I wrote and recorded these episodes about 12 months ago.
Chat GPT was a frothy topic! And I used AI to help me write these episodes. Twelve months down the line, and I feel disconnected from them. I listen, and I feel disappointed to hear my own creative expression being monocropped to the AI tone.
While I feel ashamed to have used AI in the first place, I also celebrate the experimentation phase, and the end result I’ve landed at now: that AI, is truly lame. The promise of AI was efficiency, and I love me a good system, especially with studying full-time, so the shiny promise of optimisation was seductive!
However, using it took away from my felt sense of power in the truth that I already know. Having AI adapt my draft scripts for me to then read on a podcast took the enjoyment away. But more importantly, it took away my intuitive confidence, leaving me to lean on another tool to appear to be someone other than I am.
It’s not confidence. It’s trying to appear confident.
Alas, it’s 2026 that is not the energy I’m in anymore, no sir.
Bless that year-younger version of me, who needed the boost to come back to this space, heart in hands, and offer it up to the feral world of the internet. Of course she needed a bolster.
I reflect on these recent episodes with a sense of ick, compassion and most importantly, excited to be more connected to my erotic current of creativity, expression and truth.
I want to feel connected to my work, I want to be in the art of it, the pulse, the impulse, the messy mid-process unpolished truth of it all. I want my spelling mistakes back.
I have four more AI-assisted episodes in the bank. I will be publishing them (this is one of them) because it’s assignment time at uni, and a gal has things to do.
All of this to say;
Yes, the AI usage was then.
No, I don’t use it now.
The content is still great, don’t be deterred. It’s just not formed in the living, breathing current that I usually create from.
This is all relevant to the episode because I reflect on what has been blocking my own confidence to podcast again, from my own intuitive pulse.
In the episode I go into all the ways we fear being too much and how that subdudes authenticity, connection and confidence.
As I’m at uni, trying to do this whole academic thing, I reflect on the artist within me. The witch, the irrational, the deeply wise and intuitive, not just “part” of me, but the whole infrastructure of who I am, is built upon a foundation of mythical, celestial, spiritual, unmeasurable, and nonsensical explorations of my lifetime. The fangs of shakti gouging, the spinal serpent snake tigthening, this is me.
And gosh, I live in a world that tells me to get a job, grow up and get on with it.
Somehow over these last few years, I lost my confidence to comformity. I thought I needed AI to help me sound more researched, more professional, more academic, more… something. I completely disregarded the years of existing knowledge, experience, and embodied wisdom garnered from coaching, facilitating, speaking, writing, loving, not loving, defending, mistake-making, healing, successfully finding peace and love in my relationships, and ferociously jumping off cliffs in my psyche to reach what’s hidden so I can light it up for myself, and for others.
I’m good at that. I’m frothy for that.
It’s funny that I’m even studying, since I don’t need more training or certifications to work deeply and meaningfully with people. It’s not that I don’t feel confident holding clients and facilitating groups; I’m (authentically confident) expanded in that way. The confidence I lack is due to my fear of being too:
Spiritual
Unconventional
Different (god I long to be normal)
Woo-woo
Irrational
Impulsive
Artistic
Feeling
Wise
Feminine
… Magical.
Therefore, if I finally get an MA in the PSY sciences, then and only then can I be confident in being all of the above, because I’ll be validated by “credentials”.
LOL.
I’m sure, in time, now knowing this, I’ll find more loving acceptance for all of me, and perhaps less need to try and prove its enoughness to a particular pocket in a world that doesn’t see me.
So I hold all my parts tenderly as I send this out, heart in hands, to the feral void of the internet. My hope is that my shining a light on what’s hidden in me, helps to shine a light on what’s hidden in you.
And my hope is that you can take this into the episode and garner from the personable, not AI-generated, real-time process of finding confidence, and the ongoing process of being yourself.
As always, take what resonates. Leave the rest.
»»»»» Listen on Spotify
»»»»» Listen on Apple Podcasts
With love,
Laura Ellen
