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Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Leadership Growth Podcast. I'm your host, Daniel Stewart, along with my brother, Peter Stewart. And today, a fantastic guest, Elizabeth Rosenberg. Thank you for joining us today on the Leadership Growth Podcast.-Thank you for having me.-And especially around the topic, and this is an interesting topic because it's understanding how to lean into AI without losing yourself, and what this might mean, and whether people even considered this as maybe happening. And how do we know when it's happening and what this looks like? So we'll be able to understand ourselves and AI, and what that relationship is. First, let me just share Elizabeth's background really quickly before we dive in and have a great conversation. So, Elizabeth Rosenberg, Founder of the Good Advice Company, a marketing and communications consultancy focused on C-suite personal branding and high-stakes reputational strategy, and Chief Spiritual Officer, a leadership platform and community helping executives cultivate intuitive intelligence as a competitive advantage in complex AI driven environments. A lot of expertise. We want to leverage this.(laughing) So Elizabeth, as we're starting off here, what does it actually mean to lose yourself to AI? What are the signs when this might be happening? Please start us off here. Please start us off here.-Yeah. Well, I'm glad that you, I mean, you talked a little bit about intuitive intelligence as we were diving in. And I think that's exactly what we need to cultivate as we're losing ourselves in AI. And to me, losing yourself in AI is about when you stop trusting your gut and you stop trusting yourself. So I think a lot of people are using ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini, not necessarily as a thought partner, and create— like a creative collaborator, but actually as like the end-all be-all of all answers. So instead of coming to a problem with your own brief or with your own kind of institutional knowledge, you're letting AI drive your own narrative for you and then just accepting that as fact.-Mmm.-And to me, we're losing so much of our humanity and of our connection and of our critical thinking just by kind of, um... I think taking away that step of questioning if what AI is true or not. Like what they're giving it back to us is true.-I think you're highlighting just an absolute pivotal acknowledgment and recognition of AI as a resource,-Yeah.-it is not the authority.(laughing) And how we can use it as a tool.-Yeah, I mean, it's funny because I look back, especially with people who are, I think, Gen X or kind of older millennials and... and... we came up in our careers at a time where email was a new thing. And we didn't take that as like a complete“Okay, now we're never writing anything again with paper and pen,” right? It was just like another tool, another something that we were able to use that expedited things. And I wish that we kind of saw AI as that as well, as just like another collaborative tool that expedites things and can help us in a lot of areas, but not necessarily a replacement for our own thinking. And I don't know if you're having the same experience, but I'm finding that AI is getting a little dumber. Every time I use it, it's coming back with things that are making us all sound the same. And with answers that aren't totally making sense. And again, I don't think we are pushing enough as a collaborative... like as a creative collaborator on where it is not giving us the answers that we actually want, and the ones that we actually need.-It can become an easy crutch. And so, what are the signs that we need to be cognizant of, that we might be diving in too far, because in some ways I can see people rejoicing and going, oh, that just saved me a half hour. That just saved me an hour. And I'll just take it. Maybe I'll read through it. Oh, that's such a relief. Instead of them having this existential conversation with themselves and saying, wait a minute, I've just denied my own ability to think and be a critical human in this case. That is not necessarily where most of our brains are during the day. But you're saying that we might be doing that without even realizing this is happening.-I mean, we need to acknowledge there's a lot going on in the world right now. So, anytime that we have anything that's making something easier for us, like, we are going to do it. And I am very pro AI. I think that AI can be an incredible partner, but also can push us in ways that will make us more creative if we allow it to do so. But if you go onto LinkedIn, you can see right now how people are using it as a crutch. Everyone's tone sounds the same. The cadence of how you write things sound the same. It's like, you know, you've got the three-sentence, the three-point sentence, and you're like, oh, AI wrote that. Or if you go onto Substack and people are... have very popular and I think well-read with a lot of reach Substacks right now, that I read something and I was like, oh, that entire thing was written by AI. You can see where the italics are. You can see all of the em dashes. Now, I was also an English major, so I am also pro em dash. But we're all starting to sound the same, and to me, that just makes everything about your personal brand and everything about your thought leadership sound like garbage. So I am really kind of questioning that we are just using it and we're not questioning anything and we're just throwing a bunch of, I think“thought leadership” out into the world that is actually not any kind of original thought.-That makes sense. So, Elizabeth, let me share a conversation I was recently having with someone I was coaching.-Yeah.-And an insight they had to see how this fits in with your perspective on this intuitive intelligence and preserving it. So we were talking about... so this is a, you know, a director in a large organization, leads a very, very influential team over IT in many regards there. And they were becoming a little frustrated with AI and it wasn't necessarily giving them the help or the assistance or the responses they were looking at.

