of those things. We tend to know going in, here’s my audience, here’s what I am. Then explain what you’re trying to do very simply, and probably the most important part when you’re explaining it. End your prompt, which is what we call it when you’re asking ChatGPT what to do. End it with this question. Ask me any questions you have. In other words, you’re literally going to be asking the AI to now interview you, to ask you the questions it needs in order to gather the information to answer your question.

When you do that, your life gets easier because you’re already running at a million miles an hour. You don’t want to have to pause and think through it. Now, you literally, and I do this a lot of times when I’m walking using the voice mode, I literally say, ask me any questions you’ve got, and it will then I’ll hear it through my headset, and it’ll go, okay, tell me about this. I’ll respond, ask me another question, respond. Now I’m taking that downtime, so to speak, my walk time, turning that into something productive, and I’m giving real, relevant information to the AI model so that it can put that together.

Keep in mind it’s been trained on the best presentation techniques, the best ways to reach your audience. It knows a lot of their pain points already. Now I can help you put together that the other part and the last part have it start by creating an outline first, and then filling out the outline as multiple prompts, multiple questions.

Don’t expect it to be a slot machine where you’re gonna pull the handle once you’re gonna give it one prompt, and you’re gonna get the perfect keynote. It won’t happen. You need to do it step by step, and when you do that, you can take that prep time. That was again the thing, you were dreading the thing you were trying to figure out how to get done before you got home tonight, and you can have it done in maybe an hour or two instead of hours or days.

AW: I love your slot machine metaphor. That’s beautiful because I think that’s how people, a lot of people think about it. There’s these lists that we see as lead magnets all over the internet. Click here, give me your email address, and I’ll send you 50 AI prompts or a hundred AI prompts. And it’s like, I just need to find the right prompt and it’ll solve all of my problems.

The Perfect Prompting Framework (That Actually Works)

So this, Jonathan, is actually why I invited you to be on this podcast, because I was listening to you and you said, forget the AI prompts. I have a framewor,k and I was like, what? So you don’t know this about me, but I am not a fan of memorized or rehearsed anything. Self-introductions, anything. It’s all about having a free yeah, high five, high five. It’s all about having a framework that you customize. I would love it if you shared with the audience your prompting framework, which I’m just gonna say I started using literally the same day that I heard you say it. And it is magical. 

JM: Well, thank you. First of all, like you, I don’t like memorizing things; it’s just not how my brain functions. I can memorize frameworks though, because they make sense to me, because it’s a recipe that I can follow and.. 

AW: And you can customize it, right? Sorry to interrupt you, but you can 

JM: Exactly. No, you’re, you’re absolutely right. I don’t, I’m not tied in. I like probably most executives, I don’t like you to tell me what I can’t do.

Well, this is about you can do not what you can’t do, and therefore it works. Four simple steps. The first is tell the AI model. Doesn’t matter what one you’re using, what type of expert it is. So let’s just say, hypothetically, that we’re gonna write a press release. I’m gonna start off by telling it you are an expert at writing press releases.

Not very complicated, but as you can imagine, I’ve now narrowed that scope right down to where I need to go. Step number two: give it background information. Andrea, if you and I are working on a press release together and you are the expert, and I walk up to your desk and I go, Hey Andrea, I need a press release.

And you go, great, I can do that. Then I turn around and walk away, and you go, but I got a couple questions, and I don’t give you any context. What’s the likelihood that press release is gonna be relevant? It’s not. No matter how brilliant you are, if I don’t give you the context. ’cause my wife reminds me she can’t read my brain.

Neither can AI, and you need to give it context. Now that doesn’t have to be a lot, but give it the context you have. Then step three, this is what normally we just prompt with. So we told that the expert, we gave it context. Now we ask it our question. That’s where most people start and stop. But we’ve got one more really important step, and if you only remember this one, just ask your question.

Do step four. In other words, steps three and four, the two most important. Step four is you end your prompt with this simple statement. Ask me any questions you have. That’s it. Because see, the AI is not sentient and it, we can’t read our minds, but it has been trained on the proper format and framework on how to do about everything, and that includes press releases or anything else.

So when it reads through its framework and goes, Jonathan doesn’t know a framework ’cause he doesn’t know how to write press releases, but he missed these four things. And when I say, ask me any questions you have, it will then do so. If I don’t add that though, it’s been taught to make assumptions, and it will just fill in the blanks assuming the data that it thinks is correct.

And we all know what happens when we assume we resemble the southbound end of a northbound mule. So AI does the same thing. 

