In this episode, Gary welcomes Dr. Lyman Montgomery, the founder of Coach Lyman, who shares his expertise in using AI while maintaining a personal touch. Dr. Montgomery talks about his journey and his role as a clarity and cultural strategist who helps businesses and entrepreneurs stay focused and build healthy cultures. He introduces his Five S System and discusses how AI tools can revolutionize business operations. Dr. Montgomery also emphasizes the importance of setting boundaries with AI, ensuring it serves as a partner rather than a replacement for human interaction, particularly in sensitive situations.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome

00:18 Dr. Lyman Montgomery's Background

02:27 AI in Business: Challenges and Opportunities

05:01 Effective Use of AI Tools

14:13 The Five S Framework

21:18 Ethical Considerations and Limitations of AI

27:30 Recommended AI Tools

29:06 Final Thoughts and Contact Information

CoachLyman.com

[00:00:15] Dr. Lyman Montgomery: Hey, thank you for having me. A pleasure to be here.

[00:00:31] Dr. Lyman Montgomery: Sure. Dr. Lyman Montgomery, originally from Dayton, Ohio, now reside, residing in Akron, Ohio. So it's a little chilly up here in northeastern Ohio. I'm considered what you call a clarity and cultural strategist, where I pretty much help leaders and organizations build healthy cultures and also to lead with focus and confidence.

And what that simply means is I'm the person that when businesses or even entrepreneurs feel distracted, they're pulled in many different ways, especially with the advent of AI, I get called in and say, hey, you know, we're struggling with this. We're not sure what tools to use, if, if this still fits within our mission, our purpose, our guiding principles, and it's my job is to help them make sense.

And I have a tool that I call the Five S Framework. That, I've trained over 50,000 over the last 10 years to use this tool. It's simple and it fits nicely within various, what I call partners. Some people call them tools, I call them partners and to help people think of AI as partners. And so that's a little bit about me.

Married, two grown sons and enjoy what I do, enjoy helping people.

Because I know I've, I have a love hate relationship with them, and it's usually every other day. Yesterday was not a good day for me and AI.

We were not having a good time.

[00:02:26] Gary Ruplinger: Gotcha. So I know kind of the, the big thing we're, we're kind of looking at today is using AI without losing the human touch. And I see so many posts, you know, whether on social media and, you know, even news articles, you know, saying, you know, people getting caught trying to use AI for,you know, but masquerading as a human versus just being honest and like, this is gonna be AI stuff. So I, I'd love to kind of get your, your take on where do you even draw the line with that? How do you use it and yeah, how do you keep you you, and still get the benefit of, of these tools?

They run from it. They think it's bad on the economy, use too much water. They see it as, you know, this is a prelude to AI machine. Sort of like, remember, what was that movie? Arnold Schwarzenegger? Where the machines was taking over, like the Matrix

[00:03:49] Dr. Lyman Montgomery: Yeah, Terminator. They kinda see it as that, you know, fight, you know, they're part of the resistance.

They're gonna resist. The other side of that coin are those that think that AI will solve all their problems. That they don't have to think about anything. They don't have to do anything that basically can take a laissez-faire, very passive approach to AI and where I come in and say, no. If you think of AI as a tool and as a partner to help you get certain things done, there are some things AI is absolutely great at doing.

There's other things that still require a human being to be at the forefront, to think of AI more as an assistant rather than a manager or a leader within your organization.

[00:05:01] Dr. Lyman Montgomery: Where I'm seeing AI bea great fit is in the, what I call the embryonic stage of any new product, launch, any new development. Especially probably the biggest and most popular AI tool out there is ChatGPT. And what most people don't realize, most people are still typing in prompts or trying to figure it out.

If you turn it on to little microphone, you can actually speak to it as a human being. There's also a function that allows you, it doesn't save the recordings, but it allows you to sort of, speak to AI or ChatGPT. And I actually named mine, his name is Gerald. And it's kind of cool because if I have a, a pitch and I will put in a prompt where I'll say, hey, Gerald, I'm thinking about launching a new program. This is what it, this is what I'm thinking about. Look at it and tell me where you see gaps. And we have a conversation about it. Then I say, let's role play as if I'm pitching and I want you to grade my pitch on a scale of one to five. One being go back to the drawing board, it's horrible. With five being this is the best thing since sliced bread.

And what it does, it actually allows you to get into the mode of hearing your pitch, but also getting feedback before you take it to someone. Because I found out with a lot of entrepreneurs, they talk themselves out of launching. Because they say, you know what? It's probably stupid. It's dumb. AI doesn't care.

And so you don't have that embarrassing moment where you say, well, what if I forget something? And so again, using AI as a coach in that sense of I want to launch something is great, and I do it all the time. You know, if I'm going do a speech, I say, you know what? I'm struggling in this area. What would you suggest as far as a better close?

