75. I Leveraged Too Hard! My AI Experiment and How To Use AI Without "Selling Out"

Have you ever been tempted to hand over your marketing to AI? Maybe you've heard all the advice about "leveraging technology" and thought, "This could save me so much time!" But what happens when that well-intentioned shortcut leads to zero sales?

In this vulnerable share, I'm pulling back the curtain on my recent launch that completely flopped after I went all-in on AI. I learned the hard way that there's such a thing as leveraging "too close to the sun."

You'll discover:

• The surprising red flag I missed that signaled I was losing connection to my own business
• My "back to basics" approach that immediately improved my marketing results
• The hidden cost of outsourcing your thinking (hint: it's not what you think)
• Which AI tool actually outperforms ChatGPT for certain business tasks

If you've been feeling disconnected from your marketing or struggling to find balance between efficiency and authenticity, this honest conversation might be exactly what you need to hear.

Join me for LEVERAGE - my free 3-day live program happening next week where I'll be sharing the scaling strategy for booked-out moms who want to grow their income beyond 1:1 work—without adding more hours, missing bedtime, or building a business that pulls them away from the life they’re working so hard to create. I'll actually be sharing my screen and showing you the AI hacks that support me without drowning out my voice >>> https://yaelbendahan.com/leveragepodep 

👑 CALLING ALL CEO MOMS! Ready to scale your business without sacrificing bedtime stories and family dinners? Only 6 spots left in the CEO Mom Mastermind before the investment goes up on April 10! Apply now and you could be booking your ROI Roadmap call by NEXT WEEK to map out your 6-figure+ year. This is your permission slip to build a business that fits YOUR life—not someone else's cookie-cutter model. 

DM me "MASTERMIND" on Instagram or head to https://yaelbendahan.com/mastermind to apply. Your kids AND your bank account will thank you! 

LINKS
📈The CEO MOMS Growth Matrix - feeling stuck or plateaued at your current revenue? Snag your custom roadmap for sustainable growth from $0 to multi-6-figures in this FREE training! >>> yaelbendahan.com/matrix

🔥Join my FREE 3-Day Program, LEVERAGE - the process that’s creating multi 6 figure years working nap times and being a full time mama of 6. Claim your spot here >>> https://yaelbendahan.com/leveragepod

💰Offers in Your Pocket - 11 Offers You Can Pull Out of Your Pocket and Sell This Week! Only $9 - yaelbendahan.com/pocketoffers

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In the "building" stage of your business? Join the MOMentum Collective - my most accessible mentorship program for moms growing to $5-10K months.

💃 Apply for the CEO Mom Mastermind if you're ready to scale sustainably to $15-20K+ months. Read more about the mastermind here OR go straight to the application here.
Want to chat about the mastermind before you join? DM me on Instagram - instagram.com/theyaelbendahan

