The Reading

Will you rise to the level of your goals — or fall to the level of your systems?

Three things AI does to your voice

Brings down the average. AI picks the most probable next word. Your weird edges are where your voice lives. AI flattens them.

Substitutes your quirks. Your unusual syntax, your slang, your abrupt shifts — AI reads them as errors and removes them.

Normalizes your stance. If you write with a political, feminist, or confrontational edge, AI softens that into "both-sides commentary" or "bland empowerment talk."

The cost of staying quiet

The cost of staying quiet is not neutral. The conversation fills with whoever shows up. Right now there are roughly 86,000 AI podcasts looking for guests who are not tech bros. Conference organizers are reading 200 applications and choosing the few that have a point of view.

Anne has given the same talk for $0 and for $12,000. Same talk. The difference both times was the digital footprint behind her name.

The Workbook

The Reading

In Chapter 1 you decided your voice was worth defending. Good. Now you need a written record of what your voice actually is — specific enough that an LLM can read it and stop sanding you down.

This is voice DNA — the four elements that make your sentences sound like you and not like the average internet writer.

The Voice DNA framework

Diction — your word choice. Plain or ornate. Slang or formal. The words you reach for first, and the ones you never reach for at all.

Syntax — your sentence structure. Short and punchy. Long and looping. Fragments. Run-ons. Where you put the verb.

Tone — the emotional register. Sarcastic. Warm. Authoritative. Pragmatic. Dry. Urgent. Funny.

Quirks — your sacred words (the ones you always use) and your bursty words (the ones that carry rhythm). Plus the rules you break on purpose.

Sacred words and bursty words

Sacred words are the ones you use constantly. They are not fancy. They are not always grammatical. They are the words that signal "this is me" to anyone who has read your stuff before.

Bursty words are the ones that carry the rhythm. The intensifiers, the swerves, the words that change the energy in a sentence. They show up rarely, but when they do, the sentence lifts.

Talk, don't type

The fastest way to capture your real voice is to stop typing and start talking. Type, and you self-edit in real time. Talk, and your asides, your stories, your jokes, your rhythm come out. The asides are where the voice lives.

The three sins of AI against voice

Brings down the average. AI picks the most probable next word. Your weird edges live in the improbable next word. AI flattens them.

Substitutes your quirks. Your unusual syntax, your slang, your abrupt shifts — AI reads them as errors and removes them.

Normalizes your stance. If you write with a political, feminist, or confrontational edge, AI softens that into "both-sides commentary" or "bland empowerment talk."

The defense is to feed AI your voice on purpose, every single time. Which means you need it written down.

The Workbook

The Reading

You've got a trust moat to build — a digital footprint that proves you're a real person, that you've been one for years, and that you mean to keep being one. Organizers and bookers check before they say yes. What they find is what they decide on.

Anne has given the same talk for $0 and for $12,000. Same talk. The difference both times was what showed up when someone searched her name.

Her frame on the profile itself is — it's a billboard. It answers one thing. What the heck should people do with you? Hire you, book you for a talk, or bring you onto a panel — pick the main one and point everything else toward it.

The Know, Like, Trust funnel

Anne runs her LinkedIn presence on the Know, Like, Trust factor — the three stages someone moves through before they hire, book, or refer you.

• Know — they recognize your name and your face.
• Like — they read your stuff and want what you make.
• Trust — they book you, buy from you, refer you, or invite you in.

Why LinkedIn carries the weight

Anne's take — it feels boring and salesy, and it's also where the people with budgets are.

• Over 1 billion members in more than 200 countries, built for B2B
• Decision-makers are active on it
• Google trusts it, so your profile lands on page one when someone searches your name
• The search runs on keywords, which is why AI has to be in your headline if you speak on AI

What goes on the billboard

Eight pieces do the work. Anne's checklist, straight from the deck.

• Banner — your personality, your logo, and what you're promoting right now.
• Photo — profesh, facing the camera, recent, and probably not AI-generated.
• Headline — power-packed terms, with AI in it if you speak on AI.
• Company logo — needs a Company Page to attach to.
• Link — to your website, your opt-in, or your portfolio.
• Hashtags — your content pillars, which you'll define in Chapter 4.
• Contact info — fill in everything, open to all.
• Bonus — record how to pronounce your name and add a welcome note to your page.

