Episode #59 ~ Can Artificial Intelligence Deliver Transformational Coaching? with guests, Joe Dunn and Julian Humphreys

Welcome to another episode of Beyond the Page, where we delve into the fascinating world of coaching and explore the latest trends and technologies shaping the industry. In today's episode, our host Garry Schleifer sits down with Executive Coaches Joe Dunn and Julian Humphreys, co-authors of an insightful article about AI in coaching.

With unrivaled expertise and a passion for innovation, Joe and Julian take us on a journey of discovery, sharing their thoughts on the transformative power of technology in coaching. They challenge our assumptions and paint a compelling picture of the opportunities and pitfalls that lie ahead.

Throughout the episode, we explore the significance of being open-minded and embracing new ideas, as Julian's Spot beautifully demonstrates. We learn from Joe's experiences, as he reflects on missed opportunities due to skepticism about new technology. They make a powerful case for the importance of breaking free from limited views and exploring the possibilities that new technology offers.

Chat GPT, a cutting-edge tool, also takes center stage in today's episode. The speaker shares their experiments with this AI-powered chatbot, using it to capture conversations and insights during coaching sessions. We discover how Chat GPT provides valuable summaries and helps improve coaching engagements, sparking new reflections and perspectives.

But no exploration of technology would be complete without acknowledging the ethical implications and concerns surrounding its use. Our guests highlight the need for confidentiality standards, raising important questions about the control and accountability of AI in coaching.

Join us as we journey beyond the pages of coaching expertise, amplifying the conversation on AI in coaching, and gaining valuable insights from Joe Dunn and Julian Humphreys. Together, we'll navigate the ever-evolving landscape of coaching, discovering how technology is reshaping the profession and opening up limitless possibilities for both coaches and clients.

Joe is an Executive Coach who has worked with leaders in tech startups and scaleups for eight years (clients include Pinterest, AirBnB, Segment, Discord and many others from Series A onwards).  His coaching style is informed by a thirty year fascination with how people grow and change. His approach is eclectic, integrating a CTI certification with learning from cognitive therapy, yoga, a thirty-year mindfulness practice, surfing, and improv among many others.

Julian is an Executive and Team Coach with over two decades of experience as a strategist in the technology industry.  Julian earned his Ph.D. in Education from the University of Toronto and is the Founder and former Editor-in-Chief of Philosophy of Coaching: An International Journal.  He designed and teaches several ICF-accredited courses, including Psychology for Coaches, Philosophy for Coaches, and Level 3 Mastery. Julian holds the Professional Certified Coach (PCC) credential (MCC application in process) from the International Coaching Federation and is trained in Co-Active Coaching and Organizational and Relationship Systems Coaching.  He is certified to administer the Leadership Circle Profile 360 Leadership and Collective Leadership Assessments. 

Watch the full interview by clicking here.

Find the full article here: https://bit.ly/dunn_humphreys

Learn more about Joe here.

Learn more about Julian here.

Grab your free issue of choice Magazine here - https://choice-online.com/

In this episode, I talk with Joe and Julian about their article published in our June 2023 issue. 

