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Today, we're diving into the intriguing world of AI as a personal diagnostic tool, exploring how it can unearth our psychological blind spots. Imagine building a custom AI environment that not only streamlines your business but also shines a light on those hidden fears and biases you’ve kept tucked away.

We chat about an eye-opening article by Heather Masters, where she reveals how she used AI not just for mundane tasks but as a mirror reflecting her own mental patterns. It’s a wild ride, as we uncover how this technology can transition from being a mere productivity tool to a partner in personal transformation.

So, grab a cuppa, kick back, and let’s unpack the fascinating relationship between AI and our own self-awareness!

In today's chat, we dove deep into the intriguing transformation of AI from a mere tool to a mirror reflecting our own psychological landscapes.

Picture this: you're creating a custom AI environment, designed to sort out all the pesky bottlenecks in your business. But then the AI starts holding up a mirror, revealing those uncomfortable truths and blind spots we've been dodging for ages. It’s like that moment when you think you’re the star of your own show, but the AI comes in and says, 'Hey, have you noticed that your sales strategy is as invisible as a ghost at a costume party?'

We explored how advanced AI can go beyond just crunching numbers or drafting emails; it can actually help us diagnose our own behaviours and thought patterns, making us question the very essence of how we operate in the business world.

The episode featured an insightful article by Heather Masters that sparked our discussion. She crafted a mentoring LLM (that’s Language Learning Model, for the uninitiated) that not only understands human behavioural patterns but also challenges them.

Instead of simply answering questions, this AI collaborates, pushing back when it senses your logic might be spiraling down the rabbit hole. Imagine working with an AI that doesn’t just execute what you say but engages in a back-and-forth that sharpens your thinking, much like a seasoned business partner would.

This is a monumental shift in how we perceive AI – from a passive tool to an active collaborator in our cognitive journey. But here's the kicker: while AI can point out the holes in our logic and help us see what we’re missing, it’s ultimately up to us to do the emotional heavy lifting needed to bring those insights to life.

The AI can't magically fix our issues; it can only highlight them with terrifying clarity. The episode reminds us that, as we step further into this AI-driven future, we need to be prepared for the unfiltered reflections it offers.

If we can embrace that vulnerability, we might just harness AI to not only boost our productivity but also to transform our understanding of ourselves and our work.

Chapters:

• 00:02 - Building a Custom AI Environment
• 03:21 - The Evolution of AI: From Tool to Partner
• 06:35 - Understanding Deletions in NLP
• 09:22 - Understanding Deletions in Consciousness
• 12:49 - Understanding the Resistance to Selling in Service Industries
• 17:03 - The Mirror, Not the Medicine

Takeaways:

• In the podcast, we explore how AI can serve as a psychological mirror, revealing our hidden blind spots and helping us understand our deeper motivations.
• The transition of AI from a simple tool to a co-creator hinges on how we instruct it, allowing it to help diagnose our behavioral patterns more effectively.
• By employing AI for diagnostics, we can uncover missing elements in our business strategies that might be causing us to spin our wheels without seeing results.
• The idea of 'deletions' in our thinking—where we unconsciously ignore crucial elements—can be highlighted by an AI model, leading to breakthroughs in personal and professional growth.
• Our relationship with AI is not about it fixing us, but rather about it providing a clear reflection of our own cognitive patterns and blind spots.
• The podcast emphasises that the real transformation happens when we confront our internal conflicts rather than solely focusing on strategic fixes in our business.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• CLAUDE
• StartWithI
• Heather Masters

Welcome to today's Deep Dive.

Imagine you're building this custom AI environment, right?

And it's specifically designed to fix business bottlenecks for your clients.

Like a highly specialized diagnostic tool.

Exactly.

But then, you know, the machine turns around, looks at your own workflows, and just completely exposes a psychological blind spot you've been hiding from yourself for years.

Which is, frankly, a terrifying thought.

It really is.

Yeah.

It's titled Start with AI and it's sourced from StartWithI online.