And so they were looking at more of this prompt engineering side of: 7:03

okay, am I giving it the prompt that's really helping me? And they said they had a mindset shift that has completely changed how they've used it. And they said, I actually don't look to AI for solutions anymore. I look to AI as a brainstorming partner and say, I am considering this. What are the factors that I should be thinking about? Or what are... poke holes in a solution that I'm doing. Like, is that getting more in the lines of the type of AI use that you're advocating for?-I think so, yes. And the thing that I... that I also am finding, it is a conversation, right? And you also have to push back on AI when it's not giving you the answers that you actually need in order to solve the problem. But when you say, like, put together a creative brief, it doesn't have the institutional knowledge of all of the years of experiences that you've had, either in life experience or work experience, in order to get to the place where the brief is going to be helpful. It doesn't actually have the cultural context of what we are doing in the world right now to pull on that and how that's going to help. As a PR person, I'm seeing a lot of people go in and trying to optimize their LinkedIn with AI, which I think is an interesting way of doing it. But without the right prompts and without the right, I think, human approach to your personal brand, it's going to fall flat and you're going to sound like everybody else. I'm also getting a lot of founders and a lot of, I think, agency leaders and company leaders sending me PR plans that they wrote with AI that is promising that they're going to be, like, on the cover of the New York Times and on the Today Show. And I'm like, that's not going to happen. Like, there's actual new, like, world news happening right now that is going to be competing for that space. So I also think there's just this optimism that comes with AI that makes all of us sound like we are going to be the next billionaire, that in some ways is actually kind of exciting because it is giving you that nudge, but there's so many people who have, I think, business ideas and new ways of thinking that they want to throw in here. And then AI is telling them, “Yes, quit your job, go ahead and do this. This is going to be amazing.”“You got this.” And it was like, oh my God, did you consider like any of the manufacturing or tariffs or, you know, international tax laws that you need to consider when you're doing this? So, and sometimes we don't know the right questions to ask back. So I love the idea of using it, I think, as a creative partner. And it helps a lot, I think, when you're coming up with things that you haven't really thought about of new of new revenue streams or new ways of kind of, I think, also dealing with different humans. But we need to also just take in consideration that that is an opinion. It's not the end-all, be-all answer, you know? Yeah.-And what this is also talking about, and it sounds kind of funny for me to say, but this assumes that we have intuitive intelligence. It assumes that we as humans have it, or have enough of it.-Yeah.-And so, in some ways, you sit back, and I think just like any skill, humans can fall on a wide spectrum of how much they have, how much they believe, how much they trust themselves. And sometimes AI can actually feel more confident about their own thinking than we as humans do. And thus it's like, oh, well, I'll go with that. And so let's do a timeout here. How can we strengthen the intuitive intelligence in humans, because we have that capacity, we're all at various different levels. But we need to encourage that instead of allowing AI to diminish, and diminish or even thought about needing to focus on it. So how do we build our intuitive intelligence?