Transcript

Garry Schleifer: 0:07

Welcome to the choice Magazine podcast, Beyond the Page. choice, the magazine of professional coaching is your go-to source for expert insights and in-depth features from the world of professional coaching. I'm your host, Garry Schleifer, and I'm thrilled to have you join us today. In each episode, we go guess what, beyond the page, and dive deeper into some of the most recent and relevant topics impacting the world of professional coaching, exploring the content, interviewing the talented minds behind the articles, and uncovering the stories that make an impact. choice is more than just a magazine. For over 20 years, we've built a community of like-minded people who create, use and share coaching tools, tips, and techniques to add value to their businesses, and of course to impact their clients. In today's episode, I'm speaking with executive coach Joe Dunn and executive and team coach Julian Humphreys, who are the co-authors of an article in our latest issue. Technology and AI. Will it support or replace human coaching? Inquiring minds want to know. Their article on page 38 is entitled, "Can Artificial Intelligence Deliver Transformational Coaching?" A little bit about the gentleman we have as guests today. Joe is an Executive Coach who's worked with leaders in tech startups and scale ups for eight years, including Pinterest, Airbnb, Segment, Discord, and many others from Series A onwards. His operational experience prior to coaching includes everything from being one of the three guys in a garage, and I don't think he's talking about a band, to being on the exec team of a successful public company. In addition to his operational experience, his coaching style is informed by a 30-year fascination with how people grow and change. His approach is eclectic, integrating a CTI certification, welcome to the club, with learning from cognitive therapy, yoga, a 30 year mindfulness practice, go Joe, surfing and I mprov among other things. So that's pretty eclectic. He still tries to keep it light while being as directly challenged as t he situation allows. His personality i s one of humor, which I've already discovered, overlaying a deep seriousness of purpose. On the other hand, we have Julian, who's g oing under his desk to hide after that one. Julian is an Executive Team Coach with over two decades of experience as a strategist in t h e t echnology industry. Since 2013, he has held leadership, advisory and coaching roles in the finance, legal, logistics, healthcare, pharmaceutical and professional services industries. Julian earned his PhD in Education from the University of Toronto and is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Philosophy of Coaching and International Journal. He designed and teaches several ICF accredited courses, including Psychology for Coaches, Philosophy for Coaches and Level Three Mastery. Julian holds the professional certified coach credential with his MCC application process, welcome to the club, I'm working towards the same goal, from the International Coach Federation and is trained in proactive coaching and organizational and relationship systems coaching. He's certified to administer The Leadership Circle 360, Leadership and Collective Leadership Assessments. Because he's not busy enough with all of that, he's currently pursuing the Registered Psychotherapist Designation with the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Thank you so much for joining me, gentlemen. That is a lot you guys.

Joe Dunn: 4:03

Thank you. That was a lot.

Garry Schleifer: 4:03

How'd you even find time to write an article? And to work together to do it. Well, first of all, how did you two meet?

Joe Dunn: 4:12

I can't remember how I came across it, but I came across Julian's philosophy. So Julian does both philosophy for coaches and psychology for coaches, and I did both of them. And we met during the first one of those, which is about three years ago. Something like that. Yeah.

Garry Schleifer: 4:32

And then how did you figure out that you both wanted to write about AI and get together on that page?

Joe Dunn: 4:40

Yeah.

Julian Humphreys: 4:40

You can't talk to Joe for long before he's marveling at the innovations all around him in San Francisco. So he would send stuff to the group and to me as things were developing, and he was kind of ahead of the curve on all of this. So we sort of struck up a conversation and then when I saw that there was a issue of choice dedicated to AI, I thought it would be really fun to write something with him. So that's what we did.

: 5:09

Many people in tech in San Francisco, when the ChatGPT hit, it just seemed to me like an enormous change. You know, along the lines of seeing an iPhone for the first time or seeing a browser for the first time and having lived through those cycles I suddenly sort of felt that I saw the next development.

Garry Schleifer: 5:36

Your next disruption?

Joe Dunn: 5:36

The next few decades are going to be different. We don't quite know how and I got very excited about it. And now, most people i n b ack in San Francisco w ere like yeah it's gonna be a while and it's not quite as magical as we thought, and it's going to screw a few things up. But my excitement came across that Julian was kind enough to to invite m e to write the thing with him.

Garry Schleifer: 6:10

Okay. So let's ask you. You were like, woo , woo , woo . What are you seeing that I'm not hearing that as you go, eh?

Joe Dunn: 6:18

It's not so much, eh. I think there's two things going on. I think one is we're kind of used to it now. One of the amazing things we know about human beings is something will happen and we'll be like, oh, that's incredible. Then three days later we'll be like, yeah, it's just part of the furniture. Not to get too dramatic, but global warming's a bit like that. It's like, oh, it's 119 degrees in Texas. Well, next year that'd be fine. So there's a bit of that going on. We now just sort of accept that the thing can write poetry and, and do these amazing searches and stuff. And then the limitations are showing, the fact that AI makes stuff up.

