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Ep. 49: Breaking Through Roadblocks - How to Use ChatGPT for Clarity and Progress
00:28:13
In this solo episode, Cary tackles the challenge of feeling stuck when facing major professional or personal roadblocks. Drawing from personal experiences and coaching insights, Cary shares how ChatGPT can serve as a powerful tool for organizing...
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Welcome to the podcast. Got a question for you. Have you ever faced a moment, or perhaps you're facing it now in your career or your life, where the next step feels impossible? It's a little overwhelming. Maybe it's a decision. Maybe it's a major challenge. Maybe it's a reinvention and you're stuck, unable to move forward, unable to see what to do first, what to do next, and how to make sense of it all so that you can get to whatever it is success looks like. Well, if the answer is yes, if this feels like a relatable situation to you, then this episode, episode 49 is going to give you some tips and tools of how to use ChatGPT to break through that how to make sense of the chaos and make meaningful progress towards the goal.
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Hey there. Welcome to the ChatGPT Experiment podcast, where we take all that confusing ChatGPT stuff and break it down so even Grandma can understand. If you're a curious beginner, you're in the right place as we help you understand what ChatGPT is, how others are using it, and what are practical takeaways that you can use right away. It's going to be fun, informative, and maybe surprising when you find how helpful ChatGPT can be. All right, let's get this thing started. Here's your host, Kerry Weston.
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Hey gang, how you doing? Welcome to the show, episode 49. Today we're going to talk about breaking through roadblocks and how ChatGPT can help and appreciate the feedback from the last episode. Got a few folks that have reached out, really curious as to how folks are treating ChatGPT and AI and education and got one of someone had feedback that said there's a quandary and the institution that they're going to, because the teachers are forbidding ChatGPT to be used in the classroom or for classroom work, but yet they're using AI to grade. So there's some sort of an ethical dilemma going on there, and it does open up some questions. I know that there's more to come on that, but last week's episode in talking about how it's being used to do curriculum and teach students and that kind of stuff opened up some interesting feedback. So I appreciate, I do appreciate it when you, when you reach out and give me comments and. And again, just like last week, if you've got a situation, if you've got something that you'd like to share, you think others could learn from, please reach out. Please reach out, because I'd love to have you on the show talk about it so we can share your story and have other people, other people benefit from it. Okay? So breaking through roadblocks, solving the problem, overcoming that anxiety, chaos. Yeah. If this is a relatable situation and a question that has meaning to you, what we're going to do today is spend some time talking about some best practices where ChatGPT can help you get some clarity. Okay. It can help you deal, organize, plan, path recognize, and really release some of that tension, some of that anxiety, so that you can see your way forward. And some of the things I'm going to share, I've done personally, and some of these I've done through my coaching with other folks. But the consistency here, I guess the overarching theme is the circus music that's in our head that keeps us from moving forward, whether it's over analyzing. Right. Whether it's a fear of unknown, maybe it's a loss of identity, overthinking it, there's some sort of emotional overload, whatever that might be. Really, the tools that I'm sharing with you here has helped myself and others kind of cut through that, organize it and see how to move forward. Okay. So the first thing I would say is a lot of the stuff you can do without ChatGPT, it's just much like I've shared before, I don't think of it as. I don't think of AI as the artificial intelligence. I see it as an amazing instrument. Right. And so in this case, the instrument is going to be a tool that allows us to get our thoughts out, to communicate in no particular order or reason, and have somebody identify or something in this case. Right. Identify what their role is, how they can be helpful, and help us kind of make sense of the chaos. Okay, so the first thing I'm going to do, and I put this into the notes on both chatgpt, experiment.com and in the podcast itself, is we need to, what I call narrow the band. We need to give ChatGPT some specific criteria so it understands the situation, it understands what it needs to do it underneath, it understands what you need from it and the work that we're going to do together. Okay, so there are two episodes. If you want to get into more details on this, there are two previous episodes that I'll reference here, or let's do three, actually. The first one is role playing. So chatgpt, if you haven't been there, is a fantastic role playing partner. It's a great sounding board, it's a great