Ruth Poundwhite [00:00:00]:
As a business and life coach, I feel that I shouldn’t say this, but sometimes, actually, often, I see myself as a bit of a chaotic mess. And something that’s helping me a lot behind the scenes is what I call my AI support team. In this episode, I’m taking you behind the scenes of what that looks like.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:00:18]:
Welcome to the Soulful Sales show, where we talk about believing in the value of your offers, getting them in front of your right people, and selling more.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:00:27]:
Of what you do in your unique way. Hi, and welcome back to another episode of the Soulful Sales Show. So you would have heard in the intro to this episode that I often see myself as a bit of a chaotic mess. And it doesn’t feel so difficult to talk about now, but I definitely found it hard to share the realities of what it’s like inside my brain. And the truth is that no business system has ever worked for me out of the box. No productivity system ever continuously works for me. Like, I always end up falling off the wagon and needing to try something else. And I have a million and one ideas that I want to implement either all at once or not at all.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:01:11]:
And I do go through phases where I’m really overwhelmed and phases where I’m doing all the things and showing up in all the places. I need to preface this episode by saying that I haven’t figured it all out, except to say that I have figured out the fact that this is not a flaw and this is just the way my brain is wired and I need to show myself compassion for that. So I want to start by saying that I’m not about to share with you a magic fix because this is the way that my brain is, and I know a lot of you will relate to that as well. But I have built a system behind the scenes that is helping me massively.

It’s helping me to make decisions quicker, to not get stuck in spinning my wheels and overthinking. It’s helping me to remember things like when I set my goals, I actually remember my goals because I’ve set up a system that reminds me of them. And not just reminds me of them, but factors those goals in when I make those decisions and just stops me staring at the blank page and not even starting. And this system that I have set up for myself is actually an AI support team.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:02:18]:
It’s so, so helpful. I use my, what I call AI team members every single day in my business, and I have been for about a year. And finally I am pulling back the curtain and sharing them with you. I actually have a brand new offer which is called the AI Support Team at ruthpoundwhite.com forward/AI team where I teach you how to build your own. But in this episode I am going to share with you some of my core team members and exactly the type of things that they help me with and how. So I hope that this is really helpful for you if you resonate with some of the ways that I describe myself and you are looking for a way to have that support but without necessarily hiring a team because I know that not everyone has the means to hire that team. So yeah, by the way, before I get stuck in, do go to ruthpound.comait to check out the offer because it is brand new. I’m selling it on a very big discount pre sale one time only.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:03:22]:
And that pre sale is ending very soon at the time of release of this episode. Okay, so let me introduce my AI team members and I have given them names because it feels fun. So I’m going to refer to them by their names throughout. So the first one is Clara, the calm CEO. And I actually think this is the most powerful of all of the team members. So one of the things that I have been wrestling with this year, I’m just thinking of examples of how I’ve used these different team members. Actually, before I get into that, let me say that Clara is trained on my business model, my values, what I do, who I work with, my offers and really importantly my goals. So I did like a reflection on what worked in 2024.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:04:16]:
Then I set goals for 2025 and I used that, uploaded a transcript of me talking about it to train Clara. So I’m due an update for the next lot of goals. So yeah, Clara is trained on all of these aspects of my business to help me make decisions about where I want to go, what I want to do. And one thing that I was really, in fact I have been wrestling with for a while is that that dance between working on the public facing stuff and the time sensitive stuff and the launches and the summits and the events and all of that and the behind the scenes setting up of the funnels and all of that stuff. And earlier this year I made a decision a few months ago to step back.

My decision really was to slow down, to speed up. And the reason I felt confident making that decision because let me tell you, that comes with a lot of fear now, not necessarily showing up on the front end, public facing side of my business as much as I had been brings up a Lot of fear for me about revenue and momentum and all of this stuff. But I had this conversation with Clara, my calm CEO, and it really, really helped me, firstly to remind me of what my goals were.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:05:31]:
So I tend to set goals and forget about them. So it brought up my goals, it brought up what had been working. She asked me some questions about what was going on. We made a decision based on the fact and it made it so much easier for me to feel confident, to take that time out, to slow down, to speed up. Really, really powerful. I feel like I’ve made so much more progress this year with the behind the scenes setup of the, you know, the ecosystem of offers and setting up the funnels and all of that stuff. And it’s, that’s just one example of how this CEO AI support team member really helps me in my business. Second example is from Eden, the sales email writer.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:06:15]:
So I have probably talked about this a lot, but if you, if you want to go back and listen to a couple of the most recent episodes, I talk, I’m talking a lot about how I am going big for Q4 and some of the lessons I learned from analyzing my best quarter last year and all of that stuff. And one of the lessons that I learned is that I was selling, I was sending daily emails and I was selling a lot. And when I was sending those daily emails in 2024, Q4, 2024, that really honed this AI strategy where I go to my email assistant, Eden, I ask for different angles, I work with her and then I finish up the email myself. And I got really, really good at writing emails in a much shorter period of time that still feel like me. And this is really important.

