EP104 — Why I’m Pausing Interviews (And Why That Has Nothing to Do With You)

Hey there guys and welcome to Morning Cup of Brand Spark. Okay, so I'm doing something just a little bit different this time. Clearly you can see there's no guests, there's no interview, it's just me. And you know, that kind of feels scary. That's exactly why I'm doing it. I've been running this podcast for a while now. It's been over a year and over 100 episodes. And I've had incredible conversations.

with founders I respect, people doing genuinely interesting work, real talk about what's actually happening in business right now and how people have navigated the change. And I really, really love that. And I'm not walking away from it. So with that in mind, I am pausing the interview format for just a little bit, for just a few months. And I want to talk to you today about why.

because the reason is not what you might think. It's not about the podcast itself. It's about something that a lot of us are running into right now in our work and in our industry and in our heads. And I think it's really worth saying it out loud.

Here's what's actually going on. My energy has been shot. I hate to say it. Not in a dramatic, my God, I'm having a burnout, break down kind of way. Just the kind of low level depletion that builds up when you keep saying yes to everything while your body is quietly saying, hold up for just a minute. I've had some health stuff, nothing crazy, nothing to worry about.

But it's the kind of thing where your body makes it very clear and you need to listen to it. Your body makes it clear that it gets a vote also and you need to listen to it. And for a while I was overriding it because that's what we do, right? Especially if we're in mavericks in this world, we keep going, we keep showing up, we stay consistent as much as we can. And then the algorithm of course rewards consistency too.

post through the hard days, smile anyway and show up, and record through the tired weeks. That's what I did too. And somewhere in there, I actually stopped asking myself whether I was putting out, whether what I was putting out had something to say. And that's the part that got me. Because I work in brand communications as I think all of you know.

And I spend my days helping founders figure out what's actually true about their brand versus what they've been performing because they thought that's what they were supposed to do. And when I look at my own podcast calendar and then I thought, am I doing the same thing actually? Not in some big like fake way, but in the quiet accumulated kind of way where you just keep filling the slots because the slots need to be filled and they're there.

And that's not why I started this in the first place.

But okay, I said this isn't about me and it's not, or at least it's not only about me. Because here's what I'm watching happen in real time across brand, comms, and PR right now. And I think if you work anywhere near this space, you're seeing it too. We are drowning in content that nobody actually said. And I'm not being dramatic here.

I open LinkedIn on any given morning and I can identify within the first sentence which posts were written by a human being and which posts were written by a prompt. And it's not because the AI ones are bad. Well, technically they're not actually bad at all. They're often fine. They hit the right notes. They have the right structure, even though we can all read that structure now. They check all the boxes of cool content, right?

and the algorithm is sadly still rewarding them in some ways. They just don't sound like anyone specifically and that's what I hate. And we're building this at light speed. If you follow me on LinkedIn, you hear me talk about this all the time and all of the different AI models and all the LLMs. We're building this at mock speed. That's the thing. The tools are extraordinary, like amazing.

You know I am not anti-AI, any of you who know me. The tools are awesome. I use them every single day. Claude, specifically, is in my workflow constantly, every day. ChatGPT for different things, Gemini for different things, and Perplexity as well. I'm using all of them. But the thing is, I've built systems around how I use AI, and I think in collaboration with it. It helps me move

way faster and think more clearly on a lot of things that I do. But what I've noticed in myself, and I suspect that I'm not the only one here, is that we stop turning our brains off. It's not because we're workaholics, well, some of us might be kind of workaholics like me, but because the tools, they're always there. They never go to sleep. And Claude, you can have it work while you're asleep with cowork.

Because there's always one more prompt you could run and there's one more thing you could refine. And if you're using ChatGPT and you haven't disabled the whole, I'm gonna send you to do different things at the end of each prompt, it's giving you great ideas that you didn't ask for in the first place as your next step. One more thing. And it ends up being one more thing or one more idea that you could test at 11 p.m. from your bed.

I've done this, I'm not proud. I am not above this. I have literally been in bed, tired, not sleeping well, and instead of resting and closing my eyes and trying to figure out a way to make myself go to sleep, I'm building something in Claude on my phone. I'm not kidding here, on my phone. And part of me thinks this is magic, like this is the coolest part about having AI in our world right now.

This is what I can do in the middle of the night from my phone with multiple things going on. It's magical, right? Look at what I can make. I built a game that way. And another part of me thinks, what the hell is happening to my brain right now? Magic and magically dangerous. That's what it is.

That's the honest description of where I think we are right now.