Garry Schleifer: 6:58

Yeah. Hallucinating, we call it.

Joe Dunn: 7:00

Yeah. Hallucinating, which is a great word. It sucks enormous energy out of the planet. We're starting to see where some of the limitations might be. I like the analogy of the browser. If you look at a browser in 1994 , you look at it and you kind of go, there were people around then who were like, oh, it's gonna completely turn the retail business upside down and you look at it , you kind of go, yeah, yeah, it will , it will . And then a couple weeks later you go well, it might, but it's slow and it's buggy and maybe sometimes . So there , there's that. The shine's come off a little bit. It is still revolutionary. It's still a huge deal. I think we're off the immediate hysteria a little bit.

Garry Schleifer: 7:55

Well , I hope so. I hope so. Well, let's get into your article then and let's get a baseline. How do you guys define transformational coaching?

Julian Humphreys: 8:06

Yeah. So this is a big question and we didn't define it. We basically went with your question in the spec which was something along the lines of, can AI deliver transformational coaching? And we basically said, well, it would be a whole article and more just to define what transformational coaching is, but we will assume that transformational coaching is something that humans can do. The suggestion there is that computers can't do it. So really we're answering the question, can AI coach like a human can coach? And if so, then presumably they can do transformational coaching if humans can do transformational coaching.

Joe Dunn: 8:48

Yeah. There's a whole bunch of sort of thinking around what transformation is and there's a sort of definition of coaching in some way that it's defined to transform people. But transformation itself is undefined. So it's a bit of a complicated conversation. I used to distinguish myself a little bit in some of the CTI courses by questioning the idea if transformation was possible at all. Does a human being ever really transform? What does that mean? And so it's a pretty deep rabbit hole to go down. But I think the thing that caught my attention, which was kind of what caught Julian's, is this idea that there is something that humans can do, which is inherent like only a human can do it, and a machine will never be able to do it. And that was the thing that I found particularly kind of questionable or at least something we should question. So anyway that was for me was the core of the article, this idea that there's something just inherently human and no matter how great these machines get, they'll never be able to do this thing.

Garry Schleifer: 10:08

Are you still of that mind? They'll never replace.

Joe Dunn: 10:12

I think it's an open question. I guess my, I wouldn't say purpose, but my agenda writing the article was, we don't know. And I was mostly reacting against the whole slew of articles which were of the form, oh yeah, it writes poetry, but the poetry's not very good. So it's never gonna replace the inherent insight that humans have that produce good poetry. It just never will. And in the coaching world, it's like there's something magical that we do in a session that only a human can ever do. And I'm like, I don't know. Is there? I still don't know . I guess to bring it back to coaching, I think we need to have a beginner's mind around it. Like, I just don't think we know.

Julian Humphreys: 10:56

I think if you think about what you might mean by transformation in a coaching context, I'll give you an example of a client of mine who is a sort of tech guy and has used ChatGPT to transform something about the way he does things in the world. He basically took transcripts of his conversations on Tinder and got ChatGPT to analyze those transcriptions. And said , where could I do better for the result that I'm looking for? And consequently, he transformed the way that he engages with potential dates on Tinder. So is that transformational coaching that the AI delivered? Maybe, I don't know . It depends what you mean by transformation.

Garry Schleifer: 11:50

Yeah. Or transformational coaching as a term, right? Did it transform, is he married now and two kids, and blah, blah, blah, or getting married?

Julian Humphreys: 12:00

And is that what we mean by transformation, that on some core identity level you're different than you were?

Joe Dunn: 12:06

Right and to pick up on the thread about machines will never be able to be transformational. What he did there was essentially a bunch of pattern matching which is one chunk of what we do in a coaching practice. We're doing it organically, but when one of our clients says something we're like, oh, yeah, that fits with the things you've said before. It fits with stories about your family patterns. It fits with models that I have in my head about whatever attachment theory or family theory or cognitive behavioral therapy. Therefore I can tell you this thing, but that's pattern matching. An AI system can certainly know about attachment theory and cognitive behavioral therapy and it can have a complete record of all the sessions. So can it do a good job of pattern matching? Probably.

