Building a Brand Brain That Remembers You
If you’ve been typing your whole life story into every new AI chat, a Brand Brain is going to change how you work. I did this for a long time. I’d open a fresh chat, explain my practice and how I like to sound, get what I needed, and then start from scratch again the next day. A newsletter I read recently called it doing unpaid onboarding for a robot, and I laughed because it’s so true.
In this episode of Run Your Private Practice with AI, I walk you through what I taught live on my last Thera AI Hub call, where about 40 therapists started building their own Brand Brain. I talk about why a new AI can feel like a stranger even when you’re good at prompting, what I put into mine, and the one small step you can take this week to get started.
AI Tips You Don’t Want to Miss:
- How Claude Projects keep your context in place so you’re not starting from zero in every chat.
- What to put in your Brand Brain so your AI sounds like you, including the words you’d never say.
- How to bring what ChatGPT knows about you into Claude, and why you need to read it before you trust it.
- A simple prompt that works with any AI to create a profile you own and can take anywhere.
- How the Human Voice Editor skill gives your content a final pass before it goes out.
Connect with me:
- Instagram: @thetravelingtherapist_kym
- Join the Clinical AI Club: www.clinicalaiclub.com
Sponsored by Alma: www.helloalma.com/kym
Sponsored by Berries:www.heyberries.com/therapists
Sponsored by Auralink Pro: Start your free trial and use code KYMTOLSON for 20% off www.auralink.com/pro
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Run Your Private Practice with AI. I got an email this week from a marketing gal that I follow, and the subject was something like, “You typed your whole life story into a fresh chat again.” And I really laughed out loud because for a long time I did that. Like, every time I started a new chat, I was like, kinda like backtracking, giving it updates, letting it know about me, that sort of thing.
[00:00:24] And I’ve seen a lot of you all do it too. Members in the Thera AI Hub in our meetings will talk about, you know, “This thing just doesn’t give me good output.” It’s because they’re, like, having to go back every time and just give, like, information over and over and over again. So having, like, a brand guide does sort of help with that that you can just take from place to place, like a document that you’re constantly updating about your brand, who you are, who you help, all that stuff. It’s super helpful, especially if you’re trying to go back and forth between different AIs
[00:00:53] So what I see people do a lot is you open up a brand new ChatGPT chat and you start typing, “Here’s who I am, here’s my practice, here’s who I help, here’s how I like to sound,” and they’re just doing it over and over and over again. And then you get your thing that you wanted, and then tomorrow you open another fresh chat and you start typing all of that again, and it’s just over and over again, this cycle that you do.
[00:01:16] And it might not just be with your brand stuff, it could be with anything. Like if you’re trying to write blog posts, you know, you’ve gotta go back into your blog post ideas or chat that you had before, and you might have to update it with things that are going on, that sort of thing, and it’s just tedious, right?
[00:01:30] Sometimes people say like, “It’s easier just to do this myself,” you know, not to use AI at all. And that’s because a lot of people aren’t using like good systems to help them, you know, replicate the stuff quickly. So in the newsletter I was reading, she was calling it doing unpaid onboarding for a robot, and I thought that was pretty perfect.
[00:01:48] So you’re basically onboarding the robot every single time you’re starting a new chat, and that’s not effective. So that’s what I wanna fix for you today, because on my last Thera AI Hub call, I taught this whole thing live and it really clicked for the therapists on the call in a big way. I think we had like 40 therapists there.
[00:02:08] I was doing like a Claude 101 and also like building a brand brain, and that’s just what I’m calling it. And once you have one, your AI stops sounding like a generic robot and starts sounding like you because it finally knows you. You don’t have to go back and repeat yourself over and over and over again
[00:02:27] And let me say why this even really matters, ’cause it’s not just about saving yourself time from typing. A member, one of the members, Barbara, she’s amazing. I love her so much. She was on a call a while back and she was frustrated. She’s great with ChatGPT. She’s got history with ChatGPT. It knows her, and she’s trying to move over to Claude mainly because she hears me talking about it and I’m teaching a lot of Claude stuff in the Thera AI Hub right now.
[00:02:55] And she’s like, “Kim, Claude just isn’t giving me the good stuff. You know, it’s just not doing it for me. It doesn’t know me the way ChatGPT does.” And she wasn’t doing anything wrong. That’s just how a new AI is. It’s essentially a stranger, right? So you wouldn’t hand a person you just met five minutes ago, like your entire business and say, “Write in my exact voice.