Yeah, and the mission today is to explore that exact phenomenon.

Like what actually happens when advanced AI evolves from just, you know, a utility that executes tasks into this deeply personal psychological mirror.

A mirror that uncovers our deepest mental blind spots.

Okay, let's unpack this.

Because usually, I mean, we know large language models are great at organizing data or drafting code or synthesizing complex research.

Right?

The typical digital assistant stuff.

Yeah, but the author here isn't using AI as a digital assistant at all.

She's using it to perform high level systemic psychological diagnostics on her own behavioral patterns.

So, I mean, how does a language model actually transition from a simple productivity tool into a deeply insightful diagnostic mirror?

Well, the transition fundamentally depends on how the model is constrained and, you know, instructed.

The author didn't just open a standard browser window and start asking an AI generic questions about business strategy.

Right, like how do I get more clients?

Type of prompts.

Exactly.

Instead, she utilized CLAUDE projects, which allows a user to create a localized, bounded environment.

Okay.

Inside this project, she built what she calls a mentoring LLM.

She literally uploaded custom knowledge bases.

Specifically her own extensive expertise in human behavioral patterns.

Oh, yeah.

Neuro linguistic programming.

The mechanics of personal transformation.

By doing this, she wasn't asking the AI to search the Internet for generic business advice.

She was giving it her own brain.

Pretty much.

She was programming her specific diagnostic frameworks into the system's foundational instructions.

She established her own professional methodologies as the literal physics of that digital space.

Okay, so the stated goal was to create a tool for other practitioners.

Right?

Something they could help them find what she describes as the genius already operating in them.

Which implies that high performers often have an unconscious pattern beneath their success.

Right, and the AI could trace that pattern.

But to calibrate this system, she had to use herself as the baseline test subject.

Naturally.

So she expects to log in, give the system a set of parameters, and just have it spit out a formatted diagnostic framework.

Based on her notes, a standard predictable output.

Right.

But instead, the system began co creating with her.

She notes that the AI actually held the shape of what they were building.

It tracked the endgame.

Yes.

It monitored her focus when she drifted into tangential ideas.

And it would generate a draft of a concept only to immediately explicitly challenge the logic of that very same draft.

It wasn't executing instructions at all.

It was thinking alongside her.

Yeah, what's fascinating here is the profound distinction between a AI as a retrieval mechanism and AI as a modeling partner.

Okay, break that down for me.

What's the difference?

So a standard interaction with an LLM is purely transactional, right?

You input a prompt, it retrieves or generates a response based on statistical probability, and the transaction ends.

Boom.

Done.

Right.

A modeling partner, however, utilizes those custom system instructions to hold the entire architecture of a goal in its context window simultaneously.

Ah, I.

Because she trained it on the principles of neuro linguistic programming, which, you know, is heavily focused on how language structure reflects underlying cognitive models.

The AI was analyzing, not just what.

She was asking, it was looking at.

How she was asking exactly the structural integrity of the request.

It understood the underlying logic of the transformation she was trying to achieve.

So when she deviated from that logic, the system's guardrails pushed back, maintaining the integrity of the project over the immediate request.

It's the difference between hiring a junior intern who just diligently executes your exact commands.

You know, even when those commands make zero sense for the quarterly goals.

Yeah, just blindly following orders versus bringing.

On an equal seasoned business partner.

A seasoned partner looks at your proposal, compares it to the company's core mission and says, hey, this new marketing idea is clever, but it completely abandons our central thesis.

The let's redirect.

That's a spot on analogy.

But wait, I have to push back on the mechanics of this.

I mean, how can an algorithm, which is fundamentally just predictive text and code, hold the shape of human transformation better than the human expert who literally programmed it?

It's a very fair question.

Right?

The author is the seasoned expert in nlp.

She knows these frameworks inside and out better than the machine.

How does the algorithm out expert its creator?

Well, the algorithm doesn't possess deeper wisdom or lived experience, but it possesses complete immunity to cognitive fatigue.