Garry Schleifer: 13:07

Well, and the more we use it as a tool, let's say for mentoring and analyzing our transcribed recordings, the actual recordings, I mean, we're supposed to get better so why wouldn't a machine get better?

Joe Dunn: 13:21

Yeah, exactly.

Garry Schleifer: 13:22

Well, while we're on the topic of using AI, how do you gentlemen use AI in your coaching now or plan to use it?

Julian Humphreys: 13:31

I have been using it more in the form of experimenting than a regular practice. But for the past few years, I've been very diligent in taking notes after each session, just kind of notes of what happened. We talked about this, we talked about that, and sometimes I have some additional insights that come out during the note taking part and I was really just doing it so that I could remind myself of the conversation, not for any other reason, so now I have a year's worth of like weekly or biweekly sessions transcribed with dates and stuff. And so I thought, okay, I'm gonna anonymize this, so take out all the names, because who knows what's happening over there in ChatGPT world with data, and there was already a date of breach with ChatGPT. So I took out any identifying information then I pasted it in. There's a limit to how much you can actually paste into ChatGPT. But then I started asking questions of ChatGPT about what it noticed. What are the common themes in this engagement? How would you describe this form of coaching? How could I, as a coach, do better in this engagement? These kinds of things. And it spits out answers that are kind of interesting. It is actually incredible. What it determines as the themes. And it can even summarize this engagement, and it'll actually do a summary of each session. And then you can say, summarize it the whole engagement in one paragraph. It's just incredible what it can do. And from those new angles that I'm getting on the engagement and the notes that I took on that engagement, new reflections come up in me. So that's actually been really interesting, and I will probably continue doing that. I just wish that ChatGPT was sort of HIPPA compliant so that I don't have to worry about any confidentiality breach.

Garry Schleifer: 15:40

Yeah. I think that's what is going on over at ICF with the task force on ethics and AI.

Julian Humphreys: 15:46

Yeah.

Joe Dunn: 15:47

Yeah . Cool .

Garry Schleifer: 15:49

Joe, what about you? Are you using AI for your coaching?

Joe Dunn: 15:51

The only thing I've done so far, I've kicked around things and I have played with a couple of tools that record Zoom sessions and then summarized them and I've found them helpful, but I've sort of bulked at the idea of recording all my Zoom sessions for obvious reasons and I don't take copious notes. I take handwritten notes. So I've kicked around trying to find a thing that transcribes my notes, but my notes have arrows and doodles and stuff, all of them. So it's unclear what I'm gonna get so I wanted to get to the kind of place where Julian is at, where you have basically a co-pilot that is helping you sort out what happened and see the patterns and remind you of patterns. So I think it would be extremely helpful both for the coach and the client. I mean, it w ould be lovely to come out of a coaching engagement with a little manual that said over the year this is what you l earned. These are your patterns. These are the tools that are associated with the patterns. This is how the tools work and all o f that is eminently doable. That's just a case of putting the bits together to do that. So all that said, what I have done, w hich I found exciting, is I've got people to do visualizations and use the image generators to see their visualization. So if you're doing a future life visualization particularly with engineering people, but also with others, y ou do a future life visualization and they're like, I see this place and it looks like this. And then the homework i s to go away and generate a bunch of images of that place and it's fantastic. It's absolutely magical because in the next session you can go through 25 images of what their future life looks like and they n otice things. They'll be like, o h, you know, I wanted a city that was kind of alive, so I added hydroponics. But the hydroponics are like, there's not enough of them. So I added more hydroponics t han t hey a dded a city that is very flat. Because you can't have hydroponics in a place with a lot of skyscrapers and just really kicks off the imagination. And that's been fun.

Garry Schleifer: 17:59

What I'm hearing here is, so first of all, you're embracing it. You're not afraid of it. It's like, okay, let's play with it. Am I hearing that right? A little bit of play.

Joe Dunn: 18:09

Experiment. Engagement.