Transcript

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I'm so excited to dive into today's episode because I'm sharing something super real, something I learned the hard way. I leverage too close to the sun. I leverage too hard. I had this big plan. One of my coaches recommended to use AI to make things easier, to streamline my content, automate as much as possible for a launch. But I found myself feeling totally disconnected from my marketing, my sales process, even my own ideas. So today I'm going to be breaking down how I went a little bit overboard with AI and what happened. The balance between leveraging AI and staying connected to your work and how I use AI in a way that supports my business and my creativity and does not replace it. Or attempt to replace it, because frankly, it can't. And inside my upcoming free program, Leverage, I'm gonna be sharing some very specific tips for exactly how I use AI to expand my natural genius instead of replacing it. So if you want the behind the scenes The link is in the bio, in the description, sorry, not the bio. Sign up for Leverage, it's happening next week, it's live, it's free, and I haven't done this since before my baby, so this is gonna be a good one. Welcome to the Raising Your Business Podcast. I'm your host, Yael Ben Dahan, founder of CEO Mom Academy, mom of six, and lifelong reading addict. This podcast is here to empower moms to run their businesses and lives like the powerhouse CEO they are. I want you to believe that you can have the business success you desire. And be present with your family and to give you my best tips and strategies for how to make that happen. I'll be sharing the honest reality of balancing business and motherhood, biz models that work for you, marketing simplicity and the mindset of a CEO mom. Now let's dive in. So here's the deal. I love leveraging my time, my energy, my systems. That is literally what I teach, but there is such a thing as too much leverage. And the truth is, I was very resistant to AI. And I did start using it more to basically just take what I already have and like I said, expand what I was doing. So I use it to create my show notes for this podcast because I take the transcript that I, the podcast that I recorded, and then I plug it in, and I have a framework, and I'm like, please take this, and turn it into this type of and turn it into this type of description with the show notes, please use these keywords. That is very good, and I love using it for this. I love using AI to just, Make repurposing faster and better. Okay? That being said, what I found was that people kept telling me, use AI to make things easier. So I did and with my recent launch for CEO Mom Academy one of my coaches really recommended she goes, just really lean into AI because I had a lot going on in my life. I was very overwhelmed. And she's just lean into AI and use it, right? Use it to help you with your webinar, use it to help you with your emails, your content, your marketing strategy. And the truth is, that's what I did, right? I actually, I did plug my own ideas, my own thoughts in, but I let it map out my webinar. I let it Map out my content. I let it, write emails even though like I did obviously go back and I updated the emails I fixed them. I made them sound more like me. They weren't like completely Yeah, nothing that I posted or wrote or sent was completely AI, but it was very helped along by chat GPT you know with my own input obviously and I let it ideate and plan and outline everything I'm like you this I was using a custom GPT that uses my mentors frameworks. I'm like, this is perfect. It's just mapping it all out for me. And that was what I did. And at first I felt Oh my God, this is amazing. But here's what happened. Okay. I would call this launch an epic failure as far as specific launches go. Now here's the interesting thing. I did make other sales. Of other offers. People were inquiring about other things. Okay? I had some people asking me about Oh, is this good if I'm having a baby this year? Is this good for maternity leave? And I was like, Actually, I have an intensive that I help to map out your maternity leave. And that kind of stuff sold. CEO Mom Academy itself did not sell. Not even one. Okay? And this is my confession. I did not make a single sale of the actual program that I was launching. And every time I've launched, I've 3 percent conversion rate. Since I started launching anything that has been my conversion rate. Okay, so it was surprising, right? But it's actually not so surprising because what ended up happening was I realized throughout this launch that I was using ChatGPT so hard, was that I lost connection to my business. I was not so excited about what I was selling. My marketing felt robotic, even though it was technically good, it felt It didn't feel like me. I had all these plans, but I wasn't actually implementing them. And I realized that leverage to make things easier, not disconnect you from the work that you do, especially when you're a coach, you work with people. So what are the downsides of over leveraging AI? So AI is an incredible tool 100%, and it really can help you save so much time, right? It spots patterns that you may not spot. It really helps you sort through ideas if you have to brain dump things out of your head because you're over, you're overwhelmed with too many thoughts which is, which happens to me all the time. And it helps you organize your thoughts better. But I really do find that if you use it to outsource too much of your thinking, you lose touch with your creativity, your intuition, and your authority, okay? And here's why. AI is really great at pulling ideas together, but it's not you. It cannot replicate your lived experiences, your insights, your unique perspective. It only knows what you have told it. And so it does not, it's not going to take your intuition into consideration, right? When AI does all the heavy lifting for you, you also start feeling disconnected from your own message, from the things that you're doing, right? It's help me with my messaging. Okay, great. And it. It spits some stuff out, and I'm