listener, and it's a great organizer of the thoughts that you put out. And you can run any kind of scenario through and really gain value and perspective from that. And it does a nice job as long as you set up the details and the background description and it knows its role. And there's all kinds of information in episode seven about role playing. And that goes in hand in hand with episode 43, which is called narrowing the band. And again, much more detail in that particular episode. But in summary, if you hold your hands out wide and just think of it, that represents the entire knowledge base of what ChatGPT is capable of doing and thinking about and analyzing and providing information on. And you bring your hands in literally close, close, close, close, close. So they're right in front of you. You know, about the width of a. Of a sandwich. You're narrowing the band. And what you're saying is, I only want you to focus on this topic or the situation or this role. Right. And so you are sharing. I don't need you to think about or have at your disposal all of your information. I just need you to focus on this lane. Right. Episode 43 goes more into narrowing the band. And then anytime I use ChatGPT as a problem solving partner, as any kind of role playing kind of thing I love to do. What I'm doing right now with you is just talk. Typing really gets in the way. I think typing is more structured in my mind. It's. I'm slower at it. I don't have as Much color and character when I type as, when I talk, I can go on tangents. I can take mental exit ramps from the. From the main topic highway and then come back and it's all good. Right? So episode 12 gets into some specifics on how talking works, talk to text, how to set up your computer to do it. I've got a keystroke on my computer, so I hit a key twice and a microphone comes up. And when I talk, it turns that talking into words on the computer. And you can do the same whether you have a Mac or PC. In the show. Notes on chatgpt experiment.com for episode 12, there are instructions on how to set up your computer so that you too can just hit a couple keystrokes and start talking. And for anyone like me that probably thinks faster, that they can type and goes off on tangents and all that kind of stuff, it's a. It's really a game. It's a game changer. So the prompt that I put into the notes for here on episode 49 is setting up ChatGPT to become that problem solving partner. Okay, so it's a very simple prompt and you can get into as much detail as you want. But I'll read to you here what I did personally in testing and experimenting to get ready for this episode. And you can use exactly what I did, or like I said, you can get more details. But here's what I said. I need help. I started a new conversation. I said, I need help getting through a major professional roadblock for me, and I need someone to talk to. Would you please help me? I need to identify. And then I had three bullet points. One, what the specific issue really is. Two, what's keeping me from making meaningful progress towards solving it? And three, what does success look like? If I could. And then I said, can we work through this one at a time? And that last sentence is important because anytime I feed instructions like this into ChatGPT, it has a tendency to want to do everything at once, right? So if I didn't put that sentence in there, it would have said, okay, great, and then spit out questions and tips and all this kind of thing for all three of these subjects. And it would have been a little exhausting. And quite frankly, if the goal, if you think about this for a second, if the goal is to bring clarity and calm the anxiety of that mental overload, the last thing you want to do is have a ton of stuff thrown at you all at once. We want to be able to focus on one thing at a Time. And so that prompt that I just gave you and that one sentence at the end, can we work through this? One at a time is going to allow it to pause and be helpful with one topic at a time until you work through it. And so with that simple prompt, it came back and told me, absolutely, I'm here to help. Let's start with step one. And then it worked me through some questions of what the specific issue really is. Right. I'm saying take a moment to think about this. Here are some questions. Share whatever comes to mind and we'll refine it together. So episode 12, that voice to text allows you to really just free flow whatever you are thinking. Right. You don't need to type it and be perfect. You can just say things in incomplete sentences in inconsistent order. You can just give it a bunch of stuff and it will figure out the thread, it'll figure out what's important. It'll make sense of your own chaos in this regard. Right. It really is a strong problem solver, analytic partner here when you, when you have a situation like this. So those are the three things that are important is identifying the issue, what's keeping you from making progress and what does success look like? Okay. So you know, it's okay not to have all the answers right now. It's to feel like you need help, right? Because we know growth requires us letting go to do something different. And maybe this is an uncomfortable zone or a new area or a new job or a tough conversation, whatever it might be, it's