Garry Schleifer: 18:10

I'm also hearing that it's not complete for you for the purposes that you're thinking about. There's still, oh, that's interesting and you still, as a human coach, to choose what you do with it. Your clients get to use it and makes your life easier. And I was getting excited for your clients doing the visualization when I heard about all this. So there's opportunities to widen our thinking, our imagination, stuff like that. I did the same with that survey that you took , Julian , and by the way, we are implementing one of your suggestions. It's kind of like it's 70 to 80% complete. Like I basically said , ChatGPT create me a list of survey questions for writers that have written more than once for choice the magazine of professional coaching and it came up with like eight to 10. And like I say , it was 70 to 80% complete, but it just took the whole burden of thinking of, oh, what would be the right question? I like to edit versus create. It's easier for me to edit than to create. So I've got that tool . So, yeah.

Joe Dunn: 19:20

Yeah. By the way, I think that's a fundamental thread around thread but also perhaps a threat around AI in the sense that human beings generally are much happier to edit than create. Creating is hard and editing is fun and easy.

Garry Schleifer: 19:38

Illustration is now easy,

Joe Dunn: 19:41

So the concern or the worry is that most of the things that human beings will create from now will be edited versions of things that machines create. The amount of whatever you wanna call it , fundamental creativity will go down. The ability to create will dissipate. That's a worry.

Garry Schleifer: 20:11

There we go .

Joe Dunn: 20:12

I was going to say actually two things. I don't buy that argument so much because human beings can't, they just create. And the other thing is like 99% of what humans create is not very good anyway and so I don't think that's gonna change. Anyway, sorry I took you off on a tangent.

Julian Humphreys: 20:31

I I just think genuine creativity will be appreciated all the more in a world where there's not much of it. But maybe I'm overly optimistic.

Garry Schleifer: 20:42

It's great that humans are optimistic. I don't know, can a machine be optimistic? It can be positive, but can it be optimistic?

Julian Humphreys: 20:50

You can tell it to be.

Garry Schleifer: 20:51

I'd like an optimistic article on A I a nd coaching.

Joe Dunn: 20:57

Well, I think that's the problem. These things are gonna look like beings, but they can be anything you want.

Garry Schleifer: 21:05

Yeah. I think the big thing that you're revealing here is we're we still have an element of control. T he question i s how long will we have that?

Julian Humphreys: 21:15

Yeah , that is the question. I want give another example of a way that I haven't embraced this because you said we're embracing it, but here's an example of how I haven't embraced that . I had a client say to me, here's what you should do. He's, again, in tech. Here's what you should do. Record all your sessions, put it in ChatGPT, and then instead of having to pay you every two weeks or whatever, or between sessions, I can just go in and I know your voice and I trust you so it'll feel like you. I can ask you whatever question I wanna ask you, and it'll give me an answer. So it is like ChatGPT customized through virtually for him and any other client. I c an absolutely see that being the future. It'll be somebody who looks like me, who talks like me, who thinks like me, based on whatever I've fed it, and people can come and basically talk to me, and it'll feel more or less like you're talking to me now. But you'll have that for Eckhart Tolle. You'll take all of Eckhart Tolle's books, you'll put it i n a customized ChatGPT, yo u'll t ake everything about Eckhart Tolle, hi s t one of voice, everything and you, me, everyone will be able to go and have a conversation with Eckhart Tolle that is verbal, not written. I'll be chatting. He'll be chatting.

Garry Schleifer: 22:30

Interactive.

Julian Humphreys: 22:31

Yeah. That seems inevitable to me. And I'm not completely sure how that experience is gonna be different from a real conversation with Eckhart Tolle

Garry Schleifer: 22:41

Well, you wrote about it in your article as well. What was the conversation about how we get used to technology? It's like we were talking about at the beginning of the call, but you wrote it quite eloquently in your article that we thought it was weird to sit in front of a box in the living room and now we streaming everywhere.