like, wow, this is great, this is exactly what I want to say. But it didn't really come from me, and so I don't feel connected to it. I don't feel like when I say it, I'm saying my own words, right? And if you rely on AI to generate ideas, you stop thinking critically about your strategy. Okay? And I found myself collecting a ton of content ideas, but not actually executing them because they did not feel like me. And that is what I really feel was the missing piece in this launch. And so I decided, I made an executive decision to go back to doing it the hard way, so to speak. And yes, I'm using it for support, and I'm gonna share some ideas about how I'm using AI the right way. But I just wanted to say that leverage is important. I highly recommend using You know, thinking about how can I leverage anything I'm doing to get more done or to accomplish more. I highly recommend it. But I realized that I was just using it. The wrong way. I was leaning on it too much. I was leaning on it as a crutch. And so now I found that I've actually been going back to using it in the most intuitive way. And I am enjoying this so much. So now that I've learned my lesson, I want to share a few ways how I'm using AI to support my business without losing my voice, without losing what connects me. Okay, so the first thing is creating structure for intensives and trainings. My Baby Proof Business Intensive that I've offered to a few people, what I asked it to do was, I was like, can you please take my Baby Proof Business course, which I'd already mapped out and written and created, and I plug my curriculum in, and I was like, can you please turn this into an intensive that I can do with a client? organized because I've done this before in a slightly less organized way. That's where the whole concept for baby proof, your business came from. That's where a lot of my ideas came from when I actually did these intensives with moms to map out their plan for their maternity leave or mat or baby proof their business. But I already had a course curriculum that I'm in the middle of recording right now, and I'm going to be launching it officially probably closer to the summer. And so I said, here, take my curriculum and help me turn this into intensive that I can do with a client. And please help me even create a workbook that I can use with my client to go through them to make sure I'm not missing anything. And please, and then, what it did, and I did this in Claude, so I highly recommend Claude over ChatGPT. If you want to get like specific like outputs, I find that ChatGPT really helps because it has a great memory. When you have ChatGPT Pro, it has a memory, it remembers what you told it, so it knows a lot about you. If you want help with yourself, with your life, with like things in your life, I found that it is very helpful. When it comes to actually, putting out content or things for your business. I much prefer Claude. It sounds much more human. It's much more intuitive as far as educational stuff goes. I just really enjoy it. So I braindumped everything that I wanted to teach and AI helped me map it into a very clear outline step by step of exactly how to go through the intensive together. And it is all my ideas. It is just organized so much better. And then I went back and I personalized it. I brought my own real life examples, my stories, experiences, but It created this beautiful structure for me to deliver this intensive in a way that's going to make sure that I'm covering everything. I'm not missing anything. I'm not leaving anything out. Now I have an amazing document to put together to present to my clients as we go through the process and If it's something that interests you if you are having a baby this year, I have three beta spots available Actually one is already taken. So I actually have two beta spots left At a 50 percent off discount. It's actually going to be more than 50 percent off because I believe it's going to probably go up to closer to 5k by the end of the year, but it's going to be 3k in full when when I officially launch it, and and currently it is 14. 97, so if you do want to map out your maternity leave together 97. Or preparing your business for maternity leave, reach out to me on Instagram and we can chat. So that was one way that it really did help me. It took my ideas and it helped to turn it into. It's like an offer structure that is going to help get people the best results. Okay? So that was amazing. The second one I like is that it helps me write better copy using my voice notes and my content. So I realized the best way to use AI is not to let it write for me, but to let it refine my voice. So I dropped my voice notes into AI and have it. format them into polished posts. Maybe I'll drop some post frameworks that I have and then I'll drop my thoughts. And then I'll say, can you please match these things together? So instead of AI creating my content, it's enhancing what I'm already saying. It's just making it sound better. It's making it more understandable. And even that I'm still not like totally sold on. I actually prefer just going back to basics and writing like. My, my coach Taylor Lee said, write like a human, right? Talk like a human and that was what I'm going back to. I'm really going back to just sitting there and being like, what do I want to say? Let me just say it. I don't care if it doesn't sound perfect. I don't care if it's not structured perfectly. Let me just get it across with the basic, hook, information, call to action, right? That's what I can do. I can do that in my sleep. I don't need frameworks necessarily. I know how to write content. In fact, what I was thinking was back in the day when I was just, all I was doing was just writing content from my heart in Google Docs, right? Like I did the best in my business during those days when I started buying into everyone else's formats and content structures and content frameworks and then do it like this and do it like that. I lost touch with my voice and I just found that things have not I really found that I'm going, I decided I'm going back to myself, I'm going back to my basics, I'm going