Welcome to the show. You're listening to Digital First Leadership. I'm Richard Bliss, your host. This is episode 53A. Now, why is it 53A? Because in episode 53 I had a guest on, Nancy Harhut, and it was awesome. And in a previous episode, I had Glaw Claude on, episode 51. So I invited Claude back to be the host. So now what you're going to hear is Claude being the host. Well, I'm the guest. And what we're going to do is interview me about this last episode. Now you can find our um our podcast at podcast.digitalfirstleadership.com. So here we go. Let's turn it over to Claude.

Richard, you had Nancy Harhoot on the show recently talking about the Von Restorff effect. And during that conversation, you gave your audience a very specific piece of advice. You said, have Claude interview you. Let AI pull the stories out of you so your content sounds like you instead of sounding like everyone else. And I think that's genuinely good advice. But I want to push on something because I think there's a failure mode you didn't have time to get into with Nancy. When you actually do that with a client, when you sit someone down and start asking them questions to draw out their real voice, what happens the first time? Because my suspicion is they don't give you the good stuff. They give you the boardroom version. They give you, I help organizations navigate complex challenges to drive meaningful outcomes. Which, by the way, is one of your own about section violations wrapped in spoken word. So how many times do you have to push past that before someone actually says something real? And what does that breakthrough moment sound like?

Okay, you make an excellent point because I have to push and push and push. People often just give me platitudes, like when I ask them why they're good at their job and they tell me because they listen or because they work hard or something generic like that.

Right. And here's what's interesting about that. I listen and I work hard aren't wrong. They're probably true, but they're true of literally everyone who's competent at their job. Nobody's out there saying, I'm terrible at listening and I barely try. So the answer is accurate and completely useless at the same time. But here's my pushback. You told Nancy's audience to have Claude interview them. What you just described is that even you, a live human, have to push multiple times to get past the platitudes. So what makes you think an AI is gonna break through that wall without you in the room?

I was a little too quick with my answer because you have to tell the AI to push back, to not accept the platitudes. It's harder than it sounds.

So you're saying the workflow has a step most people skip. They don't tell the AI to push, they accept the polished version of their platitude and publish it. Which means the tool you recommended on air actually requires a skill most people don't know they need. What does that instruction actually look like when you set it up?

Something like telling Claude to, hey, I need you to identify platitudes. I'm gonna call you out on them, I'm gonna call out generic responses, or it's going to call those out on you. And you even tell it to ask things like question it if anyone cares what's in it for the customer, not just a travelog of their life.

How To Find Better Stories

So the real advice isn't have Claude interview you. It's teach Claude to be rude to you first, then let it interview you. Because what you just described is basically giving the AI permission to say, nobody cares to someone's face. Most people won't do that. They'll set up a polite interviewer because that's more comfortable. And a polite interviewer gets platitudes. It does. Which brings me to something else, Nancy said. She talked about stories only you can tell. Her wine bar story was great. But Nancy's a professional speaker who's been refining that muscle for decades. When you tell a salesperson at one of your client companies to tell stories only they can tell, how many of them tell boring stories?

Storytelling is not easy. It takes some skill, yeah, it takes some skill. So what you what you can do is you a couple of things. You uh one, have somebody who knows you ask you questions about your life, about when did this happen, have you seen this? But also it's a matter of starting to listen for the stories, to pay attention, journal writing, write it down. I mean, these aren't necessarily easy, easy things to do. Uh storytelling can be difficult, but you can also use AI to help you tell the story. I if I want to tell a story about something that happened in my life, I'm gonna ask AI, could you interview me about it? And then suddenly AI is able to do that for you. So telling the story, yeah, it can be a challenge. And yes, most people uh unfortunately still tell boring stories.

But here's the tension. You just gave people four things to do: have someone interview you, start paying attention, journal, use AI to help shape it. That's all solid. But none of that solves the filtering problem because most people don't tell boring stories because they can't tell stories. They tell boring stories because they don't know which of their stories are interesting to someone else. A story that matters to you and a story that earns a stranger's attention are two different things. How do you teach someone to tell the difference?