okay. Other people have felt this. Okay. You don't have to have all the answers. And the process can be messy. Right. It's not a bad thing if you can't logically figure it out without help. It could be messy and this whole thing could be messy. You can have some ahoma moments here or you could have more questions as you come through that. But the whole point of this exercise is to recognize that not all of us have someone to turn to, to hold up a mirror. Not maybe it's something we don't want to share out loud at the moment. Right. Maybe we need to have some personal reflection or we need to work this out personally before we share this. You know, there's a variety of reasons for that. Right. And so this is where ChatGPT can really come in handy. So those three episodes, 43, 12 and 7 will help you get to this point and I'll put the other prompts in the show notes as well. Right. But the important thing here is to ask it to work through one at a time to give it its role. Okay? It needs to know its role and it needs to know how it can be helpful. And with those small pieces of information, you can get some wonderful results. Okay? And so the other thing you want to do as you walk through this is you want to find timelines for success. So once you identify what success looks like, the next thing to do is to think about the timeline by which you have to solve this problem. And if this doesn't have a tight deadline, I would suggest going no more than 90 days. It might be something you have to solve by next week, it might be something that you need to solve by the first of the year and it might be open ended. But if it is open ended, I would cap this thing. If you're really serious about making meaningful progress through it. Could life be better in 90 days than it is now? Would it be okay if you had a 90 day window? Don't go any further than that. What we found is that humans by default have a hard time keeping focus on anything meaningful. If we go beyond a 90 day planning and knowing that we can break that up into stages. So if you were to have 90 days and again if it's a week, then you've got to, you've got to concentrate this timeline, then the first tip I would give you on that time frame is we have three months inside that 90 days, right? So let's break it down into thirds. We've got a 30 day period, a 30 day period, and a 30 day period, and then each of those has weeks inside. And so you can tell as you go through this, one of the things that you can give as a prompt to ChatGPT, once you've gone through this work of identifying the issue and what keeps you from making progress and what does success look like, I would then go forth and tell it, I've got 90 days. I want to put together a 90 day action plan. I want to divide that 90 days into three 30 day periods, and I want to divide those 30 day periods into four weeks. And I want to make meaningfully small regular progress towards solving, fixing, achieving the thing that is in front of me. Okay? And what you're going to find is if you're in the same conversation as you were when you were identifying the issue and making meaningful progress, is that the memory of ChatGPT, especially in the paid version, and the paid version does have some advanced tools, the free versions are getting much more robust now. But I live in the paid version because I know that that's where the investment goes and new features and functionality. And I found that the memory, you know, the memory function, it really does remember more than it ever has before. That's a pretty impressive thing here. And so I would share with you, you can have a paid version for a month, right? So it's 20 bucks and you can cancel any time. So if you think the long term pay of using ChatGPT is not going to be worth the value, just think of it as a 30 day trial here. And is 20 bucks worth solving whatever this big problem is in front of you? I would assume it probably is. And so tell it I have 90 days or whatever the timeframe, let's stick to 90 for this conversation. I've got 90 days. I want to divide it into three 30 day periods and then inside those periods, let's divide into months. Now what is it that I can do in each of those periods that will help me make meaningful progress? What are the obstacles I have to overcome? What are the things I have to think about? What are the questions I have to have answered? What are the resources I have to find? Who are the people I have to talk to? Right. What are the things that have to be true? What are the things that have to be done? What are the things that have to be finished? And you can see where just me rambling this to you. There's no script in front of me. This is just thinking out loud. And that's the same way that I use ChatGPT. Here is you can see how using that voice to text gives you the ability of just free flowing, just talking to it. All of those things are important in having ChatGPT be valuable to you. And what you're going to find is if you finish that with please ask me one question at a time to get more information and help organize this time frame. It's going to come back and do just that, right? It's going to come back and say great, I need to know this or what about this? It's going to ask you some of these questions and then it's going to put together a timeline