back to the way I speak, writing like I speak, and that really connected with people the most. That is what I found AI has really helped me with, and again, I highly recommend Claude for this over over chat GPT. The third thing it does help me with a lot is helping me with mom life and schedules. We do need leverage outside of just business, okay, CEO moms need leverage outside of just business. It's actually been amazing for meal planning, for helping me time block, organizing my week, making suggestions for how I can create a schedule for my baby that incorporates development activities and quality time, but also getting my work done. I'm actually going to drop a bunch of the prompts that I used for this. Maybe I'll do it inside of Leverage as well. But I use it to map out my days and making sure that I'm focusing on the high impact tasks for my business while still having time for my family and being super present with my baby. It also helps me focus on what actually moves the needle. So like I said before, I was spending way too much time tweaking my AI generated content instead of just writing my own. So now I use AI for the brainstorming, the refining, but all the final content is me, like I said. And this shift has made my marketing feel so much more natural and aligned and powerful. Like I've been putting out posts lately and it just feels so much better. It feels like me, okay? That is what people want. They want you, especially if you're a service provider, a coach, a coach, a consultant. They're working directly with you. They want to hear what you sound not what an AI version of you sounds like, right? So it also it helps me identify my weak spots. Sometimes AI is really great at showing me the gaps in my thinking. So I'll say what's missing from this launch strategy or what objections might my client, my audience have? And it helps me fill in the blanks. But I'm still the one making the final call. Like I was, Putting together a plan for March and I want to talk about the CEO, my mastermind this month. Again, I have six spots open until the investment goes up. It's either going to go up on April 10th or when those six spots are filled. Right now I have a couple people who are already interested in some of them. I know that I wanted to focus high core really hard core on the mastermind. So I literally asked them is there anything I'm missing here? Is there anything else I could be doing? Can you please, identify where I might be, I might fall short when trying to implement this plan. And because it knows me, it knows my psychology, it knows my personality type, because I've plugged it all in, it, it told me, okay? But I'm still the one making the final call when I'm, and putting together the strategy and writing it all out, right? Because I find if I'm just collecting marketing plans and content and whatever, It's just not coming from me, and I just don't feel connected to it. And so I'm sitting down to like actually write the content. I'm like, why did I even decide to write this? I don't even want to write about this, right? Because I didn't decide to write it. Chat told me to do it. So I stopped doing that. I'm not doing that anymore. Okay, so what I wanted to just say was that Sometimes you can leverage a little bit too hard, and so leverage is powerful. So if you take nothing else away from today's episode, remember this. Okay? Number one, AI should amplify your voice, not replace it. Number two, if you feel like you're getting disconnected from your marketing, from your from your offers, from your sales, go back to basics. Maybe you're relying too much on other people's methods. Frameworks like strategies, go back to basics. What has worked for you in the past? Go back to that. And the last thing is that leverage again is powerful, but only when it actually serves you. So inside of leverage by my upcoming live three day program, I'm going to be showing the real behind the scenes of how I'm using AI strategically to scale my business without losing my voice. And the link, if you want to sign up is in the description. Highly recommend joining is going to be such a great experience I've not run a live program like this since June when I had my baby and so I'm really excited to do this run this again So if today's episode hit home, send me a DM on Instagram Let me know what really landed for you and I will if you send me a DM on Instagram with the word leverage I'll send you the link to sign up for the free program and, of course, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss next week's episode. We are going to be doing some bonus episodes I'm really excited to share them with you. And, again, if you love this episode, take a screenshot, share it to your stories, and tag me. I love seeing what resonates. And, if you have any questions, thoughts, you want to chat about it, tag me. Let's talk about this. the whole concept of AI. Let's talk about the concept of leverage. How have you used it in your business? How does it apply to you? Let's chat. I'm really excited and I cannot wait for next week's free program. So make sure to jump in. And if you are interested in work with me to scale your business beyond one to one to multi six figures in 2025, then This is the place to do it and the CEO of my mastermind. Send me a DM with the word mastermind on Instagram and we will chat. I'll send you all the details and we can talk about if it's the right fit for you. I've been speaking a little fast cause my baby's about to wake up from his nap. So have a great rest of your day and I will see you in our next episode. I can't thank you enough for listening to Raising Your Business. I hope this episode has inspired you to take another step towards building a business and life that you love and growing your income in a way that works for you and your family. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a second to rate and review and let's connect on Instagram. Screenshot and share it on Instagram stories so we can get the word out to more mom business owners like you. Tag me at theelbendahan and share your biggest breakthrough from today. See you next week.