Erica: Hey, girl. By now, you know I have Her Collective, my online community for ambitious women who are done doing it alone. Her Collective is for the women who are smart, capable, and driven, but they find themselves stuck on the sticky floors like self doubt, burnout, and waiting for permission that quite honestly never comes. Inside HER, you get more than motivation. You get real support, real strategies, and real momentum.

Erica: We work on things like clarifying what you want now and what's coming next, building confidence without burning yourself out, navigating hard conversations, career moves, and leadership moments with clarity, and surrounding yourself with women who actually get it. This isn't about hustling harder. It's about moving intentionally with the right tools and the right people in your corner. If you're ready to stop spinning, start choosing yourself, and build a career and life that actually feels aligned, I'd love to welcome you inside Her Collective. You can learn more and join us at www.joinhercollective.com.

Erica: Because honestly, girl, you were never meant to do this alone. Welcome to the Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors podcast, the podcast where we get real about the challenges women face in work, life, and leadership. I'm your host, Erica Rooney, HR executive, keynote speaker, and executive coach, and I'm on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there. This is the space where we call out the paradoxes. Being told to lean in but not too far, to speak up but not too loudly, to be ambitious but not too ambitious.

Erica: Does that sound familiar? Yeah. We're over all that. Now here, we break down the sticky floors that keep us stuck, from imposter syndrome and perfectionism to burnout and fear, and give you real strategies to shatter those glass ceilings once and for all. So if you're ready to rewrite the rules, own your power, and take your career and life to the next level, you're in the right place.

Erica: So here's the scoop, y'all. I have been prepping for this big workshop. It's gonna be online, have like a thousand women, and it's for women's leadership today. And what I'm presenting on is called AI powered leadership, and it's all about confidence.

Erica: Because I want you to know that AI isn't just about productivity. It's also about speed. It's also about doing more, or less. But it's also about you, as a human, as a woman, being able to show up bolder, more clear, and more confident in the spaces that matter most. So if you've ever sat in a meeting and second guessed yourself, me. If you've ever stared at a blank page trying to figure out what the hell you wanna say, also me. Or maybe you just wanted to share your wins but didn't wanna sound like you were bragging, this episode, y'all, is for you.

Erica: So we're gonna start with this. Confidence is not magic. And we talk about this all the time here. Confidence is not a personality trait. It's not a gift that just someone has and you don't. It is a skill, and skills get built. You know this.

Erica: One of the biggest myths we're sold as kids, and especially as women, is that confidence is something you either have or you don't. But we know, because we're ceiling smashers, y'all, that confidence is really the result of being prepared, being clear, and knowing when you've done the work. And that's where AI comes in. Now, I don't use AI to be somebody that I'm not, and I definitely don't want you to use AI to be someone you're not. I don't use it to inflate skills or capabilities I myself haven't earned, but I do use it to sharpen what's already there, to get organized, to get clarity for my message.

Erica: I use it to rehearse the tough conversations so I can walk into any room with my head up and my shoulders back. Because if your brain is overloaded and time is short, which let's be real, y'all, that's probably every single person listening right now, guess who isn't tired? Guess who isn't overloaded? Your AI assistant. Girl, she is always ready. She stays ready. She's always eager, and she's always willing to do the work. And she will also help you get more confident than you ever realized was possible.

Erica: So let me walk you through a few real world ways I use AI, and that I want you to start using it too. The first is prepping for high stakes conversations. Y'all, how many times do we have high stakes conversations and play them over and over in our head? What if they say this? What if they say that? I wanna make sure my messaging is clear. I wanna get the right impact across. We've all been there. We've all had that huge presentation that demands perfection, honestly. And guess what happens? A lot of times we get jumbled thoughts, especially if you're an older perimenopausal woman like me. Like, you got that brain fog going on. I also call it ping pong brain. If you have ADD, you know what that is, right? It can be super hard to focus and super hard to stay the path.

Erica: But now I use chat to help me with this. Now real quick disclaimer, you can use Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, whatever agent you want. I'm going to always refer to it as chat because I use ChatGPT. I know that's the one most people are comfortable and confident with, so that's what you're gonna hear me talk about it as, chat or ChatGPT. But again, you can use it with any AI chatbot you want.