that's probably going to be pretty valuable, especially if you are relating to the, the phrase that I used of circus music or there. It feels like an upside down puzzle that got dumped on a table and I just don't know what to do. I got to find those corners right to the puzzle. I've got to find the frame, the puzzle and then I've got to work in. That's essentially what we're doing here with ChatGPT is we're taking that jigsaw puzzle of that messy jigsaw puzzle and we're finding the corners and we're making the frame and we're just going to build out from there. And we're going to do that with purpose and we're going to do that with an eye towards what success looks like, because that's what you've defined. And then we're going to back it into a timeframe that makes the most sense. And what I tell folks when I work with them is my goal is to be better next Tuesday than you were this Tuesday. And better is relative. Right? It's relative to whatever task, situation, feeling goal that we have. But I know that if you are feeling anxious about the thing, then you're probably feeling anxious about all the things you need to do to accomplish the thing. Yeah. And so it can be hard. It can be hard to have clarity in that situation. It can be hard to strip away the emotions and the pressure and start thinking clearly. And again, I have been terrifically surprised. I've benefited greatly from using ChatGPT in this regard. And it all comes down to feeding it the right information, narrowing the band, allowing it to know what role play it's going to be and then, and then getting everything out of my head. Yeah. I want to give you a couple extra episodes here because I think it would will help tremendously because you really are on, on the fly exercise here. This isn't a fill in the blank kind of thing where I'm not telling you. There's a worksheet. If you fill in these five things and hit enter, your world's better. What I'm telling you to do is think of this tool as a therapist, strategy expert, confidant. Right. That can help you organize and move Forward. And episode 10 goes into prompts and how to think of talking and using ChatGPT. Beyond that perfect prompt, it really does come down to conversation and natural tone conversation and giving it details and clarity. And there's a lot of that in episode 10 that you can benefit from. Okay. Now if you find yourself at a point where this might be a problem that comes up time and time again. Okay. For some of us, this paralysis is a one time thing. For others, this might be something that happens regularly. This might be something in our own life, this might be a problem that we might see happening again. Maybe you're solving it for other people. Right. And you feel guilty that you can't. So there is the ability of Doing this work once and then betting from benefiting from it many times moving forward. And so let's go there for a second. And episode 31 is called Custom GPTs and it's an intro to building some custom GPTs inside ChatGPT. And as a summary, custom GPTs is really, again, it's like narrowing the band, but doing it in a way that you can get back to it time and again and not have to tell it to narrow the band. So custom GPTs allows you to create a one off bot that has a specialized purpose that you can use over and over again with specificity and clarity. And by the nature of designing the custom GPTs, you are narrowing the band automatically so that when you come to it and use it over and over, it knows default, it knows by default what its mission is. Right. And so let me just share with you as you've gone through this, if this is something that you think you might use over and again, then here's a prompt that I would give to ChatGPT to help set up that custom GPT. Literally, tell it I want to create a custom GPT that will help me solve problems like this over and over again in the future. Can you take the work that we've done? Can you take the steps that we've worked on? Can you take the questions that you've asked and put them into a detailed specific prompt so I can paste it into the configurations of a custom GPT so that I can benefit from this work in the future? Okay, please ask me, and I always end with this. Please ask me any questions that you need to get more details and clarity on what I'm asking you to do. Okay. And it's going to give you instructions and those instructions literally could be copied and pasted into a custom GPT that you fire up and you're going to be well on your way of having a problem solving partner. Now you probably are going to want to tell it. The issue might not be the same every time. So I'm more interested in the process and the framework of what we've done on this issue than I am on the issue itself when I'm creating my custom GPT. Now, that may not be the case. This may be the same issue over and over again. Right. But if it, if it isn't, then you see what I mean. Explain to it really what the benefit was in the work that you did with it so you can replicate it over and over again. Okay, so yeah, that's what I wanted to get out of my head. And the reason I wanted to get out of my head is in sharing some of the things that I've gone through in my professional life as I. I'm transitioning from something I've been doing for 20 years to something new. And I've