And the key when it comes to AI prompting is if, if you would just put this one line in. Give me a no bs, no sugarcoat response because the problem with a lot of people when it comes to using AI is you get this sort of vanilla response. It's not really good or bad, sort of like, you know, that's a great idea.

No, some ideas aren't that great. But if you and I would ask AI, I say, hey, store this in your memory, so whenever you give me a response, you're going to give me a no bs, not, no sugar coating. You're gonna give me what's great and where improvements could be made. And don't sugarcoat, don't worry about my feelings.

And boy, let me tell you. AI, Gerald comes back sometimes and say, hey, Lyman, that really wasn't good. I'm like, man, you don't have to be so harsh. But again, you're training AI to respond to you, to learn your voice, your mannerisms, and again, that's where I see the biggest benefit of using AI is as an assistant to the pre-launch and also the research as well.

If you're looking at, it's great as summarizing. Like let's say you have a, a report that's 50, 60 pages and you're short on time, you only have five minutes. Well, you can upload that report and say, hey, give me a deep dive summary of what it's about and highlight the top three goals of this document and how I can use this to do X, Y, Z.

And within a matter of 30 seconds, it will read through it, it will pull out the key components of that document, and it also will tell you how you can use that document for whatever you're looking for. And so that's what I've seen AI as a great tool to save time, to as a pre-launch to an idea. And I think that's where you get your bang for your, your bang for the money is if you use it in that way.

I'm gonna sell pineapples to fish in the Atlantic Ocean. Because it's an untapped market, nobody's there. And, they managed to get AI to get on board with that.

Running through, it's like, you know, it, it, so yeah. If you don't put those guardrails in place

And but you had to put those guard rails up there. And one of the things that I encourage my clients to do is start with three core questions when it comes to AI. The first question is, how do you intend to use this as a partner? And again, it's changing from a tool that's just sitting in a a box somewhere.

But if this was a partner, how would you want to use this? Would you want this just to be a sounding board? Are you looking for this partner to actually go out and do something? And then the third question or the second question of that is, what is the responsibility that you have and what's the responsibility that your AI partner has?

Because that's very important to understand. Not just what you want to use it for, but what are your roles? What are you gonna be responsible for and what are you going to ask or instruct your AI partner to be responsible for? Like in my business, AI is used as a sounding board. AI is used as my chief research officer.

AI is also used as my note taker, you know, so. And it's great for doing that. It's very good at doing that. You know, it takes a little time for it to learn your, you know, diction and how you pronounce certain things. But after a while, after about, I would say a week or two, it gets pretty good. Especially with learning your mannerisms and, and that's if you're using it every day.

I use AI every day in some aspect. And then the third question, and probably the most profound question is what is the end result? What are you trying to accomplish with AI? And that's where people get caught and say, well, I don't know, everybody's using it. But there has to be an end result. Is it to get to market with a new product, a new service?

Are you, are you looking for AI to solve a problem? AI is not good at solving problems, but it can kind of help you work through a problem to get to a result. And I think if you're clear on those three questions early on, I think you'll do good. And you will see the benefits of AI as opposed to just another gimmicky type of gadget that keeps coming on the market. Because you can go down a rabbit hole quickly and it can get expensive. You know, you got $10 here for something, $20 there, before you know it. I have a friend of mine, he's paying right now, $120 to $200, just on AI, different gadgets. And I said, Al, how many of these are you using?

He said, man, probably three of them. But you know, you never know. And I said, you know what, listen. And I kinda shared with him what the five that I use, I only use five to be honest with you. I'm gonna share with you on the, on the call today, but I only use five and they have revolutionized my business, my clients' business. Because simplicity is where you want to be at when it comes to AI.

[00:14:17] Dr. Lyman Montgomery: Yes, yes.

[00:14:21] Dr. Lyman Montgomery: Absolutely. And so the Five S System stands for structure, how your information and knowledge is being organized. ChatGPT is the foundation of how I organize everything. But see, I couple ChatGPT with another AI program called Notion. So Notion is sort of like the hub where I keep everything. It is the foundation, ChatGPT and Notion. Those two working together provide the structure of everything that we do. So when I go into an organization, the first thing I wanna look at, how are you organized? Not just from a legal standpoint, if you are a S corp, an LLC, a partnership or a full corporation, but have you structured your day entrepreneur? Have you structured your life?

Do you have a life that's conducive? If you say, you know, time freedom is important to you, or health freedom. Well your life and your business should support that. So if a person tells me that health freedom is important, but they're telling me they work 18, 20 hours a day. Well something is out of, out of alignment.

We need to get you back into alignment. The second part is systems. Systems are the repeatable steps that keeps things moving. And so you can have a great structure, but that structure also have to have systems that operate seamlessly and integrate without having these glitches, without having these bottlenecks.