So in brand and coms, well, and PR also, we've always had a volume problem. There's always been more content than signal that needs to be going out. But what AI has done is remove all the friction that used to regulate the volume a little bit more. Before, if you wanted to write 10 LinkedIn posts this week, that took you time. You physically sat and you wrote 10 posts.

and then you read them and then you probably rewrote them. You read them, you did this, you did this yourself like a human being and that took time. And time acted like a natural filter. You had to decide what was actually worth saying because you only had so much capacity in the day and you only had so much capacity to say things in the first place. Now that constraint,

is out the window, it's gone, right? Anyone and their mom and their brother and their bestie can produce anything at like significant scale, instantly. And if not instantly, while you sleep it can be running. And this sounds like a huge win, doesn't it? And I wish it was. And in some ways, it is a bit of a win.

But what it's also done is absolutely flood every single channel with content that has no actual point of view behind it. What do you stand for? What do you mean? Because the tool doesn't care if you have something interesting to say. It's a people pleaser. Chat GPT is way more than anything else. It's a people pleaser. It's going to help you produce whether or not you do.

And so a lot of people are producing. They're producing constantly at volume, significant volume. And that signal to noise ratio in our industries, it's become quite literally hard to navigate, for me even, and I'm in the industry. And here's where my work comes in. Because what I see over and over again with founders and communications professionals,

is that the answer is not to produce less. It's not even to produce smarter in the tactical sense. It's to know what's actually yours to say and yours to own. What's the actual point of view in your work? What do you believe that most people in your space just don't say out loud? What's the thing you've seen that you know to be true?

and you know it to be true from real experience that you've had,. not the stuff that cuts through. That's the stuff that cuts through the noise. And it's not because you're louder than everybody else, but it's because it's specific. And it's because it sounds like a person, a real human, authentic, living, breathing human being.

who actually lived something and has something to say about what they experience.

So for the next few months, this podcast is gonna look a little bit different to you. The first thing is, it's video now, I'm talking to you. And second, you're gonna get a couple of solo episodes. It's just me thinking through the things I'm working on day to day, and that I'm working through, and the things that I'm seeing. And I'm gonna spend some time on building something.

and I'm specifically going to spend some time on something I've been building. It's called Mirror, Not Mask. It is my diagnostic framework for brands, and it asks a pretty uncomfortable question to people. Is your brand reflecting who you actually are, or is it a version of you that you thought you were supposed to perform? And this question applies to everything, individual founders,

communication strategy, it applies to companies. And honestly, it applies to how we are all using AI right now. Everyone, I know you are. Don't tell me you're not, please. I know you are. We are all using it, and we are all using it to amplify, and are we using it to amplify something real that's genuinely ours?

Or are we using it to produce more of something that sounds fine, it sounds awesome, but doesn't actually come from anywhere? And if someone were to speak to you in person the next day, would they recognize you as the same person that they read on LinkedIn? That's the question. Those are different things. And I think, my opinion, is that in the next year or two, the market is going to get really good at telling them apart. I see it more and more.

people allergic to the same sameness that they're seeing on LinkedIn.

So that's where I'm at, taking care of my energy a little bit more than I'm used to, pausing the interview format just for a bit, and using this space to actually say the things I've been thinking. And if you've been feeling the same pull, that low grade pressure to keep producing, to keep showing up, to keep optimizing, to keep doing more, and somewhere in there you've lost the thread on what you're actually trying to say.

then I think this little mini-series is just for you. And it's not because I have all the answers, I really don't. But because I think talking about it helps us and is more useful than pretending that the noise doesn't exist. I think deep down we all know this noise is out there, we see it. And there's a diagnostic up on my website, it's at ogsolutions.nl /mirrornotmask, I'll throw the link here. And in the notes,

If you want to start thinking about this for your own brand, will take you five minutes or less and it's free. You don't need to put in an email address. It's not gated. There's absolutely nothing there in marketing for you that you have to do. Just take it and see what it gives you. One more thing. Part of why this format works for me right now is that it also gives me somewhere to put things. I read the news every day.

I actually have an AI agent that goes out and finds me the news that's relevant to me and brings it to me in a nice neat little package every day of why is this relevant to me? Why do I need to know about it? And one of the things that I'd like to do also in this series is because I watch what's happening now. I watch what's happening. I'm an observer. I watch the industry. I watch what's happening in the news and

and in tech and communications and in the way brands are responding to the things in real time that are happening. And I've got opinions, if you know me, you know they're probably pretty strong ones. And an interview format just isn't the right place for me to rant about them, but this is. So some episodes will be about the framework and the work, and some will be me reacting to something that I read that morning that I think deserves

way more than a LinkedIn post. And somewhere in all of this, when my energy is back and the format feels right at that time, I'm gonna bring guests back in for the new season. But on my terms, and not that my calendar is empty of interviews. So I'll be back with the next one, and thanks for being here you guys. And if you would like to hear about something specific or you've got a question about AI or about marketing,

You could also submit that to me through LinkedIn or through my website. You can find me on Gina Dunn on LinkedIn, G-I-N-A-D-U-N-N or ogsolutions.nl and I've also got ginadunn.com. So feel free to reach out to me if there's something missing and otherwise, thanks for being here and I'm gonna see you in the next time. See you soon.