So last week was a full year of Mostly Human, done and in the bag! And what immediately followed was the following: flew back from an amazing weekend in Denver with my besties, landed with a plugged up right ear (that is STILL plugged 6 days later) and a sneaking suspicion that the rest I got over the weekend wasn't gonna cover a full time contract and running my business at the same time.

By Thursday evening my sinuses had gone full snot factory and by Friday I had that lovely experience of not being able to smell or taste anything.

After wrestling with the time reporting process for my new contracting agency (seriously, how hard is it to give me access to my timesheet??) I finally got my first paycheck in 14 months. Not gonna lie - seeing that money show up after months of doing the black/red balance cha-cha in my checking account felt really good.

What was the predominant feeling all last week was a deep tiredness which I'm going to chalk up to two weekends in a row away from home and attempting to cram a full corporate work week into an already full schedule.

One thing is for sure, some of the things I've been doing the last couple years will need to take a back seat while I manage this contract. I'm getting really stingy with my time. Before I'd meet up for a 'coffee' (that always makes me snort 'cause for me it's a Diet Pepsi or Kickstart) with nearly anyone who reached out. But now it's not gonna work like that anymore. I think what I'll need to do is expand my Friday Jam Sessions to be 45 minutes and then direct anyone who wants to connect to that. I dunno.

OH. And my work with the extraordinary Emily Worden is kicking off again. We've been throwing around doing a LinkedIn Livestream on a weekly basis (still rumored) and I've been low-key tutoring her in using AI to make her nearly manual business a little more automated.

What's kind of cool is that I've had several people reach out for speaking engagements/workshops which is honestly my jam. Nothing better than getting on live and sharing my screen and showing folx that it's not as hard as they've been led to believe to make your AI bot do what it needs to do to make your life a little easier.

One cool thing that I fit in last week between everything else was reviewing applications as an alum of SheBuilds by Lovable for Season 03. I'm not an official ambassador of Lovable but I'm definitely a fan of the product and I think the SheBuilds initiative is phenomenal. I was able to review 65 applications (they received literally thousands from all over the world) and I got signed up to deliver live on YouTube this coming week for a session called SheBuilds: Make AI Write Your Lovable Prompts (Yes, Really).

To anyone who applied for Season 03 and got accepted, congratulations! If you didn't get accepted, my request is that you don't make it mean anything about you, your proposed build, nor your abilities. What was apparent from the applications I reviewed is that there are women out there in parts of the world wanting to build solutions that can mitigate many of the wrongs perpetrated against the female body and psyche that I personally have never had to experience.

Here's what I keep forgetting: every yes costs the same no.

I said yes to the coffees for years because saying no felt like something only an important jerk would do. And I'm not important enough to be a jerk. So I'd hop on the call, Diet Pepsi in hand, give somebody a solid 30 minutes or an hour, close the laptop, and wonder why my own stuff never got done.

The time wasn't free. It came out of the same account my real work gets paid from - I just wasn't looking at the balance.

You've got that account too. The reply you owe, the call you said you'd take, the friend-of-a-friend who wants to "pick your brain" - all of it draws down the same pile of hours your own life is running on. Nobody tops it back up at the end of the week for being nice about it.

So you get to say no. You did the subtraction. Cold has nothing to do with it.

Point the askers at a door you already built - the Friday Jam, or just the reply button. Keep the expensive yeses for the work that's actually yours.

That's the part I keep having to learn. Again.

The stuff that touched, moved, and inspired me this week. Or in the case of the last one, made me laugh entirely too hard.

Love is paying attention
I've followed Misha forever, and this one nails how sexy it is when a man helps out his partner in the little ways. Pay attention, fellas.

What Claude thinks of me
My bestie sent me this and I cackled. If Claude and ChattyG could actually think, they'd call me an aggressive b*tch without hesitation. I'm proud of that.

Heartfelt poem (NSFW)
Warning: the language is RIPE. And I am so here for it. Wild how a good cuss can carry more love than all the hearts and flowers combined.

A quick word from this week's partner (yes, a real live ad - still gotta keep the lights on around here 💜)

Confession: I've been reading Mindstream's daily email for over a year. Nobody paid me to start. It's just one of the few AI newsletters that doesn't leave me standing in front of a firehose with a paper cup. Five minutes, the stuff that matters, done before I’ve finished yawning.