The deeper sections

Three sections below the fold do the heavy lifting once the billboard is built.

• Featured — your offers, your personality, your other socials, your opt-ins. Put your best proof here.
• About — don't overthink it. Open with a hook strong enough to earn the "see more" click. It's not a repeat of your CV. End with a call to action and add five skills.
• Experience — answer why anyone should care. Not boring like a CV. Include your skills and add media.
• Recommendations — this is your social proof. Give them and ask for them, don't be shy, get a breadth of people, and hand each one a few bullet points so it's easy for them to say yes.

Your three brand checks

Once the billboard is built, run it past the three checks Anne uses.

• Sounds Like You — does someone hear your voice when they read it, or a corporate version of it.
• Resonance — does the profile speak to the people you want, not to everyone.
• Visibility — are you posting often enough that your activity shows you're present, not silent.

Algorithm Karma

Visibility isn't only about what you post. Anne's rule of thumb is a 10-to-1 comment-to-post ratio — for every post you publish, leave ten real comments on other people's. Comments tell the algorithm you're an active contributor, and the algorithm returns the favor by boosting the reach of your own content. That's the karma.

Commenting is also audience borrowing. Comment with substance under the big voices in your field — Greg Eisenberg, Allie Miller, Nicole Weffer — and your expertise lands in front of a targeted audience someone else already gathered. Richard van der Blom's annual LinkedIn algorithm reports document the mechanics, year after year.

The LinkedIn tool stack

Four ways to put power behind the billboard once it's built. Algorithm Karma is free — the rest are paid upgrades you pick based on how you sell.

Connection request etiquette

A personalized message creates a debt of response — if she has to compose a reply before she can comfortably accept, your request is more likely to sit ignored. A plain request lets her glance at your billboard, see what to do with you, and say yes without homework.

Your profile doesn't have to be perfect. Do the basics, point it at one answer, and it works.

The Workbook

The Reading

Anne thinks in three content pillars — one personal touchstone and two professional topics. The touchstone is the low-stakes way in, and it's the thing podcasters and audiences remember. The two professional topics are things you could already talk about to a friend over coffee for an afternoon.

Touchstones from Anne's slide

• Dogs
• Improv
• Underwater basket weaving
• A personal story
• An origin story
• Anne's own — her wedding-ring story, her red-shoe rule for sales calls

Professional topic categories from Anne's slide

• Privacy and Security
• AI for Job Seekers
• AI and Your Subject Matter Expertise
• AI and Fundraising

The Workbook

Take It Further

• Which pillar would you still want to be associated with five years from now
• What pillar is your friends-and-clients data already pointing toward that you have been ignoring
• What would change if your personal touchstone was the part you led with instead of the part you closed with

The Reading

When Anne reviewed 200 CREATE applications, the AI-vanilla titles got cut in the first pass. The title is where your voice has to come through.

The title quality ladder from the CREATE review

• Excellent — "Why Creatives Will Be the Next Tech Giants" · "Being a Time Traveler in Your Own Life"
• Good — "Scaling Towards AGI with Mixture-of-Experts Models" · "The Human-AI Delta™ — Designing AI Transformation for Human Judgment, Not Just Automation"
• Not ideal — "AI That Works for You — Designing Human-Centered AI Systems That Drive Real ROI" · "AI Essentials for Professionals — Becoming Irreplaceable in the Age of AI"

The not-ideal titles use the same words a thousand other applicants used. The excellent ones have a point of view in them.

The Workbook

Take It Further

• What is the one phrase only you would say across a stack of 200 applications
• Which of your favorite recent reads or shows used a title structure you could borrow
• If a stranger only read your title, what would they assume about your stance

The Reading

Four places speaking gigs come from.

• Your industry — conferences and events in the field you already work in.
• An industry you want to enter — speaking is a way to establish presence in a new space before you are fully in it.
• Local groups — libraries, chambers of commerce, and business groups that look for speakers. In Anne's words — "lots and lots of people doing the library, Chamber of Commerce, lots of opportunities to get reps."
• Conferences — from large national events to small niche gatherings.

Go where you are not tapped in yet

The numbers behind the bench

The bench is long on purpose. Anne went through a TEDx coaching program, and one number from it explains why fifteen names is a floor, not a ceiling.