Oh, interesting.

And emotional bias.

Human cognition is incredibly expensive from an energy standpoint.

The human brain is constantly filtering out data, getting distracted, avoiding uncomfortable realities.

We're just simply losing the thread of a really complex multi step logical sequence.

Exactly.

When the author programmed the AI with her own rules of transformation.

The AI adopted those rules perfectly and applied them objectively.

It doesn't get tired.

It doesn't flinch away from an uncomfortable realization.

It just runs the math.

Yes.

The machine simply applies the human's own brilliant framework back to the human step by step, without any of the emotional blind spots that cause us to abandon our own logic halfway through a thought process.

So she literally digitized her own most objective analytical state and then engaged in a dialogue with it.

Which is just wild to think about.

It is.

And because this custom mentoring LLM proved so adept at maintaining the integrity of her frameworks, she decided to fully run her own business strategies through it.

As a diagnostic test.

Right.

She was trying to figure out why she felt stuck in certain areas of her career.

Exactly.

And what the AI uncovered was not a missing marketing tactic or like a poorly designed product.

It identified a literal psychological void.

The tool pointed out a deletion.

Yes.

Which is a major framework in neuro linguistic programming.

Yeah.

Can you explain what a deletion actually is in this context?

Sure.

So, in nlp, a deletion is one of the three main ways the human mind filters reality alongside distortion and generalization.

A deletion occurs when your brain completely removes a piece of information from your conscious model of the world because that information causes too much internal conflict or it just overwhelms the system.

So it's like a repressed memory?

No, that's the key distinction here.

It is not a repressed memory.

It is not a secret you are actively hiding from yourself.

The information is entirely and literally removed from your perception.

Wow.

You cannot act on it because in your localized version of reality, the concept flat out does not exist.

And the author points out that when a deletion is finally brought to your attention, it rarely feels like this mystical lightning bolt epiphany.

Who does it feel then?

It feels like someone is pointing out a foundational fact of gravity that was painfully obvious to everyone else in the room but you.

Okay, here's where it gets really interesting.

Think about a deletion like this for a second.

Imagine your brain is operating like an incredibly strict nightclub bouncer, and the nightclub is your conscious awareness.

I like where this is going.

Right.

And this bouncer has a highly specific blacklist of concepts that are absolutely forbidden from entering the club.

But a good bouncer doesn't just wait for the concept to reach the door and cause a huge chaotic scene, but.

They handle it down the block.

Exactly.

This bouncer goes down the street and completely bans the concept from even getting into the neighborhood.

So you, standing safely inside the club, have absolutely no idea that this concept even exists in the city, Let alone.

That it might be useful to your business?

Exactly.

You don't know what's missing from the party.

That's a perfect way to look at it.

And the AI is uniquely positioned to catch this exact phenomenon.

Because humans are notoriously bad at noticing absences.

We notice what's there, not what isn't.

Right.

We notice what is present in a conversation, not what is systematically avoided.

But an LLM operating as a modeling partner functions a bit like a grammar checker, but instead of checking for dangling modifiers, it checks for dangling logic.

Oh, I love that dangling logic.

If the AI understands that a complete business cycle requires step A, step B and step c to function, and it scans your uploaded journals, plans, and conversational.

Inputs, it doesn't judge you for missing step C. Exactly.

It simply flags the mathematical absence of the necessary variable.

It maps the edges of the void by tracking the logical inconsistencies and everything else you are doing to compensate for that missing piece.

So what exactly was the concept?

What was the essential business variable that Heather's brain had completely deleted from her reality?

Because the answer to this unlocked a multi year struggle for her.

It really did.

The deletion was sales.

Sales.

Just a fundamental act of selling.

Yeah, and she hadn't just developed like a mild discomfort with asking for money.

Her unconscious mind had actively categorized the act of selling alongside behaviors she genuinely found morally contemptible.