I am not someone who believes in copying and pasting from AI as much as I talk about AI and as much as it helps me and as much as I’m all for people with limited capacity or neurodivergence or other challenges leaning on AI. I am not someone who believes in copying and pasting and I always want to bring my unique flair. I always also want to add my unique stories which as much as you train AI, it’s never going to know all of your unique stories or what happened yesterday that relates to what you’re going to share today.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:07:34]:
Right? But it can ask you questions about that and it can give you a starting point. And I really honed this system for writing my emails to such a degree that some of my emails and I really need to emphasize some, this is not all of my emails can be written in 10 minutes. And it is just amazing. Just imagine if you could write an email in 10 minutes, you could write an entire sequence in an hour for a launch that you were doing and then you can get on with other more important things in your business. Right. Just amazing. So Eden, the email assistant, I would say is my most used AI assistant, but Clara is like the most powerful, like, bigger vision. Then I have two others that I want to share with you as well.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:08:18]:
So next up is Maya, the Offer Muse. So I said in the intro to this episode that I have a million ideas all at once. Like, I am not short of ideas. Obviously, AI is a very helpful tool to come up with ideas in the first place, but I’m not short of ideas. What I do find harder is to differentiate between my ideas. I find it harder to have boundaries on my ideas. So I tend to like, have idea and want to throw everything in it, which I think can be like for a course or something, which I think can end up being confusing and not as powerful and easy to sell. And Maya, my Offer Muse, is so helpful for whittling down those ideas and really importantly, asking me to tune into my current energy and my current goals, to make a decision not just on what sounds like the best idea strategically on paper, but what is the best idea to move forward with given my energy levels and given my goals.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:09:11]:
And that is the really, really important part of the way that I do things. I think is missing from a lot of these systems is the personal element, taking into account your energy, your feelings, your goals, what does success look like to you? So really, really helpful for choosing between ideas. But also that kind of blank page feeling of starting from scratch, that one really gets me a lot, the blank page. So I find that starting can be the hardest part. So having some sort of outline really, really helpful. And again, just like with the emails, I very like. I don’t think I ever outline a course and then just use that as my final product and then record the course based on what AI gave me. But I do do a lot of back and forth and it gets me in the process of figuring out what I want and weaving that together in the logical order.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:10:09]:
That makes sense. And I am someone who, when I see, when I’m at the start of a bigger project, like a course with lots of different lessons and or what solar order to put the lessons in, a lot of that can become so overwhelming that I don’t want to even start. It just feels so overwhelming that it feels paralyzing. So having this Offer Muse assistant. Really, really helpful with that. And then the final thing that I want to share with you, the final assistant that I want to share with you now is, is the unsung hero. Like it doesn’t have sexy results like writing 10 minute emails or you know, helping me to make those powerful decisions in alignment with my big goals. But actually it helps with everything I do in my business and that is to work through my self doubt and, and to give me a boost of self belief because I don’t think there is a single human who has not battled with self doubt.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:11:09]:
And we all know as business owners that it brings all of your fears and feelings to the surface when you’re about to release something new, when you are sending more emails than you’re used to, when you are working towards a big goal, but it’s not happening and happening immediately. Right? All of this stuff brings up self doubt and self doubt’s job is to protect you. And often the way it will protect you is to stop you even working on the thing so that you can predict the outcome which will be, it won’t work, but at least I’ll predict it doesn’t work. So that feels better to me. Or it makes you push so hard that you burn out, you work too hard, you’re perfectionist and it’s just too much. So the self belief part is very, very important when it comes to messy action and making those decisions and building this momentum. And the way that it works when you have your own AI team member trained is that not only is it there to give you a pep talk, but it also knows things about you that it can reflect back to you like a mirror. And this is what any good coach is supposed to be.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:12:13]:
And let me be clear, this is not a replacement for having a human coach. I have a human coach as well. But it is very helpful to have it in your pocket between sessions or if you can’t have a coach right now, really, really helpful. And it will reflect things back to you because you have trained it on what you are good at, you’ve trained it on your wins. I actually have trained mine on some of my own Q and A sessions that I have done with my members and it reflects back things to me in my own words. And you know how we often say the thing to other people that we need to hear ourselves, right? It’s really, really helpful for that. And it reminds me of my wins, it reminds me of how far I’ve come because we often forget like even when we have hit milestones there’s always something else that we aiming for. So as long as we give it that context of what we do, where we’ve come from, it’s.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:13:00]:
It’s like tapping into a version of ourselves. I think that we can all relate to having a part of ourselves that believes right, part of ourselves that feels like, yes, I do great work and my work is really important. And then there’s another part of me saying but, but why does anyone care or why would they listen to me when other people are doing it? Basically when we’re training it, we’re tapping into that empowered part of us that knows so that when that afraid part of us feels louder, we get to have it, have that empowered part reflected back to us in the form of this AI assistant. So these are four examples.