And so, I use, for example, a AI tool called Gamma.ap, and I use that for my PowerPoints. It can create a PowerPoint, it can create any type of document in less than 30 seconds, once you understand how to prompt. And so that's where I build a lot of my systems, whether it be my PowerPoints, whether it be newsletters or anything that I'm trying to get out to the public and I may not have a lot of time to do it. And so I play around with, with Gamma. Also I couple that with some video tools, like I use Invideo, as an example, when I want to create some short, funny type videos. I also use VOS is another video creation tool. A lot of people now are using Sora, SAR, I think it's SARA, which is another great one that you can create photo photorealistic images as well as videos.

Then we move to strategies. Strategies are the choices you make about the direction. You want to go? How do you want to get there? How would you get there? Strategies is a vehicle. So you can have a great system, but if you don't have a way of getting those systems or getting your message out to the world, then you just have a self-contained organization. And we've all seen this where you could have a restaurant that served great sandwiches, but because they didn't have a strategy to get the word out, they went out of business and say, man, whatever happened to, you know, so and so restaurant? Oh man, they went out of business. What? They had the best sandwiches in the world.

Yeah, but they didn't have a good strategy, a marketing strategy or a promotion strategy to let people know or let the world know that they had the best sandwiches this side of Ohio, wherever you may be. The the, the next system, number four is simplicity. How easy is it for people to use your system? The more complex a system is, the user, the, the likelihood of people using that goes down by 50% to 75%. The more simplified that you can make it through automation, the more likely people are to use it. That's why I tell my clients never have any system that's more than five steps, because once you get, definitely no more than 10. The reason I say that is the more you spread out, like people say 21, I got 72 principles.

Okay, who's gonna remember 72? Most people can remember in, in stages of three or five. It's amazing how the brain works. That's why, look at phone numbers, there's a dash because they realize it's easy for people to remember. If you look at, in, in video, they have what they call lower thirds. A lot of things that we do, we divide time up a lot of time into thirds, morning midday and evening, right?

That's just the way the brain operates, and keep things simple. And then the last S is sustainability. Whether you can keep doing things without burning out. There's a saying in human resources, most people don't burn out, they burn up Because we keep adding more and more things to them. And it's like the old adage, you know, you're burning both ends and now you're starting to burn the middle. At some point, something is going to give. So again, we look at structure, we look at systems, we look at strategy, simplicity, and then the test of all that is sustainability. And within those five, the Five S Framework, is where I put a lot of the AI tools I mentioned before. When it comes to the structure, I use no Notion as my home base. That's where I keep policy, frameworks, notes, scripts, video content. And then ChatGPT, as I mentioned, is sort of like my researcher. It's my when I want to bounce ideas off of, I start with ChatGPT, and you know, want to get, kinda work out some of the wrinkles. And then I go to a live firm and say, hey, I've been thinking about this and it's been tossing over in my head, what's your thoughts? And because I've already pitched it several times to ChatGPT and sort of role playing, that now the human touch come in and say, wow, that's a great point. Have you thought about this? And then I take it back and we'll role play it again. And after about the third iteration, I have something solid that I can take to market.

[00:21:37] Dr. Lyman Montgomery: Yeah. There are three things that, number one, when it comes to decisions as far as hiring, having to discipline someone or terminate someone, AI cannot do that. That has to be a human approach to that. When it comes to sensitive issues, as been a life coach, sometimes people share with you some very heart wrenching stories that have affected their life. Traumatic experiences that they've gone through. Those things, because no tool or artificial intelligence can empathize with the human heart. Sorry. I don't care how great you think your tool is. It cannot sympathize nor empathize with the tragedies that people go through in life, and provide them. And people can tell when it's a AI response or it sounds robotic. People want to see authenticity. They want to see, no, this is someone who leaned in and they're sharing from their heart, from their lived experience, and they can relate to me. And so the other area that I caution folks not to use AI, is when it comes to how you organize your life. That's something that you need to take the time. Now, AI is great as far as giving you some ideas. But when it really comes to what do you want your life mission to be, your life plan to be, you have to sit down with your own thoughts, your feelings.

Because AI doesn't know that. And you don't want a robot, that's essentially what is, a robot, dictating your life. I remember when ChatGPT came out early on and I was trying to think of a poem for my wife. I said, oh, you know what? I don't got time to think about it. I'm gonna hit ChatGPT. So, so ChatGPT spit out the, I thought it was great.

My wife said, the computer wrote this, or you? I said, well, it was my idea. She's like, it didn't sound like you, it didn't have your DNA on it. And I, and then I never made that mistake again. I'm like, oh, wow, okay. I won't make that mistake, because she was looking for the emotion, not just the words, if that makes sense.