Yeah, she explicitly lists those behaviors in the article over claiming, manipulating and performing.

Because she had seen sales executed poorly or aggressively in the past, her brain equated the entire concept of selling with being a manipulative fraud.

And remember, the brain's primary job is to protect the organism.

Right.

In this case, her brain was protecting her identity as a person of high integrity.

So to prevent her from ever engaging in manipulation or fraud, the brain simply deleted the required action entirely.

So she didn't consciously decide, you know, I'm going to refuse to sell my services today.

Not at all.

It wasn't a limiting belief she was actively journaling about or wrestling with.

It was a complete absence.

The action of converting a prospect into a client was simply not on her internal menu of available human behaviors, which.

Explained an immense amount of professional frustration.

She writes that she spent years producing without converting.

And just think about the energy drain of that dynamic.

It's exhausting.

You're creating highly valuable work.

You possess deep expertise.

You are putting content out into the marketplace and Literally nothing comes back because.

The conversion mechanism isn't there.

Yeah, and when you are operating with a deletion, you inevitably assume you have a strategic problem.

You think, oh, the market is saturated, or my pricing model is wrong, or.

I need to pivot to a different social media platform entirely.

So you exhaust yourself trying to fix the surface level strategy.

You might rewrite your website copy 10 times, or hire a branding consultant, or launch a new podcast or whatever.

But none of those strategic pivots yield results.

Because the fundamental mechanical action required to connect the value you create to the recipient who needs it, the sale has been completely removed from your operational reality.

It's like trying to drive a car with a missing transmission by constantly changing the tires.

So what does this all mean?

The breakthrough happens the moment the invisible becomes visible.

She states, now it has a name.

And what has a name can be worked with.

That's a powerful realization.

It really is.

Once the AI flagged the systemic absence of sales logic in her models, she could look at the deletion objectively.

And the reframe she arrived at is essential for anyone in a service based industry.

What was the reframe?

She realized that selling is not a performance.

It is not a manipulation of someone's desires.

Selling is simply the act of telling the truth about what you do directly to the specific person who genuinely needs that intervention.

It is a fundamental act of service.

Yes.

If we connect this to the bigger picture, the source material expands into a critical observation about the service economy.

The author notes that practitioners, coaches, consultants, therapists, NLP trainers, people whose entire professional identity revolves around helping others transform are frequently the exact individuals who are most resistant to the actions required to sustain their own work.

Yeah, they often struggle the most with visibility and conversion.

The irony is just brutal.

The professionals with the highest capacity to facilitate actual change for their clients are often the ones starving their own businesses of oxygen.

And it is rarely a lack of courage or work ethic.

Really?

What is it then?

It is a predictable psychological consequence of their own integrity.

When a practitioner holds a deep values based commitment to helping others, their cognitive filters become hypersensitive to anything that resembles exploitation.

Ah, that makes total sense.

Right?

And because the modern marketplace is full of exploitative marketing, the practitioner's brain unconsciously categorizes all marketing and sales as a violation of their core values.

So the brain quietly remove those actions from the available options.

Yes.

They literally cannot see the path to scaling their business because their own neurology has erased the road to protect their morals.

Wow.

To give you the listener.

A practical way to apply this.

Right now, you can actually use AI to audit your own systems for deletions.

You don't even necessarily need to build a complex Claude project to start.

Exactly.

You can take your business Plan, your last 50 professional emails, or even your daily schedules for the past month, feed them into an LLM and prompt it.

By asking, based on these inputs, what critical business function or logical step is systematically missing from my workflow?

You are essentially asking the machine to act as that logic grammar checker we.

Talked about flagging the variables you aren't even thinking about.

That is a highly effective auditing framework.

By providing the AI with raw data, rather than asking it to evaluate a specific problem, you completely remove your own narrative bias.

The AI isn't reading your mind, it's reading your output and identifying the structural holes.

Exactly.

Having experienced this massive paradigm shift firsthand, the author recognized the ultimate scalable value of the mentoring LLM she had created.