The bench becomes a system

The list you build in this chapter is the start of a pitching operation you can eventually hand to someone else.

The Workbook

Take It Further

• Which prospect on the list has the closest audience-fit to your current paying clients
• Which stretch stage do you keep talking yourself out of pursuing
• What would happen if you reserved one hour per week just for researching new prospects

The Reading

It is easy to think the job is done when you hit send. You pitched them, check. No. The work is just starting.

Before you pitch, be a guest worth booking

Do the thing almost nobody does. Listen to the podcast. Leave a rating. All any booker or podcast host cares about is whether their audience is well served by what you bring. One line on what you heard, watched, or read of theirs is worth more than any accolade list.

The cadence

When Anne does outreach, every one of these dates goes on the calendar before she hits send on the first email.

• Day 1 — the first email, a human one.
• Day 3 — the follow-up. Three days, because you don't want it to go cold, and you want them to know you are a follow-up person who is on point and on time.
• Day 9 — one more, still warm, still worth sending.
• Day 30 — one last time, then pause and put them on the island of unloved toys for a while.

The island of unloved toys

Coming back around reads as wanting it. When someone applies to CREATE more than once, we look at them differently. That is someone worth a meeting even when you're not yet sure what they're bringing. That is points.

The anatomy of a Day 1 email

Be a human being. That is most of it.

• One line on what you heard, watched, or read of theirs.
• One line on what you would bring that their audience would not get from anyone else.
• A specific ask — "would you be open to a 15-minute call next week" beats "let me know if you're interested."

Two moves that get you booked again. Ask for the pre-call — if a podcast does not offer one, say "I know this may be atypical, but could I have a 15-minute meeting to connect about the topic." And when you find a hello@ or info@ address, use it. At our level a VA is usually watching that box, and they may prefer it goes to a human on their end.

The Workbook

Take It Further

• Who is on your re-engage list right now that you could re-pitch this week with a one-line update
• What would your follow-up rhythm look like if you treated it as a habit instead of an effort
• What part of the cadence could you hand off to a teammate or a VA today

The Reading

Every engagement should move someone from hearing your name to signing a contract. A speaking gig only pays off when you treat it as the middle of a funnel, not the end of a transaction.

Anne's four-stage speaking funnel

• Visibility and Awareness — impressions. People hear your name and see your work.
• Know, Like, Trust — the fastest way to build trust at scale.
• Value Proposition — they understand what you can do for them.
• Secure Contracts — conversion. The reason you said yes in the first place.

If a gig does not have a path through all four stages, the juice may not be worth the squeeze.

When to say no

Sometimes the right call is no.

• Hassle and burnout — volunteer organizers, multiple pre-meetings, decks to submit and re-submit. Know your bandwidth before you say yes.
• Value of your time — every hour on this gig is an hour not on other business development. Run the math.
• Fear of being found out — if the only reason you would say yes is because you're flattered, you may be filling someone else's need instead of your own.

Move people down the funnel after the talk

Most speakers walk off the stage and wait. The ones who convert do these things instead.

• Create a QR code that leads to a follow-up page
• Build slides with key takeaways and make them accessible post-event
• Build a microsite or Linktree as a single access point
• Offer an AMA follow-up session for advanced participants
• Tag every attendee in your database
• Send a 48-hour follow-up email
• Document the questions people asked — they become the next talk
• Follow up with the champions from the audience

The Workbook

Take It Further

• What is the offer at the bottom of your funnel right now, and is it ready for someone who just heard you speak
• Which speaking gigs you said yes to last year should have been a no
• What is the one piece of follow-up infrastructure — a landing page, an AMA session, a microsite — that would change everything if it existed before your next talk

The Reading

Four weeks. One pitch wave, and a follow-up rhythm you keep using after the month closes. The point is reps. Reps are how this becomes muscle memory.

You have the foundation — your voice words, your LinkedIn billboard, your three content pillars, your prospect list, your pitching cadence, and your post-event follow-up system. This chapter turns all of it into a four-week operational plan.

By the time you finish Week 4, the hardest part — starting — is behind you. The cadence runs itself from there.

The Workbook

Take It Further

• What did Week 1 teach you about the gap between your stated voice words and your written voice
• Which pitch got the most traction and why
• What does your next 30-day plan look like, given what you just learned