-Well, I believe we all have intuitive intelligence. I mean, we were, as a species, we have evolved. I mean, from the very beginning, it was like fight or flight, right? Do we protect? Do we need to do we run from the tiger that is going to kill us, or do we just stand there? I mean, like, that is your intuitive knowledge of like, run, this is, this is going to get you, right? And I also think we... when you walk into an office and you're interviewing, or you're on a Zoom and you're interviewing, you're like, yes, these are, this is my vibe. These are good people. I like, like, this energy is good. People always have that. And I think what I'm running into is a lot of people, you're totally right, are using AI to question their intuitive intelligence. So one of the things that, and it's well known, I am a 25 year plus PR and marketing executive. I'm also an intuitive medium, that I leaned into very much so. And I've kind of mixed those world together in a really beautiful way. And I actually taught a workshop this year at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, along with a business partner of mine who also is in corporate America, that used crystal pendulums and tarot cards as just like a very basic let's just test our intelligence. Let's just test our intuitive feelings. Like, what is our gut? How are we feeling about this? And while a lot of people might think that those things are totally woo-woo, okay, cool, fine. You can believe it or not, it's not going to hurt you. But what it is going to do is it's going to help you cultivate a creative and kind of different practice that is going to start trusting what your intuition is actually telling you. So it was really interesting. One man came to that. We were the first session to sell out and we had over 100 people in the room. It was very fun. And one man came and he was like, I came here to prove my wife wrong, and I'm going to have to go home and apologize.(laughing) And I was like, that was the best testimonial we've ever had. So, I do think it doesn't have to be that for everybody. There's some people that just aren't comfortable with that. But I do think that we need to think about whatever creative practices are that will literally kind of push our intuition, whether it's painting, whether it's writing, whether it's meditation, you know, whatever it is that I think is going to get you out of that kind of constant grind of questioning and just give you another place to explore. And to be honest, in the world that we're living in, again, it's just... it's a nice break to do something different like that.-It is. I think it's such a helpful break, and it's helpful to make sure we're not getting sucked into the pull of, in many ways, so many of these large language models are trained to give you almost this unconditional positive regard and appraisal.-Yes.-I have.... a buddy of mine, his two daughters love scripting out really bad, cheesy, like Hallmark movie script scenes And—-I love that for them. Like, that's cool.(laughing)-Oh, they love writing it. And so, but they've lately they've been uploading those into an LLM and asking for feedback. And like these, these are horribly cheap, like atrocious scenes. And the feedback coming back is like,“Oh, what great ideas and creativity. And look at what you can build.” And da da... And “Oh, seven out of ten.” I mean, they've tried to get a score lower than a five and they cannot. But... and I bring that up because we can get sucked into this, this, just this flywheel of pattern of reinforcement that is completely not real. And so you're highlighting other areas to get those sources is, I think, so helpful.-And one thing you can do, too, is you can actually go into the settings, and you can tell it, do not be a cheerleader. I want you to poke holes in everything. I want you to push back. I want you to question when I have authority. And change the responses that you are wanting back. And it's an interesting exercise just to see kind of where you land with that, too.-So keep going with that. What are other boundaries that we might set with AI? And maybe boundaries we haven't even thought about that we could then put to be able to help preserve, honor, and build the intuitive components that humans... the humanity part of it. What are those boundaries, Elizabeth?-My boundaries, I think, are different than others because I am a creative writer as well. So I like to kind of, I don't want to be training LLMs strictly on also my creative process. And I know many authors and creatives feel similarly. And I know a lot of people want ease and automation and they just want things to be to be easier for them. I think eventually we're going to get there, right? But right now, there is no background and there are no security clearance... there's no security in place to really protect us from that, even though they're telling us that.