AW: Oh, I’m just saying this again. I really wanna underscore to the listeners that it’s magical. So, for example. Immediately after you shared this. I’m trying to think of maybe what I used it for. Maybe I was asking it to edit an article that I’d written for Ink Magazine. So I would say use your business and communication skills expertise. I actually found that if you give it two different types of expertise, I think it kind of levels up. It’s like a multiplier. And then I gave it the background.

I’ve written this article. I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I say to it, I am going to upload a draft, who the target market is. I give it all the information. Here’s the word length I want, here are my three main points that I wanna make, blah, blah, blah. And then I say, before I upload the draft. What clarifying questions do you have that will optimize your response to me?

And the other thing that I would always add is I would specify, because I’ve noticed a couple times when I didn’t specify that the AI would give me a list when I wanted a paragraph or vice versa. It would give me a paragraph when I wanted a list. 

JM: And that can be a fifth part of it, if you want, as to how you want it to respond to you, give it the format. Absolutely. 

AW: Okay, so if there’s one takeaway, you know, I think it’s the framework generally, and then specifically your question about clarifying questions. Do you have that will optimize the output? What, I mean, this framework might help answer this question, but what are some of the most common mistakes that people make when they’re using AI?

JM: The first one’s probably gonna surprise people. They overcomplicate it. AI is not as complicated as we wanna think it is. It can be, but there’s no reason to overcomplicate it. So even with the perfect prompt framework we just went over, that’s by the way, what I call that four steps.

If you go through that and you spend too much time overthinking, wow. What type of expert should it be? I’m really not sure. I want to pick the right one. Just get close. You don’t have, I loved what you said. You’re an expert at these two things. Okay, great. And they can be anything that you want. Then don’t overcomplicate it.

The other thing, and we talked briefly about this, is many, many people treat AI like a slot machine, and they assume it’s one question, one answer, one question. No. It’s a conversation. Just as you and I would have a conversation if we were collaborating on a project, AI is the same way. You’re gonna do something, you’re gonna get a response back that’s close.

You’re gonna go, you know what? I forgot to tell you this. I forgot to tell you I wanted a paragraph and not as a table. Don’t start over, just have a conversation and go to the next step or go, well, that’s an interesting perspective. What would happen if we changed this variable and have a conversation?

Many of my chats are 20 or 30 back-and-forth questions with AI as we get to that point to refine. Now, at some points we get there and I’m like, never mind. You’re just not understanding me. And like any relationship that happens occasionally. And then the good news is that nobody ever gets mad when I say that and I just start over. But that happens only occasionally, like you said. So the two biggest, again, overcomplicating and treating AI, like it’s a one question, one answer. We’re hoping to hit the jackpot. Both of those, I think, are the two mistakes. 

AW: It’s like an iterative tool, like your analogy of two partners working together to solve a problem, right? And they’re. Building on each other, other’s ideas? So recently, I’m gonna say in the last couple months, I’ve noticed in the output that I’m getting from ChatGPT, there are some common kind of markers. There’s often a solid line if I ask for a list. So if I’m creating a podcast where I’m writing an article or something, I will independently brainstorm what I think should be there.

And then I wanna make sure I’m not missing anything obvious. So I will separately ask ChatGPT, give me a list of 10 things that qualify here, and then I just usually I go, yeah, I’ve got that. I got that. Okay, I’m fine. Right? That’s kind of probably the most common thing that I use it for, but I’ve noticed when I ask it for these lists that there’s these solid lines that are just bizarre that.

And then I noticed the rocket emoji, and then I saw people. I noticed a woman that I work with who I respect very much. Obviously, she’s using ChatGPT, ’cause a lot of her work has the rocket ship emoji in it. And then I started reading on LinkedIn. I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn. I started reading people’s posts saying, you know what’s with all the rocket ship emojis? Stop using them.

And if you’re gonna use ChatGPT or other AI, at least edit out the markers. And then the most recent one is the em dash. So,  I actually asked my ChatGPT to stop putting those solid lines to stop using the rocket ship to stop using the em dash. It’s not very obedient. It keeps using them. And then I will actually say, I asked you to stop doing that, and it says, Oh, sorry, thank you for the reminder. 

JM: I’m glad I’m not the only one. Yes, you’re absolutely correct in that it is not perfect. I will give you a hint in order to do have it do a better job of doing that. Begin or end your prompt because it’s important where you put that and start with, and it sounds really weird, they’re called delimiters, and this is gonna sound over complicated, but it will help three quotes in a row and then a square bracket.

Whatever do not do is closed, square bracket, and three more quotes. It’s like taking a yellow highlighter to that section of your prompt and saying, don’t forget this. Not perfect. I have a 17-year-old, and it’s like a 17-year-old who goes, I forgot that was highlighted. It won’t be perfect, but it will help out with that.

