EPISODE 254 OF THE HINT OF HUSTLE PODCAST
Everyone’s using AI to create content faster.
And most of it is garbage.
Not because the tools are bad. Because the people using them have skipped many steps in how they use it (or using it for the wrong jobs).
That was the thread running through my entire conversation with Laura Schoenfeld this week. Laura is a strategic advisor, messaging expert, and founder of The Nourished CEO. She has been creating content online since 2012. When I look at her Threads feed, I see consistent, original, high-quality thinking. And she has two kids under four.
So I asked her: how?
Her answer was not what I expected.
The Problem Isn’t AI
Laura made a distinction early in our conversation that I think is really important.
People are asking AI to do the wrong things.
When you hand your thinking to AI (your positioning, your messaging, the core ideas that make people want to work with you) you’re not just creating bad content. You’re eroding the one thing that makes you worth paying for.
“You’re selling your thoughts as the primary thing people are paying you for,” Laura said. “If they don’t think those thoughts are coming from you, why would they pay you money? They could just get it for free from AI.”
That’s the real stakes of this conversation. The reason someone hires you over anyone else is how you think and how you communicate that thinking. The moment you outsource that, you stop differentiating.
The Good Student Trap
Laura talked about something she calls the good student trap, and I think it’s one of the most honest descriptions of what goes wrong with coaching programs.
Someone gets sold on a proven system. They genuinely show up and do the work. But the system wasn’t built for their circumstances, their skill set, their season of life. They follow the plan, things don’t work, and they’re left wondering if the problem is them.
“I don’t think I’ve ever worked with someone who said done-for-you marketing actually worked for them,” Laura said. “Nobody can really capture the ultimate essence of who you are and how you want to communicate.”
The same thing is happening with AI. People who felt burned by programs that promised easy results are now turning to AI for the same thing: a shortcut to the right answer. And AI has the same problem every underprepared coach has: it doesn’t know you, your business, your clients, or your life circumstances. It just gives you a confident-sounding output and hopes you’re happy with it.
The Test Laura Uses
Here’s a simple filter Laura uses to decide what to hand off to AI:
Would you hire a person to do this?
If you’d hire someone to write your podcast show notes after you recorded the episode, AI is great for that. If you’d hire someone to draft a caption for a piece of content you already created, AI can help. If you’d hire someone to write your email newsletters from scratch without any input from you, you probably wouldn’t. And if you wouldn’t hand it to a human, you shouldn’t hand it to AI either.
The distinction is whether the work requires your thinking to exist in the first place. Execution tasks? Delegate. Origination tasks? That’s yours.
How Laura Actually Uses AI
Here’s what actually impressed me about Laura’s process.
She doesn’t write everything from scratch. She’s clear about that. But everything starts with her.
She uses Otter to record her meetings and client calls, capturing her own thinking in real time. Then she trains Claude on her voice, her brand, her perspectives, her ways of framing ideas. She gives it source material: transcripts, long form writing, her actual words. And then she asks it to extract and format, not invent.
“It starts with me and it ends with me,” she said. “Claude is in the middle doing the heavy lifting of getting words onto paper.”
She still does a final pass on everything before it goes out. And she’s vigilant about the AI tells: the specific cadences, the phrases that didn’t come from her. She removes them. Because her audience is paying attention, and they should be able to tell they’re hearing from her.
The Competitive Edge Nobody Wants to Work For
Laura said something near the end of our conversation that stuck with me:
“The people going hardcore with AI to come up with all their stuff, their businesses are not going to survive. While you’re waiting for that to shake out, practice communicating about what you do publicly.”
Not privately. Not in your notes app or your journal. Publicly. Out loud. In front of people.
Because messaging isn’t a document you write once. It’s a skill you develop through reps. You talk about your thing, it doesn’t quite land, you talk about it differently, something clicks. You do that hundreds of times over years and eventually you have language that sounds inevitable, like there was never any other way to say it.
Laura has been doing this since 2012. I’ve been doing this since before I started my business. The people you look at and think “they just know how to say it” have been doing it for a decade. Not because they’re naturally gifted communicators, but because they never stopped putting in the reps.
The good news: you can start today. The bad news: there’s no shortcut.
Listen to the full episode for more.
LINKS & RESOURCES MENTIONED IN EPISODE:
🎙️ Laura’s podcast: The Nourished CEO
🛠️ Laura’s One Hour Messaging Makeover: messagingmakeover.lovable.app (use code MAKEOVER for $20 off)
🎧 The Trust Recession episode: https://heathersager.com/episode249/
🎧 The AI episode: https://heathersager.com/episode245/
ABOUT LAURA SCHOENFELD:
Laura Schoenfeld is a strategic advisor, diagnostic business coach, and founder of The Nourished CEO. She works with six and seven-figure coaches, experts, and practitioners who are making good money but can’t figure out why it still feels so hard. Through her Authority Arc™ methodology, she identifies what’s structurally misaligned in a business and rebuilds it around how her clients are actually wired to lead, so their inner and outer authority align and their business finally feels as good as it performs.
A registered dietitian with a master’s degree in nutrition and public health, Laura’s backgrounds in clinical pattern recognition and personality psychology shape the diagnostic approach she brings to every client engagement. She spent over a decade building and scaling her own online businesses, and that experience is the foundation of everything she teaches and advises on today.
She’s passionate about helping coaches and experts create businesses that generate consistent revenue without sacrificing their peace, purpose, or presence at home. She hosts The Nourished CEO Podcast and lives in North Carolina with her husband and two daughters.
Connect with Laura via Website | Instagram | Facebook
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