been using video on social media to kind of get that out a little bit so I can share it. It's a little bit therapy and a little bit awareness. And as I do that, people are relating to it and they're connecting with the message. And I've gotten a significant amount of direct messages of people just resonating or sharing with me how the message resonated and then asking me questions. And I've spent a good amount of time on the phone with those folks because I do appreciate people sharing. And I want to know more. And I want to know more for two reasons. One, I want to know if I can help. If there's anything that I've done in my own experience that I could share and help other people think it through and they could get benefit from it. That's a win for me. I'm totally interested in that. And two, I learned from other people too, because I don't have all the answers. And I'm constantly curious as I share with you here to be and you know, talking with other folks that have looked at it from different points of view and gone through it themselves. You know, it keeps you from feeling like you're alone and going down a dark hallway. We have to figure it out. All by yourself. Yeah. So that's important for me. And I've also done a significant amount of this in the professional work that I do. I'm not a counselor at all, but I will tell you that since COVID specifically since COVID or during COVID anyway, and then, you know, leading out from it, my work has become a lot of counseling in a couple regards. I spent every other week or every week one on ones with employees because it's part of our training and ongoing program. And more and more as Covid hit and then post Covid, those one on ones became less about professional responsibilities and more about personal situations. And when I share that with other folks, that resonates that they are seeing it as well, that they are spending leaders, are spending more time in quote, unquote, counseling roles in the professional capacity than they ever have been because people are looking to get through personal issues now. Right. And so that's, that's one and two, the work that I've done with clients, a lot of the problems that I help them solve are not budgetary, you know, and they're not logistics. They're. They're issues like this. How do I solve this problem? How do I create a process? How do I think it through? How do we get clarity, right? How do I get rid of the noise? How do I simplify the details and create a plan? And I just want to share with you personally that once I started using CHAT as a sounding board, my approach to solving this has been dramatically improved for two reasons. Number one, I have an objective partner that I can use to either validate or question things that I'm thinking or things I can't solve quite yet, or, or something like that. But I can also do it faster because my ability to get a bunch of stuff out of my head and have CHAT be my solving, my problem solving partner. And that role playing role, I can give it a whole bunch of stuff and have it organized and ask me intelligent questions. And then the last thing I'll say is if you have a framework or an author or some sort of person that you admire that thinks a certain way that you think might be able to help you take that and feed it into chat as well and say, I would appreciate, as we're doing this, utilize some of the frameworks or utilize some of the advice, or utilize some of the practices of XYZ as we do this. And it will layer in another specific kind of element to what you're doing. So, so anyway, as a takeaway, if you are feeling this, if you are dealing with this, if you feel underwater and you feel like you're stuck, you're not alone. I will tell you with utmost confidence that I have heard from many, many people in leadership positions all the way down to unemployed, that these are real issues that people feel more frequently than we think. And it's very common, right? So it's okay not to have all the answers right now and the process might be messy, but as long as we know and can identify the issue and what's keeping us from making progress, but most importantly, what does success look like? What is it that you're working towards? What does solving this mean for you? If you can get that out and get it into a format that you can make sense of and start building that work plan, I think it's going to be tremendously helpful to you as you navigate through this. So I hope this has been helpful. It's certainly been helpful for me. And if I can help one person by sharing some of these details, then it all makes it worthwhile Appreciate you joining me. We'll talk soon. And until we do, always stay curious.
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All right folks, that's a wrap for today's episode of the ChatGPT experiment. Thanks for hanging with us and diving into the world of ChatGPT. We hope you found it helpful and fun and informative. And speaking of helpful, we'd sure appreciate you taking a moment to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. By the way, five star ratings are our favorite. Till next time. Keep experimenting, keep learning. And remember, ChatGPT may be smart, but it can't make a decent cup of coffee yet. See you soon.
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