So, my boundary for me is: 16:30

I will not put any finances in there. Like, I've been watching social media and people who are letting Claude do their taxes. And it is blowing my mind that that's something that someone would allow. They are connecting their entire G Suite, their credit cards, their calendars, their contact list. And again, while I understand that that will audit, like... agentic AI is going to make a lot of things much easier in that sense. I personally don't feel like we are in a place where that... where I want to be the early adopter of that. I, again, I am all... I'm a huge proponent of AI. I think we have to get on the train. This is where we're going. Like, you're going to be left behind. But I also just think you need to be quite cautious of how much information you're allowing to get out there. So, to me, those are kind of like my hard lines. Like, I can't believe that people are doing that. But if that's what works for them, that's... okay. The other thing that's really interesting to me, and as two podcast hosts, I'm sure you'll find this fascinating too. But there are AI programs out there that are creating another kind of like digital footprint of your personalities and of your thought leadership and of who you are as leaders and people. And I think a lot about the ownership of that digital copy of where that's going to live, of who's going to have access to that, and all of the institutional knowledge that you have brought to the table, especially as you're changing jobs and/or you are sharing a lot of proprietary information that's out in the world. Is that eventually something that's going to be in your estate plan that your children will have access to and they will own? Like, I think about this kind of stuff all the time. And we just, we're living in such an unregulated time. I'm very curious as to where that's all going to land.(laughing)-There, there, there are so many unknowns.-These are big questions. We could do a whole podcast on that, you guys.(laughing)-There... there are so many unknowns. And I think that's where, as we are in many ways learning, as we are creating and trying, and it's being very conscious of that... you know, that process.-Yeah.-And that we're going to see where it goes. But let's pull back to a concept we were alluding to earlier about that personal voice. And that personal brand for a leader. And we can use AI as a tool to help with that. I mean, what recommendations do you have for leaders to leverage AI to enhance or to build their brand while still being very true to themselves?-When I kind of use my process to uncover your personal brand, I think it's really important that you have what your idea of purpose is, kind of what you want your legacy to be, what your professional purposes, but also kind of like where you're landing personally. I think the one thing that is going to continue to hit home for everybody is that human connection of where we are, which is why you've been seeing a lot more personal stories on LinkedIn of, you know, of people's failures, of the obstacles that they've overcome. When it comes to AI, one of the things that I have done and I recommend to all of my clients is if you don't have a document where all of your LinkedIn posts live, start one now. So like I have a Google document that just, I've been keeping all of my posts since 2019. It's like where I start, it's hundreds of pages long. But that's all public information, right? That's all in... that's already on the internet. I have taken that document, uploaded it into Claude, who I think is the best writing partner when it comes to me and kind of like how I've created the prompts and kind of the settings. And when I have a new post, I will, I always write my posts. Again, I'm like very anti of just being like, write a post on this, and then having it pop out exactly kind of the cadence and the tone as to where that lives. But you can have it double check your, your... making sure that it's aligning with your brand. So when I uploaded everything, I actually said like, if you were to build a brand, what would this look like? Eh. It came back with some interesting answers. But for the most part, it's gotten my voice really close. And I think that there's something to that because as I'm building proposals or as I'm writing a new deck or as I am thinking about what another post looks like, it can actually kind of check me to be like, well, that it sounds very, very different than something that you wrote a while ago. Let's think about what that narrative through line is for all of it. So, to me, that's really helpful. A lot of people don't like to post on LinkedIn. So, I also just want to be really clear about that. And last year, I said that I think that this year is going to be the year of like the unhinged. Because people are going to know that like the wackier your posts are, the more real you are, that it's not LinkedIn, like it's not an AI model who's actually writing your posts. Now, as a PR person, I can tell you that's up to you. Write some unhinged stuff or not. Like, that's okay, cool. If that's part of your brand, lean in. But I think that there's something to that. And if you don't want to post, I think you should get creative with your comments. I think that's where you can also see like a huge uptick in people actually viewing your page. And that is also a very human way of coming to things. But... I say, but... The one thing that I see in personal branding that is the most important is that people feel like they need to be a thought leader on everything. And what I tell everybody is just because you're a thought leader does not mean we need your thoughts on everything. So stay within your boundaries and stay within kind of like three large areas of what feels comfortable to you And comments are where you can kind of go outside. But when you start commenting on everything, your brand is... no one knows who you are. You have no brand. You're just that person who is loud.-Yeah. So let's keep going here. So let's make this really practical and specific. Day in the life. Give us a sense, for the leaders who are listening to us right now, what are the sorts of even AI tools or prompts or approaches that I, as a leader can do day to day and have a sense of confidence that I'm still honoring my humanity? Versus, what are the types of things that I might start to do that, oh, I am now neglecting? Walk us through a good day. What does it look like for a good human using AI?-I'm like, I mean, it's such a hard question. That's a great question.(laughing) But it's such a hard question because it's so personal to everyone, right? I think some of the things that I have found most helpful when you're thinking about prompting, is really starting to use like voice-to-note translation or dictation. Because I think when we speak, we actually say the things that we really want to say versus writing.