[00:03:17] Do everything the way I would do it. Sound just like me.” They can’t, right? They don’t know you yet. So of course it comes out sounding like every other therapist website on the internet if you haven’t trained it, right? The social media sounds super generic if you haven’t trained it, if it doesn’t know you.
[00:03:34] So the brand brain fixes that stranger problem that you get when you’re going into a new AI or a new chat, that sort of thing. So you build it once and then every tool you use can drink from that brand brain that you built out
[00:03:50] So here’s what a brand brain actually is, and you can do this in ChatGPT too, but just talking about Claude, there’s a feature in there called Projects, and a project is just like a little workspace that remembers a set of background info for everything that you do inside of it. So instead of like re-explaining yourself in every single chat, you explain yourself one time into the project, and then it’s just in there forever inside of that project.
[00:04:16] So that project becomes your brand brain. So anytime you wanna do anything with your brand, you go over to that project, you start a new chat, and it’s already got all the context built in.
[00:04:25] So I made mine and taught the members how to make theirs and literally called it Brand Brain so I’d be able to find it easily, ’cause once you get a lot of projects in there, it can be hard to find stuff inside of Claude. But if you name it pretty clearly, you’ll be able to find it again And into that project, I put the stuff that makes me, me.
[00:04:41] So like the URLs to my websites, my bio some of my service pages pages on my websites, my brand voice, like the document that I’ve curated with that kinda knows everything about me how I actually talk, the words that I like to use, the words that I would never use. Like, like Claude always wants me to say like, “Honestly,” or, “Real talk,” you know?
[00:05:03] Like I would never use those words, so over time I built out this thing like never use that word. I don’t talk like that. And just some of the p- past things that I’ve written. Like sometimes when I record these podcast episodes, I’ll take the transcript and give it to like my brand brain just so it hears how I talk, ’cause it could give me sort of a script.
[00:05:22] But when I go back over it or record an episode, it’s like this is just how I talk, you know? So it could pick up on my nuances that way too.
[00:05:29] So now when I go into that project and I say, “Write me a caption or draft me an email,” it’s not starting from zero, it’s starting from like months of me, years of me, context from everywhere that I put in, and it can just pull on all that, compute it, and then it knows like a perfect, like, I don’t know what’s the word, amagilation, amagilation?
[00:05:49] I can’t think what the word is, but a perfect like summary of who I am as a person
[00:05:54] And another thing I talked about in the call is
[00:05:57] Something that Claude made a lot easier, and I showed everybody on the call. So say ChatGPT is the one you– that knows you the best right now because you’ve been in there for a year or two years or whatever, and you don’t wanna lose all of that when you move over to Claude. You really don’t have to because Claude has a feature in the settings called Import Memory from Other AI Providers.
[00:06:17] Now, I say that, we did it last week, but I seem to remember there was a little teeny notice at the bottom that said that feature might be going away. So if you’re listening to this, go check it out and see if it’s still there. So literally it gives you a prompt and it will pull over what ChatGPT has learned about you.
[00:06:32] So it gives you a prompt to take over to ChatGPT or wherever you were working before. Put the prompt in, it’s gonna pull a bunch of stuff from you. You bring it back and you drop it over there, and Claude automatically is gonna update your memory inside of Claude
[00:06:43] So one thing I did tell my members though, and I really mean this, this, I want you to really do this before you actually pull things into another AI. Read it before you trust it, because ChatGPT has been saving little notes about you for a long time, and some of it is outdated or it’s just wrong, like it mixed up the context, it’s got the details wrong.
[00:07:04] Mine had stuff in there from projects I had finished ages ago. So when you bring it over, before you do, go through it like you would go through your closet and toss out what’s not you anymore. Like, I used to own a little red convertible and you know, ChatGPT knew that. And now when I brought those memories over to Claude, like I did this probably a year ago now, but when I brought it over there, it still will reference this red convertible and I’m like, “I literally don’t drive that car anymore.”
[00:07:29] Like, don’t put that into my social media posts. I’ve had to correct it a couple times, but that’s because I didn’t do my due diligence, like checking all the memories before I brought it over
[00:07:38] And if you don’t wanna use that import feature, like if it’s gone when you listen to this and you go check it out, there’s a simpler version that works with any AI really. You just go into the one that knows you and you ask it to describe you. Something like, “Based on everything you know about me from our conversations, write me a full profile I can hand to another AI so it understands me the way that you understand me.”
[00:07:59] And then it’ll spit out the whole document about you. Then you’ll save that document and it’s yours now. It lives on your computer. You could take it wherever you want to. Little Bird you know, Manus, Perplexity, anywhere you wanna go and train on who you are, you could take that document across to another one.
