Imagine everyone around you sounds like they’re shouting underwater. That’s my world without hearing aids—a reality I’ve hidden since I was a kid.Words reach me as a cacophony of blended vowels, forcing me to piece together meaning from your lips, your expressions, your gestures. And a year ago, if you’d told me artificial intelligence would help me finally embrace this part of myself, I would’ve laughed in your face.Let me explain.
In the days before social media could connect you to “others like you” with a single swipe, I was the only kid I knew who needed hearing aids. So at a young age, I made a decision to hide this at all costs. And I became an expert at it.Yet, ironically, I have built my entire career around helping others share their truth. As a Today Show producer and then a business storytelling coach, I spent years in control rooms and conference rooms, creating safe spaces for people to be vulnerable. Yet there I was perfecting my own daily disguise—strategic hair placement (never up), carefully tilted headphones to avoid control room feedback, and endless excuses for why I needed to sit in certain spots during meetings. I was the master of making others feel seen in order to share their stories while doing everything possible to hide a major part of my own.Fast-forward to 2023. Running my video storytelling company, I watched in frustration as students submitted soulless AI-generated scripts. Months of helping them connect the dots on their founder stories, only to have them feed everything into ChatGPT for perfectly polished—but utterly lifeless—final scripts. I hated this new technology.But the journalist in me couldn’t ignore one nagging question: Could we use AI to help us tell more vulnerable, more human stories? Late one night, I decided to test this idea on myself. I opened ChatGPT and typed: “I want to explore something I’ve been hiding my whole life. I wear hearing aids, and I’m exhausted from concealing them. Can you help me understand why I’m struggling to be open about this?”
The AI’s response stopped me cold. Instead of the usual generic advice, it reflected back patterns in my own writing—how often I used words like “hide,” “mask,” and “cover.”
AI showed me that my greatest strength as a storytelling coach was helping others embrace exactly what made them different, and that I needed to do the same for myself. Tears streamed down my face as I saw my own story in a completely new light.This unexpected moment started me on a journey to help others use AI to tell their authentic stories.But first, I used myself as the guinea pig. I began using AI as a journal—writing down my observations about my clients and students’ biggest fears, their late-night worries, their secret dreams of what their businesses could become, what triggered them on social media or in the workplace. (Anonymized, of course, to protect their privacy.) And then I ventured onto more sinister thoughts from my own entrepreneurial journey: “Am I really qualified to do this?” “What if everyone realizes I’m making this up as I go?” Then I’d ask AI to help me find moments from my own life that could build bridges to the struggles of my audience.The process was iterative, collaborative, difficult, and therapeutic.Where I once saw random life experiences that had no bearing on my current life or business hat, AI helped me spot golden threads of connection. That time I bombed a live TV segment and almost got fired? Suddenly I saw how it connected to my audience’s fear of visibility. My rocky transition from network TV to entrepreneurship? A perfect mirror for their own career pivot anxieties. That moment I was lying on my Brooklyn apartment floor with a newborn and toddler, terrified about getting let go from my “brand new fancy” startup job? It spoke directly to my audience’s fears about taking risks and making big changes.It was like having a mirror that could see past my blind spots—showing me connections I was too close to notice, patterns I was too wrapped up in to recognize, and meaning in moments I’d dismissed as just “stuff that happened.”I began weaving these AI-sparked revelations into my business storytelling, testing how this new vulnerability landed with my audience. The response was immediate.Stories I’d dismissed as “not that interesting” suddenly revealed their power through AI as “she” identified golden threads of connection I was too close to see.My storytelling library cracked wide open. I became excited to dig into some of the uncomfortable life moments with AI as my thought-provoking guide.
The real breakthrough came when I started teaching this reflective approach to other business leaders. Together with AI, we excavated the deeper meanings behind their business decisions, revealing stories they never thought to tell.Together we used prompts like this:“What themes emerge in how I talk about my business journey?”“Where might I be holding back out of fear?”“How could my struggles actually help my audience?”I watched founders who’d hidden behind their logos for years finally step into the spotlight with confidence. A soap company founder revealed her real reason for leaving finance for ocean conservation. All of a sudden, her sharing about herself “wasn’t bragging” but necessary to connect to her customers.Another founder realized her obsession with building nurturing corporate cultures stemmed from losing her dad as a child.These weren’t just better marketing stories—they were moments of profound clarity. I watched as “professional facades” crumbled as they realized their personal experiences weren’t distractions from their business stories—they just needed to see those moments in another light.These transformations were so powerful that I knew I needed to make this process accessible to more people. The problem was, most AI tools weren’t built for this kind of deep, reflective storytelling work. They were designed to generate content, not unlock authentic human stories.So I built StoryPro, an AI storytelling tool specifically designed for this intersection of humanity and technology. Not to write stories for people (although it will once it feels you’ve gone deep enough), but to help them discover the stories within themselves that need to be told.It combines the pattern-recognition power of AI with prompts and frameworks I’ve developed over decades of helping people share their authentic experiences.It’s like having a storytelling coach in your pocket—one that helps you see the significance in experiences you might have overlooked and shows you how these moments could resonate with your audience.Then came my moment of truth . . .
I decided it was time to tell my hearing aid story publicly for the first time ever.Using a combination of Google Notebook LLM and StoryPro, the storytelling tool I created, I began exploring my own narrative in a deeper way.I wrote a video script story about my hearing aids freely and with a clarity I had never felt before.When I finally shared the video on LinkedIn, the post went viral, generating millions of impressions. Speaking invitations and podcast appearances followed.But the real transformation wasn’t in the metrics. It was in how I finally saw myself: I internalized for the first time how my hearing loss wasn’t a weakness to hide.The past 18 months have transformed everything I thought I knew about AI and authenticity. AI isn’t here to replace our creativity—it’s a mirror, reflecting back the stories we’ve kept locked inside ourselves. It’s a tool that can help us see ourselves more clearly and find courage in our vulnerability. It can even be a partner in healing our wounded self-image.Those hearing aids I spent decades hiding?They’re now proudly visible in every video call and speaking engagement. Not because AI wrote me a perfect story, but because it helped me see the story that was there all along—and own it proudly.Want to start your own journey of discovery? Here’s a prompt that changed everything for me:“The Mirror Prompt”1. Open your favorite AI tool and paste this:“I need your help exploring something I’ve been hesitant to share. I’ll start by sharing some of my past writing so you can understand my voice. Then I’ll tell you about something I feel called to share with my audience who are {insert a bit of info on your audience and how you serve them} but haven’t found the right way to express it. Can you help me spot patterns and connections I might be missing? Feel free to ask follow-up questions.”2. After the AI responds, go deeper with:“Help me see this through fresh eyes—what hidden strengths might lie in what I’ve seen as weaknesses? How could this help me connect more authentically with my audience?”3. Finally, ask for:“Show me three small ways to begin sharing this story, starting with the gentlest first step I could take today.”You might be surprised—like I was—to find yourself feeling truly seen and understood . . . yes, by AI. Sometimes the most powerful insights come from unexpected places.
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