So I always tell a lot of my clients: 23:58

if you have something that you really want to say, whether it's an email, whether it's an all hands, whether it's, you know, whatever it is that you're going to be sending out, I actually want you to speak it out first.-Mmm. Because that is where you're going to be the most authentic version of yourself. When you start writing, is when you start thinking, I'm going to need prompts on this. I'm going to need help, like, I'm going to need other things on this, right? And also, I think that we think that longer is always better. And sometimes I think shorter is actually significantly more impactful. The other thing that I would tell all leaders to do, and this is like kind of, I'm going anti-AI for you for a second, is I have recommended to every one of my clients to get a Brick, which is a... it's a small like square device that actually bricks your phone. And it will brick your phone from social media and like from any like app... games, any apps that actually can distract you throughout the day. And what it does is it actually allows you to be much more present in the things that you need to be doing. I'm very pro AI in a lot of ways, but I also think that we need to get back to like where we are connected humanity-wise. The other thing that I would say is as a leader, you need to hold yourself accountable to the AI KPIs that you're holding your team accountable to. So, if you want your team to be using AI, you better be using AI too. You need to know what they are doing. I mean, and you can't just be like, “Okay, so Gen Z is going to jump on this train, and they're the ones that are going to like take us into the future.”-Yeah.-And just hope for the best. Like, you need to know what's going on. You can't not be in the trenches with them when it comes to AI and what that future looks like. You cannot just assume that everyone else is going to like bring you up to speed. So, if you're a CEO, that's not, I think explore... like experimenting with what AI means and how to use it, I don't actually think you are... I think it's a huge disservice to your company.-Really helpful practical suggestions there. And for those that, when you say brick your phone, for those that might not be familiar, describe what that means.-It literally means, that's a good question. It literally means like you cannot access those apps, even if you tried. There's a specific app and tool called the Brick. It's magnetic. You can put it on a fridge. You can put it on you can put it anywhere. If you've got kids, I highly recommend this as well. So, what it'll do is it will brick... You can brick anything. You can brick your social media apps. You can brick your games. You can brick anything, especially if, again, teenagers, you can brick their messaging. So, they can have... or YouTube, so they can have their phone in their room, but they can't actually use a lot of the tools that they need to. And what you need to do is you need to physically get up, and just like Apple Pay, you need to click your phone in order to unbrick it. So, and a lot of parents just take a brick into their room and... there you go, kids can't access it. So, your teenagers are going to hate me. But it really is an amazing tool because there's so many studies coming out right now about what screen time is even doing to our reaction time. People who let, who get off of their phone for 30 days have seen anywhere between like one to five seconds of increased reaction time. That's crazy. Like, that is wild. So, and I think back of like, you know, we were allowed to leave the house and our parents didn't know where we were. Like, what a time to be alive, yeah?-That is remarkable.-It's so true.-That is remarkable. Well, so can I share a concern? And I want to hear your thoughts about this.-Yeah. My concern is people might get confused with what is intuitive or not. For example, people who might prefer tasks over relationships, or for whatever reason in their life, they haven't connected with other humans as well. I'm just leaving it at that. They might look to themselves, and their comfort level, or their intuitive voice inside of where they're comfortable, what they should do, may not go toward humans. It might be defaulted toward non-human, and they see AI as the wonderful alternative that is not messy with human emotions. And I'm going to listen to my little voice, and I'm going to keep going more toward that. And oh, that is so refreshing. I don't have to work with and deal with as many humans. That might feel very comfortable for them. However, I see AI exaggerating that in unhealthy ways. But is that an unhelpful judgment? How do I view this within this concern, Elizabeth?