Erica: So instead of letting jumbled thoughts run wild when I'm thinking about a high stakes conversation, I don't let them derail me. I go to my chat, and I just brain dump it. Now I use the voice dictation one where you can just talk into it, and y'all, this is key, and I'll tell you why in just a minute. I brain dump everything, and then I say, hey chat, can you please help me organize this into main bullet points with a confident and professional tone. And it takes everything I had putting up in that Erica Rooney head, which is a lot, and puts it together in this clear and concise way that takes seconds. It takes seconds. Now I could have done that myself eventually. I could have done one of those little mind maps or written everything down and tried to map it out, or I could just go to AI for this. So why wouldn't we do that? It just makes more sense, right? When you walk into the boardroom, the Zoom room, any meeting, you wanna have your stuff together, and you can now do this in rapid speed with AI.

Erica: So sidebar real quick. Why do I use the voice dictation one? This is huge. And that's because, y'all, we're lazy. We are super lazy as humans. And when we type, we don't type everything out that's in our heads, because typing takes longer than talking. So we try to find shortcuts, which means we don't give that chatbot as much context as we actually have in our brains. It's kind of like riding a bike. My good friend Greg Boone says this all the time. When you teach a child to ride a bike, you give them like four or five steps. Right? Sit here. Hold the handlebars. Pedal forward. But in reality, there's so much more that goes into riding a bike. It's holding your core tight. It's the balance. It's worrying about bumps in the road. But we don't really convey that. So when you do the voice dictation, you get a lot more context out, which helps your chat learn you, learn your style, learn how you talk, but it also ensures it has all the context it needs.

Erica: So, on to the next use case for how AI can help you show up more confident, using it to rehearse. Y'all, I am dead serious when I say this. How many corporate trainings have you sat in where they're like, great, we're gonna role play now. Nobody wants to role play. Nobody likes role playing. It's cringy. It's embarrassing. You don't want anybody to see you mess up, so you just don't do it, right? I hate it. I refuse to do it with real people because it feels so embarrassing. Now listen, don't act like you don't agree with me. I know you do.

Erica: But you can role play with chat, and there's no embarrassment. No one's there to witness your mess ups or your sloppy performance. So now when you have anything high stakes, like an upcoming negotiation, a presentation, a job interview, you can go to your chat, use your voice dictation, and say, hey chat, listen, I need you to play the role of the VP, the CEO, whoever the hiring manager is, and I want you to ask me tough questions, and I want you to do this interview style about x, y, and z. You've got to tell it, hey, I'm interviewing for this role, this is my experience, ask me the questions. And then here's the key part, give me feedback when we're done. Because you're doing the voice notes, it's just a back and forth conversation you're having with chat, and it will do it. And when the interview or the practice concludes, it's gonna give you the feedback.

Erica: So what's amazing about this is, number one, you're not embarrassed doing it. And number two, you actually get real time feedback about, hey, you could be more concise there, you could expand there. Or if you gave it your resume ahead of time, it could look at your resume and say, hey, you actually forgot to talk about this really cool thing you did. But whatever you choose to talk about with your chat in these high stakes moments, you get to practice before the moment, not have the first time you do it be with the real live person. Again, more confidence, more clarity, you end up looking more put together and more professional. I love this also because you can use chat to help you think of questions you might never have anticipated. I'll often go to chat and say, hey, I'm about to meet with this person about project x, and I'm worried what they might ask, what angles am I not considering? And then I just have a dialogue back and forth with my chat because there's no risk here. But it's incredible because you get a different perspective, and you get it fast.

Erica: One pro tip here for busy working moms who are all the time in their car shuttling everybody around. I will often use this feature while I'm driving, and I just have the car conversation with my chat, because it'll give you all the notes later. You can come back to it, but it's a great way to kill two birds with one stone.