Joe Dunn: 23:02

Yeah. There's two things there. I think that the phrase we use is we adapt to interfaces that work. So if something works then we'll use it. So there's that. And the second thing is we like to impute existence into things. So there's this classic example from the sixties of the Eliza. Very, very simple bot which was put together as basically a joke and people thought, oh, it's real. I wanna talk to h er. I t's a therapist and so we're inclined to believe that something t hat looks like it's alive i s alive.

Garry Schleifer: 23:45

Right.

Joe Dunn: 23:46

So if there's a thing that looks like Julian and sounds like Julian, and it's a little glitchy maybe, but yeah, I'll be inclined to believe it. I won't. But people will. I'm more to the point. One of the threads I wanna pick up on here is you said, we are in control. I'm like, we're totally not like. Sam Altman is in control. The guys that run Google in Control, the guys that run Microsoft are in control. These coach bots that get produced are not gonna get produced by well-meaning coaches. They're gonna get produced by corporations and that I think is extremely serious. I love all the potential of AI, and, and I think Julian's outlined some excellent ways it's gonna get used. So here's a nightmare I had over the weekend. You have a coach or a therapist. A therapist, better idea. You go to like TherapistsAI.com, whatever, and looks like a person, maybe these days it would be a chat bot and it's like, okay, great. You chat to it and you get a good relationship with it and it starts saying, maybe you should think about an antidepressant. You think that's a good idea. And the fact that the bot has been created by the antidepressant company or has been sponsored by the by the antidepressant company or has been done by a smart little startup in San Francisco who's getting a kickback from the pharmaceutical company is completely concealed.

Julian Humphreys: 25:34

This is an easy fix though through regulation if you had government that was capable.

Garry Schleifer: 25:41

Well, we got two different countries going here. So in your corners, gentlemen, stand down.

Joe Dunn: 25:51

Stand down .

Julian Humphreys: 25:53

If the bot is Canadian, then maybe I'll be like, okay, that's fine.

Garry Schleifer: 25:58

Oh man,

Joe Dunn: 26:02

But I think this is an issue to. You've got people like Sam Altman , you know, late thirties, super smart, super energetic, backed by billions of dollars versus the old people in the American Senate. I mean, who do you back in that?

Julian Humphreys: 26:21

Well that is obvious with and when they hold all the tech folks in front of the Senate, it was very obvious that they were out of their depth .

Garry Schleifer: 26:30

Yeah. Very much so. Well, I know it sounds maybe a little hopeful, but isn't there always still a plug you can pull at some point, even Sam could pull the plug out of the wall and stop it all?

Joe Dunn: 26:43

I don't know. Has Zuckerberg ever shown any desire to pull the plug on Facebook? I don't think he has.

Garry Schleifer: 26:48

But Musk is pulling the plug on Twitter. Threads h as started. Zuckerberg started up with threads. But to the point of if we unplug it, does it keep going? It's just a predictive machine and humans are so much more, but do you think this predictive machine can replace human intuition and that creative insight we w ere talking about?

Joe Dunn: 27:23

I think that's the question. I think we d on't k now.

Garry Schleifer: 27:28

We're back to the question of will it assume in coaching?

Joe Dunn: 27:32

I think my point of view on that is we don't know, and we should be very humble before the question and not prejudge it. My sort of, whatever you want tp call it , energy or emotion around it was reading a whole bunch of articles that basically just dismissed the question. There was a David Brooks article in the New York Times, which was like, oh, you know, I have been reading the poetry this thing produces, and it's wooden. There was an article written by a poet, I think in maybe the New Yorker or something, and it was very much like, when I'm writing a poem, the spirit kind of comes. I am not doing this justice but there's this idea that this mysterious thing that happens that can only happen in a human being. I think we're being faced with that question. I think we're gonna be faced with that question every day .

Garry Schleifer: 28:28

Well , you said something about wooden and so to go with what you said in your article, gentlemen, you said browsers were clunky, and we thought will commerce ever hang its hat on this piece of crap? Then look at where we are now. Anything goes down and we're all down, down, down, down, down. So are we just at that stage where it's good, but it's not great. Can we control it? Now we've got all the questions. Is it regulation? Do we have the time to put the things in place before the next iteration? Okay, this is getting wild. Are we using AI to create the things that we will use to control the AI?