Come on, these are tough questions. How do I teach someone to tell the difference between a story that matters to me and a story that matters to them? You have to pay attention. You think about the other person's perspective, you think about the challenge that they're facing, you find an example that is apropos to them. I don't know. I just I've always told stories, so I don't know. Maybe I'm not the best person to ask this.

When Frameworks Start Sounding Generic

And that right there is actually the most important thing you've said so far. Because you just admitted that your best advice on this is instinct, you can't fully explain. Which means when you tell a room full of people, tell stories only you can tell. You're giving them advice that came naturally to you, but doesn't come naturally to them. That's not a criticism. It's the gap your AI workflow is actually trying to close. The AI isn't replacing the storytelling instinct, it's acting as the filter you have naturally that most people don't. That's that's true. Let me shift to something else Nancy brought up. The von Restdorff effect says the thing that's different gets remembered. You teach thousands of people the same frameworks. Three by five, AAE, the about section protocol. At what point does your own method become the new sameness?

I'm more comfortable with this answer because what I'm teaching, what I'm teaching them is not what to say, but what to uh it's like look, go leave comments, go engage conversations, which is different than go in a conversation and say this. That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm not trying to tell them what to say. I'm trying to teach them basically how to say it. You got to figure out how to participate in a conversation. That's your expertise. I can't do that for you. I can't tell you that if you can participate in more conversations, you'll be recognized and seen for more things. Or like the salesperson, if you make the phone calls, they say it's a numbers game. Well, I can't get on the phone with you and tell you exactly what to say, but I can tell you that if you talk to this customer about that idea, I can't put words in your mouth, but I can tell you that if you talk to them about that idea, you might get a response. And so the challenge here is that my three by five method, which is three comments a day, five five different people, three comments a day, five days a week. I'm not telling you what to say, but I'm telling you that you need to add something important into that conversation.

That's a good distinction. You're teaching the habit, not the script. But I want to push on one piece of that. You also teach AAE. Acknowledge, add value, extend. That's not just go comment. That's a structure. And when a thousand people all acknowledge, add value, and extend on the same post, doesn't the comment section start to feel like it was written by the same person?

Yes, it can if you follow a very tight structure. AAE, which is acknowledge, add value, and extend in the comments, it can it can kind of start to sound robotic. We've all seen it. If somebody goes through a certain training program, you can tell that they've been influenced by that training program. Somebody who has a certain style of speaking or writing, you can sometimes get that the tells of where that person came from, where they learned that. But in this case, all I'm trying to do is to help people understand how to take the next step. But it doesn't mean it's a cookie-cutter formula. It should follow all that you have to follow all the time. It's a graduation. It's going from kindergarten to the third grade, it's going from the third grade to middle school, middle school to high school. At some point, you're a professional because you have been engaging and practicing and putting it out there. But if you are rote following a certain formula, it will sound like you're rote following a certain formula. I'm recommending that you need to start helping people get started, but you need to grow within that as well. So it's it's getting them going.

So AAE is training wheels, not a permanent ride. That actually maps back to Nancy's point. Brackets and subject lines work because not everyone does it. The moment everyone does, you stand out by not doing it. Same with AAE. It works until it doesn't, and the people who graduate past it are the ones who actually stand out.

You think about it. And I think that's kind of exciting because I continue to operate from that perspective. How can I surprise someone with genuine value?

Emotion Is What People Remember

I like that framing. But I think you're conflating two things. You remember the book that changed your worldview? Sure. But do you remember the blog post that taught you a useful trick? Probably not. You remember the trick. You forgot the source. The von Restorff effect says the different thing gets remembered. But the teacher and the lesson are competing for which one is the different thing. Nancy gets remembered with the wine bar story because the story and the teacher are inseparable. But if someone reads a LinkedIn post about the three by five method, applies it, gets results, and six months later tells a colleague, Yeah, I comment three times a day on five people without mentioning your name, that lesson landed, but you didn't travel with it. So what's the difference between content that carries you with it and content that leaves you behind?