Erica: One of the other things I wanna talk to you about is building your visibility by using chat. This is a sticky topic for a lot of people because in today's world, everything feels super self promotional. It feels really spammy. It also feels so AI like. I've heard that a lot, it's too AI, right? I get it. But AI can help you talk about your achievements without feeling spammy. Now I personally hate going on LinkedIn or any other platform to talk about all the things I'm doing. I recently won an award for a book. The old me would have been like, no, I'm not gonna talk about it, I'm just gonna tuck that little achievement in my belt and move on. But guess what, y'all, closed mouths don't get fed. And credibility is king these days, so you have to post about these things.

Erica: So you know what I did? I went to AI and said, hey, I need you to help me write a LinkedIn post that shares this win in a humble but empowering tone. I want you to use my voice, not anything cheesy or salesy. Or you could say, hey chat, I need you to help me create a story style elevator pitch that shows how I overcame this challenge, and then you tell a little bit about the challenge, and I turned it into a win. When you do it this way, it's great, because you don't feel like you're bragging. You feel like you're just telling a story and teaching people. You are owning it with impact. And that, my friend, is what visibility should look like. It's visibility that doesn't make you cringe inside.

Erica: I mentioned a second ago how tired so many people are of sounding too much like AI. To be real honest, I don't care if a post sounds like AI, but I know a lot of people do. It sounds too robotic, too predictable. Everyone says, I can tell which post is written by AI or not. And yes, that's true, until you teach AI to sound and write and talk and act like you. One quick and easy way is by uploading examples of things you've written, like emails, LinkedIn posts, text messages, maybe a white paper, or heck, even a book, but it has to be yours. Then you give that to chat, upload the documents, and ask chat to analyze your tone, analyze your sentence structure and your voice, and match it in all future outputs. And y'all, that's the game changer. If you give it more boundaries, like I use emojis, or I don't use emojis, or I use emojis sparingly, that will be better. The more specific you get, the better it will be at sounding like you.

Erica: So what I just told you is a very generic prompt to help get chat to sound like you. But you can go super deep, uploading many documents, asking it to analyze your tone, asking it to give you 20 questions so it can better understand you. But either way, once you start working with chat more and more, you'll notice the outputs feel more like you wrote them. And honestly, it's because you kind of did.

Erica: So if you aren't techie, or you're a little AI anxious, that's okay. I will help you get started, and it's actually going to be easier than you think. Start with ChatGPT. I will tell you, I want you to use the Pro version, it's $20 a month. If you can afford that, please do. It is a game changer. It's got extra features that aren't in the free version that make it so worth it in the long run. But if chat isn't your thing, pick any AI chatbot. Choose Gemini. Choose what your work is using. I don't care. But start with something personal and low stakes, like rewriting your bio on LinkedIn or making a short email sound more professional. Ask it to do something, and start using it just ten minutes a week. That's it. But I want you to start keeping a running list of prompts that work for you, because that, my friend, is how you build confidence with both AI and within your own person, without burning out. You don't have to be the person mastering AI, but you do have to be that person partnering with it, and you do need to be using it.

Erica: So all right, I could talk about AI for days, but y'all, we are going to land this plane. Here's what I want you to take away from this episode. The first is that confidence is built every single day through your actions, and it's up to you to take action, and I want you to start taking action with AI. The second thing is that visibility is a strategy. It's not a vanity metric, and AI will help you find a way to be more visible, to advance your career, and to get your name out there in big ways that don't make you cringe. And finally, and this is the biggest one, ladies, you deserve to use every resource at your fingertips so you can lead with clarity and courage. AI is a resource, and men are using it as a resource, so let's make sure we are too.

Erica: And if you're ready to step into more impact, more presence, and more leadership, Her Collective is my digital community that helps women climb the corporate ladder, expand their networks, and do it all without burning out. And we want you in there. Inside Her Collective, you get real time support when things hit the fan and a group of women who actually get it.

Erica: Now, if today's conversation lit a fire under you, here's your next move. Don't keep it to yourself. Share this episode with a friend, drop a review, and let's keep the conversation going. Remember, your potential is limitless. And the only thing standing in your way are those sticky floors. But you know what? You have the power to break through them. So go out there, take up space, and let's shatter some ceilings together.