Joe Dunn: 29:15

Oh, yeah. There's a classic YouTube clip which gets passed around in Silicon Valley a lot around this stuff, which is one of the late night hosts interviewing Bill Gates, I can't remember who it is, about the internet. Maybe Jay Leno, I think, anyway. At the time, somebody had just broadcast a baseball game on the internet and Jay Leno was like, hey, have you heard of this thing called radio? Which was a good joke at the time but he was completely missing the point. And Bill Gates was like, I'm not sure what he says in the clip, but basically the idea is like, yeah, we just broadcast a baseball game on the internet, but like now anybody could do that anywhere forever for free. That's the analogy with ChatGPT right now. We're at that level, like yeah, it hallucinates and it's buggy and it's slow. But this is the first year.

Garry Schleifer: 30:19

Exactly. How many iterations has it had since they launched it in what, November? February?

Joe Dunn: 30:24

Yeah. Yeah . Two or three.

Garry Schleifer: 30:25

Like two or three. So we have come to the end of our time, but I have a big question.

Joe Dunn: 30:32

Yes, sir.

Garry Schleifer: 30:33

Do you have a plan for when AI replaces human coaches? Are you gonna retire by the like I might?

Joe Dunn: 30:44

I don't think it'll happen quickly. We said this in the article , I think like many disruptions, it's gonna happen from the bottom up, if you like. So the good part of this, I think the positive part of this with a little negative, my bias particularly. not Julian so much.

Julian Humphreys: 31:05

If you weren't being negative, I would be

Joe Dunn: 31:07

Yeah. Oh , okay .

Garry Schleifer: 31:08

Oh, is this the good cop, bad cop?

Joe Dunn: 31:09

One of the questions we always get about coaching is how do you scale it. Because it's expensive. Everybody benefits from it. It would be good if everybody in a company, particularly at any kind of leadership position had coaching. So the possibility here is they can have coaching That's good. Perhaps it's not quite as intuitive, not quite as experienced as somebody who's been doing it 10 or 15 years. But it's gonna be good. So I think it'll start there. I think it'll be a while before CEOs, chief product officers, CTOs, want to use a synthetic coach. I'm hopeful we got a few years yet. I guess that would be my reaction. I mean, like many things, having a human do something for you becomes an expression of having money.

Garry Schleifer: 32:06

And there's a downside of that too. It's like we'd love for everyone on the planet to have a coach. However, I was thinking about this the other day. There's 9 billion people on the planet, and how many registered coaches with ICF. Just a , just a little bit, 55,000 credentials coaches with International Coaching Federation. So to me, there's not really anything to worry about because, to your point Joe, it's not gonna happen overnight that 9 billion people are A, gonna know what coaching is B, want to have it, and C, that it'll be ready. I don't know , Julian.,

Julian Humphreys: 32:43

I guess I'm trusting that there'll be new, more interesting opportunities. I'm being optimistic and more interesting opportunities that arise if what I currently do is better done by a machine, and I'm happy to go chill on the beach if not. That's my default. You gonna afford it

Garry Schleifer: 33:03

After the kids make it through university and the mortgage gets paid.

Joe Dunn: 33:10

There's this argument about new technology that we freak out about the fact that new technology is gonna put people outta work. And inevitably what has happened in the past is it actually creates work.

Garry Schleifer: 33:22

Creates jobs.

Joe Dunn: 33:23

It creates activities, jobs, economic possibilities that we had no conception of. So, to Julian's point, one can be optimistic, like, yeah, we may not be sitting down doing hours a week of face-to-face coaching, but I don't know but we're doing something else.

Garry Schleifer: 33:41

Well, and to me it's just keep an eye on what AI is doing, what it can do for you, and use it to the best of your ability that will allow you to do more coaching.

Joe Dunn: 33:54

There is that, yeah.

Garry Schleifer: 33:55

Right. Like your visualization and Julian, your transcript of notes is making you a better coach, which distinguishes you from the machine, and you used the machine to be a better coach. How ironic.