The other hint, that can be hugely valuable when you copy and paste out of Chat GPT, and yes, I do it too, and then I often edit afterwards. When you’re pasting it wherever you’re going, instead of doing a command V or what control V, do a command shift V or control shift V, and it will paste without the formatting.

And a lot of times it’s faster to just to go back in and add a quick heading in, and it will remove those lines that now we’ll still keep the em dashes or the en dashes. You’ll still have those, but it’ll get rid of all the emojis. It’ll get rid of all the extra lines, and then you just simply need to go and tell it find the em dashes. Em dashes are weird in that if my wife was trained as a journalist and so she’s like, I’ve been using em dashes forever. 

AW: Me too. I love them. My agency was like, we love them. I said, you need to stop. 

JM: Yeah. Now all of a sudden people get angry ’cause they’re like, you used an em dash. And I’m like, well, that was actually proper. Well, yes, but that means you used ChatGPT. Well, no, I actually been using those for most of my career. Now all of a sudde,n that’s a hot button for those people that decide to care. 

AW: It’s such a shame. The em dash is a beautiful thing. I’m fine with losing the solid lines. I’m fine with losing the rocket ship emoji. Are there any other markers, Jonathan, that you’ve noticed recently? 

JM: There are a number of what they call non-space markers, and it’s kind of like. People are like, Oh, this is some sinister conspiracy theory. No, if you’ve ever copied from Microsoft Word to another thing, you’ve gotten weird characters somewhere because of the formatting.

They’re simply formatting characters that are used in markdown, which is the language that AI tools write in. It’s not a big deal, but again, that’s another thing where you’re command shift or control shift V will remove those non-space characters. And when they say non-space characters, it literally means it’s a character in the code that doesn’t show up when you paste it anywhere. So that’s a good way to get rid of that. 

AW: So I wanna ask you at this point, if you had kinda one other than your brilliant framework. Okay, ’cause that brilliant framework is probably your answer to this question. Other than that, is there one thing that you want people to know about AI? It could be a misperception or something that’s way easier than they thought. Like if there’s one thing that you could share with the audience that will inspire them and help them use AI really productively in their jobs. 

JM: I  believe AI is like electricity. And when I say that, I mean that AI is on the path to become so ubiquitous in our lives that we’re not even realizing we’re using it when it comes to so many other things in life.

We think about them, but we don’t think about the electricity until we lose it. Then all of a sudden we realize everything that we were using it for, and pretty much for most of us, it’s not like we wake up and we decide to use electricity. We’re just using it by living by everything that we do, by everything that’s on in our residences and everything else, and AI’s headed down that path and why I wanna share that, especially for executives.

I believe it’s fundamentally your responsibility to your business and to your team to teach them how to use it in a way that provides value to the organization and to your clients. Because if you don’t, your competition will. It’s not a matter of if, it’s only a matter of when, because it didn’t take very long for the world to go electricity rocks, and everybody started using it. AI is gonna be even faster, and the time is now. It’s not too late, but the time is now to start leveraging it as a tool. 

The example I always give, and it’s probably not perfect for your audience, but if you could just imagine you’re a roofer for just a moment. If you are putting shingles on a roof, you don’t wanna do it the old-fashioned way and carry up a bucket of nails and carry up a hammer and one by one, knock those in. It takes too much time. Instead, you wanna be up there with a pneumatic hammer that literally every time you tap it to the roof, it puts a nail in because it’s much faster.

And nobody in their right mind would not use a pneumatic hammer just because they weren’t familiar with it, and they liked their hammer because it wouldn’t be productive yet. That’s the same thing that so many of us are telling ourselves. Well, I’m just not ready for it, or I’m just not. It’s time. It’s here.

It doesn’t, it’s not scary, it’s not sentient, it’s not gonna take over the world. We can still unplug it, but it’s time to embrace it. 

Wrap-Up & Rapid-Fire Questions

AW: Jonathan, I have to say I love your metaphors. I lost track of how many amazing metaphors you’ve used. All right. I’m gonna move on now to asking you the three rapid-fire questions that I ask every guest.

I know you’re gonna be familiar with the first one based on your comment about Myers-Briggs. The question is, are you an introvert or an extrovert, and how does that affect your communication? 

JM: I am both depending on the situation. I am an ENTP, and I am very comfortable acting as an extrovert, but I need time to recharg,e and most of that time is spent on my own.

AW: So you may be an ambivert. 

JM: Yeah. Might be. I’m not familiar with that term. Yes. 

AW: Yes. Most people are actually in the middle. And it’s ambivert. I’m an ENTJ. So we’re close. Second question. What are your communication pet peeves? 