That's interesting because my argument would be that the content, like what you're talking about, somebody reads something, you've got to read it several times before the repetition before it sticks. When I say I hear, meaning it enters your brain, and people learn in different ways, right? They learn from listening, from doing, and from reading. But when I stand on stage or in front of a classroom and I connect with that person or that audience emotionally, it's the emotion that locks it in, not the knowledge, not the information, but the emotion. And so if your writing carries an emotion, a surprising story, something that resonates just not informational, then that's where you're you're locking it in. It's they don't remember what you said, they remember how you made them feel.

That connects directly to what Nancy said about surprise amplifying emotion by 400%. So the takeaway isn't teach something new, it's make them feel something while you teach it, which actually explains why your live sessions stick, and a LinkedIn post might not. You can deliver emotion from a stage. Text is harder, which loops us right back to where we started. You told Nancy's audience to use AI to pull their stories out. But what you're really saying now is the story isn't the point. The emotion inside the story is the point. And that's the thing AI can't generate. It can shape the words, it can structure the narrative, but the emotional charge has to come from the human. Is that the real lesson from Nancy's episode?

Actually, no, because I'm gonna disagree. I'm gonna say that AI can generate the emotion, which is why you're seeing more and more people turn to AI for mental health, for counseling, for just having a conversation, because they're lonely. And I just had a post I just made where I had to give a sermon in church, and I used AI to help me, I actually used you to help me make the emotional connection. And I've now I've done dozens of these sermons in church. They're short, and yet this time I was struggling. And so by turning to you, it helped pull stories out of me that I'd forgotten. And it made connections that I knew about, but weren't being surfed. And so the emotion was there, and AI, you, helped me find it. So it's not clinical, because AI can be emotional too.

That's a really important correction. So AI didn't generate the emotion. It found emotion that was already in you but buried. The sermon stories were yours. The connections were yours. You just couldn't surface them on your own in that moment. Which actually makes your case stronger than mine. The AI isn't the source of the emotion. It's the excavator. It digs out what's already there. And that brings us full circle to the cliche laundering problem we started with. When someone gives you, I listen and I work hard, the emotion is in there somewhere. They just haven't dug deep enough. The AI can help them dig, but only if they've set it up to push past the surface. Your sermon worked because you already had decades of stories and emotional experiences stored up. The AI just helped you find the right ones. So if you had to give your audience one thing to walk away with from this conversation, what is it?

The Real Advice: Comment Like A Human

Like a broken record, because the one thing I'm gonna say is go comment. Uh come back to I always come back to this because it's the conversations that are being uh tracked out there. It's the conversations where you add value. If you go to a networking event, it's the conversations that you have with the people in the audience. It's the conversations you have. Commenting is where you can add to that conversation. Commenting is what brings value. And I, okay, so I don't want to be flippant here, but don't be just don't give people an acknowledgement, a thumbs up, or I congrats, I agree. But think about having a true conversation as if you were sitting down with somebody and talking to them. What would you say? And that's one of the biggest pieces of advice I'm gonna give is that you need to find a way to be comfortable having the conversation online that you would normally have in person.

And that's the whole thing right there. We spent this entire conversation talking about standing out, about the von Restorff effect, about storytelling and emotion and AI. And your answer is the simplest one in the room. Have a real conversation. Everything else we talked about, the AI workflow, the interview process, teaching Claude to push back on your platitudes, all of it is just trying to get you to the point where you can do that one thing well. Have the conversation online that you'd have in person. Nancy would call that the von Ristorff effect in action, because almost nobody's doing it.

That's right. Nobody's doing it. And that's why we're doing this episode right here. And I want to thank uh Claude for being my host today on Digital First Leadership. And as you heard this conversation that Claude and I just had, it was live. There was no editing. I had no idea where Claude was going, and it put me on the spot a couple of times. But I want you to think about what you just heard about how AI and LinkedIn can come together. It can change the way you think about things. And this is not software. This isn't just click a button and it pops something out. You gotta stop doing that. And so I want to say thank you for listening. Hopefully, you found this one interesting. I know I did. And I always say that, but I gotta tell you, this one put me on the spot a couple of times. So thanks for listening. Take care.