It was my fault. And you know, they immediately, you know, it's got the little chat bot thing, it's like, hey, I'm an AI assistant. And it's like, you know, I can help you but if you need to talk to a human, just say you gotta talk to a human. It couldn't solve the problem because I screwed up more than it could fix. But it got me to a human and then I could talk to a real person. No problem, we, we got it taken care of. And I was like, don't mind this. Because having that system in place to handle the routine, basic stuff makes sense to me.

But I knew it was an AI. It wasn't pretending, it wasn't trying to do thought leadership and tell me all this stuff

[00:25:10] Gary Ruplinger: with somebody's name.

Like I know one of the big things that's been a, a, real controversial thing is that AI actress, I think Tilly Norwood. Happened to catch an article on that this morning that people are still angry about it. Because now it looks, now we're looking at, she's a human, but she's not a human.

[00:25:32] Gary Ruplinger: And it's, you know, people are okay with AI.

You know, if she was a cartoon or a character or, or something, people would be fine with her, but they want her to look just like a human.

I think that's what I'm seeing, you know? I was like, yeah, I'm not as comfortable with that. Because now I don't know.

And unless you look at it closely, you know, sort of the telltale signs. A lot of people just say, well, I heard so and so say this, and it's like, no, that was AI generated. And so those are, again, things that I think when it comes to, if you're going to present yourself, you need to make the distinction if it's actually you, authentically you or if it's AI generated. Because you don't want people to be misled.

You don't want to be perceived as, wow, that was kind of dirty or underminded. And so I believe in full transparency of saying, you know what? This is lyman 2.0, his AI clone, or what have you. And so people kinda relax like, oh, okay, yeah. And some things people really don't care. You know, if they, if they wanna know an answer like your FAQ, they really don't care, they just looking for an answer. And so I kind of talked about the Five S Framework, but I know I went kind of fast. And so real quick, these are the, the five tools that I use. Number one, I said I combined ChatGPT with Notion AI. When it comes to putting together any type of documents, whether it's a PowerPoint or, or something that, again, I don't have a lot of time to think about it I use Gamma. When it comes to content creation, like I take my long form videos and I love this tool, probably my favorite tool, is Opus Clips. Because it will actually take a long form, let's say YouTube video, you put the link in and it will slice the key areas, and then it gives you a rating. A virlity rating of how likely this clip is to gain traction out there.

And I couple that again with Invideo and 11 Labs, that's where I do a lot of voice cloning. And what ties all this together because the problem with a lot of AI tools, they don't all integrate well. So you have to have a connector and that's where I use a tool like Zapier to kind of connect some of these that may not integrate well together.

And that's it. ChatGPT, Notion AI, Gamma, Opus Clip. And again, I combine Opus Clip with Invideo and 11 Labs and that's it. And then Zapier to kind of connect everything, and that's it.

[00:29:15] Dr. Lyman Montgomery: Sure. And so if someone's out there and they're like, you know, I'm really struggling, you know, I, I, I'm, I'm kind of new to this AI stuff. They can just reach out to me real easy, CoachLyman.com. And I have a lot of free stuff on our website. And you can reach out to me on social media. I'm easy to find, just Google me. Dr. Lyman Montgomery, L-Y-M-A-N, Montgomery, M-O-N-T-G-O-M-E-R-Y. But if you go to CoachLyman.com, that's the easiest place to find me. And I have a lot of, you know, free stuff out there, some nice videos. And again, some people ask me, they say, well, do you consider yourself to be an AI expert? No, I am just an end user. I am someone who is passionate about AI, but I also understand that AI must have guardrails. Just like any, any tool. I choose to call them partners. That's just the way my mind clicks. Because if I think of it as a tool, I may not use it. Instance, I got five partners and so, and, and, and so far, you know, they're, they, they hold up their end of the deal.

[00:30:43] Dr. Lyman Montgomery: The only thing that I would say is this, don't be afraid of AI. I understand that there's a lot of trepidation out there, a lot of fear. But I think if you just take one, one small step back and say, you know what, how can I use this to enhance my life, not take over my life? And just start there. If, like with ChatGPT, if you just say, you know what?

Recipes, you know what? I wanna learn how to make chicken soup, just start there. And because the more you use it, the easier it becomes. Then after while you say, I don't know what I was afraid of this. And again, it doesn't solve all your problems. It is an assistant. It is a tool. And just start slow and don't be in a rush.

Because trust me, what you, once you learn it, and this is what I tell people, don't spend a lot of time trying to become an expert on this because trust me, in 30 or 40 days it will change. I think right now we're on what, 5.1 of ChatGPT or something like that?

By the time you're listening to this, we'll probably be, you know, some new Claude or Grok or whatever, you know, so. Well, that's good stuff Lyman. Appreciate you coming on today, CoachLyman.com if you're looking for some more help with some of this stuff.

Thanks so much for coming on the show today.