JM: So my biggest one is it’s never been worse. I hear people say that all the time to make a point. I’m a student of history. I’ve studied a lot. Everything we’re experiencing today, we’ve experienced before; how we’re experiencing the manner in which, you know, AI is brand new. We’ve not gone through AI before, but we’ve had the printing press, we’ve had the steam engine, we’ve had the internal combustion engine, we’ve had the internet, we’ve had PCs.

We’ve went through tectonic technological shifts before, and all the naysayers were wrong, and everybody who. Embraced it came out on the far end smelling like a rose because they found new opportunities, and that’s definitely the one that just drives me crazy. It’s never been worse. 

AW: So the extremely negative, the superlative that’s negative, especially related to AI. 

JM: Related to anything. I mean, whether it’s the news that’s going off or it’s AI, I mean, I, again, I hear it fairly frequently, and it’s just one of those things I just want to scream and go, No, it’s not true. What about, you know, we didn’t live in the and in during the Black Plague. It could have been worse, trust me. 

AW: Okay, let’s go to question number three. Is there a podcast or a book that you find yourself recommending to people lately? 

JM: Uh, there’s a book that I recommend regularly because I do think it appeals to starting to use AI, and I think we talked about it earlier, and that was Dan Martel’s Buyback Your Time, especially as an executive, and I think most of us know this, but sometimes we have to be reminded.

There are things we don’t need to do in our lives because we can pay people to do them, and it’s more productive. It’s not a bad thing. I grew up in an environment where you were trained, you always did everything yourself. That’s the way it was, and I had a hard time learning that some executives didn’t. Some do, but if you’re in that understanding, how to buy back your time is so incredibly important. 

AW: Jonathan, I listened to that book last summer, and I had the same reaction. This is gold. It’s absolutely gold. So, Jonathan, do you have anything else that you wanna leave the audience with in terms of suggestions, tips, or advice in their adoption of and use of AI?

JM: Well, I just wanna encourage everybody as leaders, which I think almost all of us in the audience would identify with. We have a responsibility of those that we lead. And I wanna encourage you to not just on the surface, go, okay, this AI thing is something I’ll have somebody else do. It is a way to absolutely amplify your skill and experience.

And most of us became leaders because we wanted to do good in the world. We wanted to add value, we wanted to change things. If that’s you, I just wanna encourage you that I believe that AI, I’m 56, just for relevancy. It is the single biggest tech to technological shift that we’ve seen in the last 50 to a hundred years, maybe ever in history.

And now is not a time to punt this to somebody else. It’s time for you to embrace what you wanted to do upfront and change people’s lives by leveraging AI to amplify your skill and experience. 

AW: I love it. Leaders are role models. People are watching you. People will adopt the habits that you adopt. So leaders have a responsibility to model their use of AI and to adopt it.

And there is no better time than today. Thank you very much for sharing your time and your expertise with me and the Talk About Talk listeners. Thank you, Jonathan. 

JM: Thank you, and pleasure.

Post-Interview Recap

AW: I hope you’re feeling as inspired as I am now about using AI, and I’m thinking I’m gonna diverge from my usual practice of sharing three key learnings with you. For this episode only, I have one key learning that I promise will make a huge difference in your productivity. It’s this. 

Copy and paste Jonathan’s perfect prompting framework, which you can find in the show notes. Paste it somewhere where you can easily access it. I pasted it to the top of my to-do list. Then you can easily copy and paste it right into AI whenever you have an AI query. As a reminder, Jonathan’s perfect prompting framework has four points: 

One, tell the AI what specific area of expertise you want it to focus on. Maybe economics or social media, or something else. Two, provide context who you are, what you need, and relevant details. Three, ask the question; four, then ask AI to ask you any questions that will help it to optimize its output. And that’s it .

Again, you can simply copy this AI prompting framework directly from the show notes in this episode. Now, if you wanna go to the next level, you can add two more points to the framework. These are two points that I find very helpful. Think of them as bonus points. The first is to tell the AI what kind of output you’re looking for.

It might be a list, an email draft, a matrix, an image. Whatever, tell it exactly what format you’re looking for. The second one is to remind it what you don’t want. For me I do not want em dashes, and I do not want rocket ship emojis. Otherwise, I find that if I don’t constantly remind ChatGPT, what I don’t want, it keeps forgetting.

I really hope this prompting framework helps you as much as it’s helped me. If you know anyone who might find this episode helpful, please share, and please subscribe to the Talk About Talk podcast if you’re not already. Thanks again so much to Jonathan for sharing his framework and all of his insights with us, and thank you for listening to talk about Talk.

Talk soon.

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