I do use AI in lots of other ways as well, but these are the big four in terms of the ones I really see as my team, in terms of the ones that have to be trained on my business context in a very specific way in order to be personalized in a way that wakes, works for my brain, my goals, my business. And that is the key here. So there are lots of people selling custom GPTs which are trained versions of ChatGPT that do a really specific thing and that can be really, really helpful for a lot of stuff like a custom GBT to write your welcome sequence, or a custom GBT to help you plan a webinar or something like that. But what I’m talking about goes beyond a custom GBD trained on someone else’s framework.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:14:14]:
These are custom assistants or trained on your business. So I will give you the instructions for how to train your assistant in my AI support team offer. I’ll give you the instructions, I’ll give you all the prompts to help you get clear on your business vision, values, goals, all of that stuff that goes into training it. But what you end up with as your versions of these assistants is going to be very different to mine. And that is a good thing. That is a crucial thing actually for making them work for you. That is what makes them so powerful. They are unique.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:14:48]:
Unique to every single person who trains them. So like I said, I’m teaching all in the AI support team offer. That’s at RuthPoundWhite.com forward/AI team. It’s on a very big pre sale discount because you are pre ordering this. The course is not delivered instantly. But as a bonus for the fact that it’s not ready instantly, I am gonna do a live implementation session to help you actually sit down and do this. And I do believe that you can train your assistant in an hour if you really focus on it. Because I, like I said, you’re not having to gather all this information without guidance.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:15:23]:
I’m going to prompt you every step of the way. I’m going to give you shortcuts like, you know, speaking out loud and getting it transcribed so you don’t have to write everything, which it will save you a lot of time as well. And then you just plug and play. I’m going to give you templates to plug and play into chat GPT to create your own personalized versions of Clara, the CEO, Maya Offer Museum Eden, the email writer, and sky, the self belief coach. And trust me when I say these assistants save me hours and hours every single week. Some of them I use every single day. I wouldn’t be without them and I’m so grateful for them. And I’m only getting better at the way that I train them.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:16:02]:
They’re getting more and more powerful the more that I use them and I just love them. And before I wrap up this episode, I do want to say that they are my assistants, but they are not the boss of me, right? They are not the leader of my business. They’re not the visionary of my business. I use them to take some of the mental load out of my brain, to help me make decisions, to stop me staring at a blank page. But I don’t use them to replace my voice, to replace my creativity. I am the unique magic in my business. And I believe that the way that I have trained them and the way that I use them allows me to show up up in that space of my unique magic even more because I’m getting rid of that busy stuff that gets in the way that’s always in my brain, right? Freeing up the mental clutter, basically. And I always want to say that whenever I’m having a conversation about using AI, I always want to emphasize the fact that we are still the leader and AI is not here to replace that.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:16:59]:
It’s really, really important. And I push back on a lot of the suggestions my assistants give me or push back on loads of them. And that is still super helpful for me. So I hope that this has been inspiring to you. I hope that you have some ideas for how you might be using AI to support you more. And if nothing else, I hope you feel less alone if you feel like a bit of a chaotic human like I do. And if you want to get the AI support team, go to ruthpoundwhite.com/aiteam Like I said, it’s only available for a few more days at the time of release of this episode and I want to leave you with a question to reflect on. Would become possible for you if you removed some of that mental clutter from your brain.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:17:40]:
What would that space that freed up space allow in in terms of the unique magic that only you can do? So just have a think about that. Check out the AI support team and I hope that you can allow yourself to be supported and accept yourself in all your messy glory as well. Because it’s just no good fighting against it, but it is helpful when we have systems that support it.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:18:06]:
Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Soulful Sales. If you have a moment to rate and review, know that it really does make a difference and if you’d like to carry on the conversation then you can connect with me on Instagram at Ruth Poundwhite. Sign up to my newsletter@ruthpoundwhite.com forward slash newsletter or my personal favorite. Join me inside the Low ticket membership@ruthpound white.com forward/membership and keep doing what you’re doing because your work really does matter.