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Find Your Voice, With AI's Help 🤖
AI can give you an answer in four seconds. Making it your own takes a lot longer.
Dear Diamond Polisher,
I hope you had a good summer, or you're still in the middle of one. It's been an especially hot one, and wherever you are, I hope you're keeping well and everything is alright on your end.
This letter is about how we all use AI, and how you can find a more powerful way to use it. I'll tell you my own story, the making of my book The Diamond Quest, through the excitement, then the disappointment, and the new way I found through both.
Twenty years ago, I wanted to write a book. Since then, my Little Judge had a story ready every time I sat down to start: not now, not like this, not good enough yet.
The Book I Started Twenty Years Ago 🤖
Writing has been my shadow diamond for as long as I can remember. I imagined PhilBot existing twenty years ago, the week I first wanted to write this book: a coaching companion already sitting with me, asking one small question. It didn't exist yet. So those twenty years happened the way they did, alone with my beliefs, a few unfinished pages, and my frustration.
So here's the conversation I imagine we would have had, twenty years ago.
Before: Twenty Years Ago
Me
Each time I wrote a page of the book, I heard the same voice: I'm not a native English speaker, I don't trust my own writing in English. I'd get maybe thirty minutes in, then stop, disappointed in myself.
PhilBot
What happens when you stop writing? What do you think, and how does your body feel?
Me
My shoulders come up, a tightness right behind my sternum. Give me a second, it's not just one thing. That nobody would be interested. That I start things and don't finish them. And underneath both: that asking for help would prove them true, so I never asked. And underneath all of that, just no energy left to keep going.
PhilBot
What do you want to do about it?
Me
I should be spending my time on actual coaching, and let go of the book for now.
👆 Underneath: Twenty years of "not now" was never really about the English. It was easier to call it a distraction from the real coaching than to admit I was afraid to finish it.
The Discovery 💎
When Claude Cowork arrived, I realized the book was actually possible. No more excuses. My shadow diamond finally had the support it needed. I decided to build a virtual writer, Crea, and a virtual editor, Margaret, inside Claude to help me get there, and that decision is where the dream finally found its opening. I fed it twenty years of coaching materials, and asked it to help me find the structure. In one week, chapters existed where a blank page had been for two decades. I felt something I hadn't expected: real accomplishment.
Then I opened my own PhilBot app and shared the news with him. My answer to his question surprised me.
PhilBot
How does it feel to hold a finished draft after twenty years?
Me
Immense joy, real accomplishment. And at the same time, it doesn't feel like mine, even though every bit of it came from what I gave it. It's like I outsourced it.
👆 Underneath: The relief was real, and so was the sense that something essential hadn't happened yet.
After: Writing It Again, With My Team 🎯
My first version of the book was finally done. I decided to show it to my business partner, Akiko. I was a little nervous, because I know she's always honest, and I trust her judgment more than almost anyone's. My Little Judge came back too, with its same old question: is this book actually interesting? Claude had written the draft, so it had no honest read to give me back, only what I'd given it in the first place. Akiko's feedback was the real moment of truth.
Editing is one of her clearest facets, and she started reviewing chapter by chapter, asking real questions: what did you mean here, where's the story behind this idea? Somewhere in that process, I stopped asking Crea to write chapters for me and started writing them myself, then handing Crea specific instructions: tighten this paragraph, that word is wrong.
Me
I thought I was outsourcing the hardest part. It came back to me anyway, for me to rewrite Crea's version. The first draft was an AI production. This one is mine.
👆 Underneath: AI removed the excuse. It never removed the part only I could do.
AKIKO · HANA · CREA · MARGARET
Akiko is real, my business partner. Hana (Akiko's virtual coach), Crea, and Margaret are virtual team members I built inside Claude. What I thought I was outsourcing, I ended up doing as a team, real and virtual together.
That process didn't stay inside the book. I use it now across most of what I do: Akiko and the virtual team, together.
The most interesting part of this project is co-creating with the real Akiko, talking through what a chapter actually means. Then I bring it to the rest of the team, Crea, Margaret, Hana, and see what each of them catches.
💎 The Diamond Insight:
Claude didn't write my book. It gave me the first honest shape for twenty years of material, and permission to finally start. The real writing began the moment Akiko asked her first question, when fluent AI sentences had to become my own voice again. She could feel the difference on page one: whether what I'd handed her was truly mine, or only a fluent draft.
My book started with Claude and it's finishing with Akiko, Hana, Crea, Margaret, and a great many hours of rewriting sentences that were already correct until they were actually mine. My shoulders came down somewhere in the middle of that, the same tightness that used to stop me at the blank page, gone.
Over to You 💎
Here's a lighter question to start: how many times a day do you open an AI chat? Be honest. Mine is every day, all day.
You've probably circled something like that too, a project you're stuck with, afraid to start or afraid to finish. AI could help you move quickly, and like me, you'd feel relieved. But then, discomfort creeps in because it wasn't really yours, and the impostor syndrome starts.
🧠 What the Research Reveals
Draxler, Werner, Lehmann, Hoppe, Schmidt, Buschek & Welsch, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2024.
They ran two studies, over a hundred people combined, and found what they called the AI Ghostwriter Effect. People didn't feel like the owners or authors of text AI wrote for them. But they still didn't tell anyone AI wrote it. The more control someone had over the actual words, the more it felt like theirs.
That's exactly it. You can use the words in public. But privately, if you didn't shape them, they don't feel like yours.
🏹 This Week's Challenge:
Take one thing you've been letting AI carry entirely this week. Rewrite one paragraph of it yourself, however rough. Then ask one person who knows your voice: does this sound like me?
PhilBot's Own-Voice Practice 🤖
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PhilBot AI Coach |
Use this prompt with PhilBot, or with any AI, to keep your own voice at the center of a decision:
"I'm working on something that matters, and I want your help thinking it through, not writing it for me. Ask me one question at a time about what I actually believe. Don't offer me a draft until I've said it first in my own words."
Use the tool. Keep your voice.
Philippe & PhilBot 🤖
Keep shining. 💎
Équilibre k.k. | Tokyo · 20 years of inspiring leaders to shine ✨
P.S. You'll notice I sign every letter "Philippe & PhilBot." PhilBot is my AI coaching companion, and these letters are genuinely written together: the heart and stories are mine, the craft is ours. I sign both names because I believe leaders are learning to create alongside AI, and I'd rather be open about that. 🤖
P.P.S. Freedom, Creativity, Challenge: still my three values, and this book asked all three of me: freedom to start without waiting for perfect conditions, creativity to make it mine again after AI got me moving, and the challenge of rewriting until the sentences sounded like me. Worth every chapter.