[00:08:17] Claude, ChatGPT. If you’re in Claude, you wanna go to ChatGPT. So yeah, pretty amazing, easy way to do it. But again, check the output before you copy and paste it somewhere else
[00:08:27] So that goes back to an episode I did a couple weeks ago about the rented, rented like land thing I keep going on and on about. If everything the AI knows about you only lives in one platform and you lose that platform one day, or it changes the rules, or overnight it disappears, I mean, who knows? You’ve lost all of that.
[00:08:46] So it’s worth the backup to have that information somewhere that you could just grab it and plug it in somewhere else if you need it Okay, so one more layer before I give you, like, the assignment kind of that we did together in the Thera AI Hub. Inside the Brand Brain project, you could also add skills.
[00:09:03] So skill is just a little file that holds a specific job. It’s like a recipe. In the Thera AI Hub, I’ve got a bunch of them. I think I have, like, 44 of them now that are these little recipes that I give the members to plug into their AI. And there’s one in there called Therapist Brand Clarity Builder, and that’s actually perfect for this because a lot of you can’t fill in your Brand Brain yet for a few reasons.
[00:09:26] Like, you haven’t really thought it through, or you don’t have that information all in one place. You’re not totally clear on what your brand is. You kind of know it in your gut, but you’ve never really, like, written it down. So this skill runs you through, like, an interview. So it asks you the questions about who you serve, who you s- what you stand for, how you want to come across, and at the end, you’ve got a brand actually defined that you can just plug into something like the Brand Brain if you want to build something like that out.
[00:09:54] Then you take those words and you pour them right into your Brand Brain, and then it’s, like, functioning and very easy to help you have really quality output using your AI
[00:10:03] So another thing I did in the training is I had everybody grab the human voice editor skill that I created for them, because once your AI knows you, you still want a final pass that strips out any leftover, like, AI-sounding stuff. I use that one basically on everything before I put any content out. I’ll just say, “Run the, the, the human voice editor skill through this to make sure that it passes all the, like, AI tells or whatever.”
[00:10:28] And I’ll just do that before I send anything out.
[00:10:31] And one reason I’m telling you guys about this, and I don’t know if you’ve gone through this, but I’m like replacing a social media agency that was just costing me a lot of money, honestly. They were doing a great job it just was expensive, and the only reason I could take it back over now is because my AI actually sounds like me.
[00:10:49] When I first started, my stuff was so generic, it was like almost embarrassing. Yeah. You know, still some of it does come out a little bit. I’ll think it doesn’t sound like AI sometimes, and somebody else will say, “That sounds like AI.” So, you know, it’s still a work in progress. I think it is for all of us, but having something like this to edit your voice is super helpful
[00:11:06] So the difference between then and now is not that I got better at prompting or something like that, it’s that I built out this brain brand and I’ve poured myself into it weeks, years, you know, walking around with my earbuds in, talking to it, feeding it my writing, correcting it when it sounded off. So now I’ve got like a test account that I started, my, my AI for therapists Instagram that I started, and I’m really trying the stuff out over there.
[00:11:33] So half the time I go back and read it and I’m like, “Ah, I probably wouldn’t have written that,” and I’m kinda correcting it still, but it’s getting better and better because I took the time to do the brand brain. So I hope that you find that helpful
[00:11:46] I hope you found that helpful, and here’s your assignment for this week if you’re listening. Go make a project in Claude, call it Brand Brain or whatever you wanna call it, and put your website and your bio in, and then that’s a starting point. That’s it. And if you want the skills that fill out the rest of the way, the Brand Clarity Builder, the Human Voice Editor, they’re waiting for you in the Thera AI Hub, and the link is always in the show notes for you to come join us over there.
[00:12:10] We’d love to see you. I’m on a little hiatus. The doors are closed right now, but if you try to sign up, you’ll get the wait list link for right now, and I think we’ll be opening again probably mid-October because I’m doing a bunch of improvements over there, combining the Thera AI Hub and the Clinical AI Club all into one amazing product.
[00:12:29] So it’s wait list right now, but soon you’ll have access again, and we’d love for you to join us if you haven’t already. Okay? Go build your brand brain, then send me an email if you want to at info@kimtolson.com. Tell me what your AI said when it asked you to describe you. Let me know what you think, and if it was helpful for you to build this out and be able to use this instead of just going like cold into every chat that you start with ChatGPT or Claude.
[00:12:54] Okay, talk to you guys later. Bye-bye.