Joe Dunn: 34:10

Yep

Garry Schleifer: 34:11

Wow . So gentlemen, what would you like our audience to do as a result of the article in this conversation?

Julian Humphreys: 34:19

Well, if they haven't already played around with ChatGPT, I think everyone should play around with it. And I think you should play around with it as a coach, which is to say whatever you think you can do to incorporate it into your coaching, either the back end or the front end of your coaching, whether it's like writing your marketing copy or analyzing your case notes or however, you should explore and see what comes up.

Garry Schleifer: 34:49

Yeah. I agree. I think for me, the whole idea of having a transcription mentor service, and then it takes all the recordings of that client and goes, oh, here. Jonathan Reitz, I had him on the other day, and he was saying he's got one and it'll measure how many open-ended versus closed-ended questions, how long you spoke versus the c lient spoke and all these kind of dashboard measurements. I'm like, of course, I'd w anna know that. I mean, that's what I learned in my mentoring. So I could be doing mentoring and still have a mentor coach. I t doesn't mean I have to have one over the other. I can use the two and move along quicker on my journey. Not without losing quality and experience and the whole cause and effect. Joe, your thoughts?

Joe Dunn: 35:42

Yeah, I think Julian's spot on. I think accepting that this is coming and having an open mind, beginner's mind to it. I was in tech when the internet came along, and it was very interesting. At the time, for me it was new technology, so I was a technologist, but it was a new technology and at the time I was quite skeptical about it which sounds crazy now. As a result, I missed a bunch of things. It made things harder. It made decisions harder. It made my view of the next 10 years more pinched. There's this moment when these things happen where there's just all these ideas booming around and it's easy to close your mind to them and just sort of go like, well , that's the Silicon Valley crazies. It's much more fruitful, I think, for coaching for life in general to kind of be open to it. Take a look. I don't know , you know?

Garry Schleifer: 36:59

Yeah. Go find out what it does, doesn't do, what do you want it to get involved with?

Joe Dunn: 37:06

Yeah, exactly.

Garry Schleifer: 37:06

Establishing it firmly in the coaching profession in a way that serves our clients and supports coaching and coaches. It's really weird because, I can't help but think of my 90 year old mother who wanted to have a Fitbit because she wanted to measure her steps. But in order to do that, she had to have a smartphone, because you can't do Fitbit apps n a computer, which she had a computer. So she still gripes about it, but every day at 10:30, we're on a FaceTime video call on that smartphone with my sister out west, me here , and my mother two hours east talking about recipes and what we're doing and what's what we're making for dinner. So I think that if you, if there's a purpose, so maybe to our audience, embrace it, what you guys are saying, learn about it, but find a purpose for it to work for you and just play around with it. Start with ChatGPT like we did and here at choice. I probably don't even know half the stuff I could get it to do. That's the other thing. It's just so open. Gentlemen, I obviously I could go on about this forever. Thank you so much for joining us for this Beyond the Page episode. I hope you're write for us again. I know Julian will and he'll invite Joe if there's a good topic. What's the best way to reach each of you?

Joe Dunn: 38:36

It's my website, cloudbreak.com.

Garry Schleifer: 38:39

Cloudbreak.com.

Joe Dunn: 38:41

That's got my bio and background.

Julian Humphreys: 38:44

He is a rainmaker.

Garry Schleifer: 38:47

Oh , lovely.

Joe Dunn: 38:48

That's actually not the analogy, but sure.

Garry Schleifer: 38:52

Hey , it's his reality.

Joe Dunn: 38:55

Yes and I'm a rainmaker too .

Garry Schleifer: 38:59

Yes. And there we go. Julian.

Julian Humphreys: 39:01

Mine is julianhumphreys.com.

Garry Schleifer: 39:10

Awesome gentlemen, thank you again . That's it for this episode of Beyond the Page. For more episodes, subscribe to your favorite podcast app. If you're not a subscriber, don't forget to sign up for your free digital issue of choice Magazine by going to choice-online.com. And click the sign up now button. I'm Garry Schleifer . Enjoy the journey of mastery.