-It's a great concern. I think the issue comes down to behavioral analytics, to be honest. I mean we are all different. I mean, there are jobs, and like an engineer's mind tends to actually do much better working remote, because they have the ability to focus, they have the ability to be away from the energy of people. Then you've got the people who are dealing with much more like the HR, the PR, the people who actually like thrive in a social environment, right? I don't think that there is a huge difference when it comes to how your intuition is feeling of being drawn towards that. We are going to need both in our society. And we are going to need both to understand the strengths and the weaknesses of what we're building and then also where AI is going. So I actually think that there's a lot of benefit to the people who are being drawn to it because they are the ones that are going to be able to kind of see under the hood in the way that the people who are more social in a human interaction can't. So, I very much value that. But I also think that, like, human intuition is something that when I say it's like that gut feeling, it's just that thing that you feel. And I think that we've just become really conditioned to not listening to it anymore. And I can tell you, everyone I've ever talked to is like, the second I don't listen to it, something goes the way that I didn't want it to. And I wish I had listened to that. I mean, I can tell you so many times where that has happened to me, or we're moving so fast that we're just like, I don't have time to listen to it. So, I think that's why we're getting back to this place of human connection, why people want to be with each other in real life, why people are pitching each other on, you know, Canva templates in order to date. I mean, we... there is this like, there's this draw towards that human connection that so much of technology and I think post-pandemic has really taken away from us. And there is still a human connection when it comes to how we're connecting, right? We've never met in person. But we're using technology in a way that's connecting us not on a tech front, but on a human front.-Mm hmm.-So I do think there is something that we need to lean in on that. But we are also just like in a hugely innovative and kind of exciting time when it comes to how things are changing so quickly. And we've lived through the internet. We lived through phones. We lived through I mean, you know, we don't drive around with paper maps and like, you know, Thomas Guides in the car anymore for a reason. Those were terrifying, by the way. I don't think there's an entire generation that will never understand of like being like, I'm on this page now, I have to go like 30 pages forward to understand where I'm going next. So much of the innovation has been positive. So I also think we need to look at that as a positive thing. I continue to be fascinated about where we're going, but also I am so in check of wanting to... be around other people and experience life in a way that still brings us joy.-That's well put. That's well put. So, so many ideas we've been able to explore today in this conversation, from intuitive leadership, trusting our gut to freaking out over AI to wait a minute, it can be a wonderful thing. I mean, there's such extremes because it's so new.-Yeah.-So as we're wrapping this up, Elizabeth, what would you say is the one thing, the one message you hope our listeners really take away from this conversation?-I would say do not hide from AI. It's here. Like, embrace. And the amount of time that you spend embracing AI, I want you to think of the exact same amount of time of like going outside and connecting with humans at the same time. Nature and people and relationships and connection and community are the things that actually like bring us into old age and keep us alive. So we can't forget that those things are part of the package.-That's well said of balancing. For every minute you spend with AI, do it with a human in some way. Be outside.-Something.-Something.-Exactly.-Be outside. Enjoy. Yes.-Yeah, we're here. I mean, we're not just here to work. We're here to enjoy life as well. So we might as well.-I love it. Elizabeth, thank you so much for being part of the Leadership Growth Podcast.-Thank you.-And to all of our listeners, thank you for joining us. Please like and subscribe, and we look forward to having you as part of future conversations as you take the tips and tools and help build your leadership capability. All the best, everyone. Take care. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague. Or better yet, leave a review to help other listeners find our show. And remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode. For more great content, or to learn more about how Stewart Leadership can help you grow your ability to lead effectively, please visit stewartleadership.com.