This week they're giving away a free guide to getting Claude to actually work FOR you. Not "become a prompt wizard by Tuesday." More like: set Claude up as the assistant you keep saying you need and never get around to hiring. (No salary. No onboarding. No filing for divorce by Friday.)

Which feels about right for the week we're having around here. You don't need to add one more thing. You need a little help with what's already on the pile. It's free. Go peek.

The professionals pulling ahead aren't working more. They're using Claude.

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AI does not need you to be nice to it. I push mine around all day. Watch.

I ask it to write something simple, and it hands me a limp little line - "We are thrilled to announce our latest offering." So I tell it: "No. Sounds like a press release. Say it like a person."

I didn't write a genius prompt. I bossed a mediocre one into shape, four words at a time. That's the whole thing. You don't keep the first answer. You send it back. It doesn't get tired, and it does not think one thing less of you.

Now you. Something tiny and real, before you talk yourself out of it.

Open whatever you've got - ChattyG, Claude, Gemini, Copilot. Ask for one small thing you actually need today. A text you've been dodging. A name for the plant. Your grocery list, sorted by aisle.

Then send it back at least twice. You don't owe it a reason. "Shorter." "Warmer." "Try that again, weirder." Watch what it does. No notes. No "well, actually."

(This is the part the prompt bros charge ninety-seven dollars to tell you.)

Sometimes it comes back flat or flat-out wrong. That's not the moment to quit, it's the moment to say so. "Too stiff." "You missed it, this is about X. Again." Steering it through a bad answer is the skill. Nobody's grading this.

You know the message. The one you've rewritten four times and it's still a paragraph when it should be a text. The "I can't make it Thursday but here's my entire medical history explaining why" message.

This week I'm getting stingy with my time. Turns out you can get stingy with your words the same way - and the bot's weirdly good at helping you do it without sounding like a robot.

Here's the move: you hand it your over-explained mess, and it interviews you down to the actual point. One question at a time. Then it writes the short version.

Copy this whole thing and paste it in:

Paste your over-cooked message after that and let it start asking. The last bit - the line you were scared to cut - is the good part. Half the time you didn't need it. The other half, it's the only sentence that mattered and everything else was packing peanuts.

Monday, June 15 | 10AM CDT (60 minutes)
This week's topic: Transformation Panel Part 3 - "Warning: Blackhole of Transformation". I’ll be joining Leslie Flowers (NY) and Charles Caldwell for a conversation about Landmark Worldwide and what we learned from our combined years of training.

Tuesday, June 16 | 10AM CDT (30 minutes)
Live on Youtube. Here's the move nobody teaches: don't write your Lovable prompts yourself. Make Claude or ChatGPT write them for you first. I'll walk through the workflow I use on every build - open Claude as my thinking partner, plan the build out loud, hand it my ROCO framework, and have it spit out a Lovable-ready prompt. Then paste into Lovable, build, iterate.

Friday, June 19 | 10 AM CDT
Friday Jam Session with Joy Prompt Club. 30 minutes. No agenda. Just prompts, play, and people who get it. Open to anyone who wants to join in and has questions or a problem they’re trying to solve. You do not need to be in Joy Prompt Club to benefit from these fantastic humans.

Joy Prompt Club - My favorite little virtual place in all the interwebz.

AI Confidential Prompt Kits - 10 copy-paste-ready prompt kits for the stuff you actually need help with - resumes, LinkedIn profiles, interview prep, content, career direction, caregiver sanity, all of it.

First issue of year two, written by a woman with one working ear and zero working tastebuds who is choosing to find this funny. Fifty-two weeks, no gaps, year one in the bag. Closing the laptop on this one tired two ways at once - the good kind and the snot kind.

Your one thing this week: say a no you'd normally talk yourself out of. Don't build the case for it. You don't owe anyone the paragraph.

💜

Take care of yourself, take care of each other,

Deb

P.S. Go boss a bot around this week. Paste one small thing, decide you're not impressed, and send it back twice - no "pretty please," no apology. Then hit reply and tell me what you made it redo. "Try that again, weirder" is winning in my house this week.

P.P.S. I love hearing from you. If AI's got you feeling stuck, behind, or dumb, or you just need a human to talk it through with, hit reply. That inbox is me. It's always been me.