She's now building toward an AI that sounds more like you than anything built from the outside ever could.

Which she calls Start with AI Practical Intelligence for Humanity First Businesses.

Right.

And she built this not by sitting in a tech incubator theorizing about artificial intelligence.

She sat in rooms full of NLP master practitioners observing how human transformation actually occurs in real time.

She grounded the technology in those specific practical mechanics.

Her goal is to make an individual's actual cognitive pattern accessible at scale.

How so?

By using the AI to hold the ideal architecture of a practitioner's expertise, the tool can continuously reflect back where the human is deviating from their own highest standards.

Allowing humanity first businesses to scale without losing their underlying integrity.

Precisely.

Wait, I have to challenge this vision of the future for a second.

Like, if we start relying on custom AI models to perfectly mimic our behavioral and linguistic patterns at scale, don't we run a massive risk of simply automating our flaws?

That's the danger, isn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

If I build an AI that captures my exact cognitive model, won't it just replicate all my bad habits, biases, and deletions just at a much faster processing speed?

Or does this diagnostic tool actually make us more human by forcing us to clear out our own psychological plutter before we attempt to scale?

This raises an important question, and it highlights the crux of the author's entire thesis regarding our relationship with these tools.

The mentoring LLM is not designed to blindly execute your current flawed patterns at scale.

It is designed to act as a dynamic modeling partner that holds the tension between your stated goals and your actual behavior.

But the most critical distinction in the entire article is her explicit acknowledgment that the AI did not fix her.

Right.

It flagged the deletion, but it didn't cure the underlying contempt for sales.

Precisely.

She wrote.

The shift is mine to make.

The willingness to look, that's always been the work.

The mirror, not the medicine.

Yes, the AI functions as the mirror, not the medicine.

It can show you the deletion with terrifying objective clarity.

It can definitively prove to you that your lack of growth is not a strategy problem, but a psychological void.

But the algorithm cannot manufacture bravery.

No, it can't.

The algorithm cannot force you to confront the discomfort of reframing your contempt into an act of service.

The human being remains entirely responsible for doing the heavy emotional lifting required to integrate that missing piece back into their reality.

The mirror, not the medicine.

I mean, that is a vital framework for how we approach this entire era of technology.

It's not a magic bullet that saves us from our own limitations.

It's an ultra high definition reflection that shows us those limitations so clearly that we can no longer plead ignorance.

We are forced to evolve.

And that requires an immense amount of vulnerability.

You have to be willing to look into a digital mirror that has no interest in flattering your ego.

A mirror that highlights the exact mechanisms your own brain has worked very hard to conceal.

And the willingness to engage with that level of unfiltered reflection is really what separates a tool used for mere productivity from a tool used for genuine transformation.

Which brings us directly to you listening to this deep dive.

Right now, I want you to sit with the core diagnostic question that Heather Masters inadvertently stumbled into.

Think about the current gap in your business, your career trajectory, or even your personal projects.

That specific area where you feel like you are constantly spinning your wheels, right?

Producing immense amounts of effort without seeing the conversions or results you expect.

What if that gap is not a strategy problem?

What if it's a deletion?

What crucial concept or action has your model of the world quietly removed from your available options in order to protect you?

And what would it actually take for you to allow that concept back into the room?

Because identifying the strategy you've been avoiding is often way less important than identifying the internal conflict that caused you to avoid it in the first place.

It is a profound auditing exercise, and it leaves us with one final provocative thought to mull over as we conclude today's analysis.

If artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving into a perfect mirror for our cognitive blind spots, if we are building machines capable of identifying the exact realities our brains have intentionally deleted to protect our egos.

What happens to society at large when we unleash a technology that forces us to constantly confront everything we've unconsciously chosen to ignore?

We have spent our entire human history comfortably relying on our blurry, subjective, localized perception of reality.

Are we psychologically ready for a mirror that never blinks?

Something to think about.

Thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive.

We will catch you next time.