Become A Better Communicator In The Age of AI with Jessica Mehring
You’re committed to becoming a better communicator to help your clients more effectively—and to turbocharge your marketing. Has AI complicated or instead simplified standing out with your communications? Consultant, author and writer Jessica Mehring shares the results of her research on the impact of generative AI on communicating strategically:
Why even though she writes professionally, Jessica doesn’t use AI for writing (note how she instead leverages AI in the writing process).
How the two key cons of using generative AI can be overwhelmingly trumped by its advantages.
How empathy, listening and storytelling are intertwined in becoming a more effective communicator.
Why becoming a better storyteller is actually easier in the age of AI.
Specific use cases where AI can help you become a better storyteller (one in particular may well surprise you).
LINKS
Jessica Mehring Website | LinkedIn
Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram
BIO
Jessica Mehring is a strategic consultant for technology companies, a published author, and M.A. in communication (May 2024). Through her graduate academic work, she has closely examined the impact of generative AI on strategic communication, and is exploring how storytelling fosters empathy and can help us connect in a modern context.
When she’s not working to bring more humanity into tech marketing, you can find her researching the intersections of art and science, creativity and data, and communication and innovation.
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RESOURCES FOR SOLOISTS
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The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00 – 00:28
Jessica Mehring: In the age of AI, storytelling and listening being an important aspect of that is more important than it’s ever been because AI will never be human. And as humans, storytelling is how we relate to 1 another. It’s more important than ever. It reveals our humanity in ways that AI will never be able to replicate. And it connects us human to human, company to customer, in a way that AI cannot replicate.
00:33 – 01:10
Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to Soloist Women, where we’re all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I’m Rochelle Moulton, and today I’m here with Jessica Mearing, a strategic consultant for technology companies and an author with an almost master’s in communication, unless you’re listening to this by May 2024, through her professional and academic work she has closely examined the impact of generative AI on strategic communication and is exploring how storytelling fosters empathy and can help us connect in a modern context. Jessica, welcome.
01:10 – 01:13
Jessica Mehring: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited about this conversation.
01:15 – 01:47
Rochelle Moulton: I am too. And I’m excited to talk to you about this whole idea of AI and its impact on our communications. And in between the times that we were emailing back and forth, I was actually stunned when I read that the Masters of the Universe at Davos ignored 2 inflammatory wars in favor of obsessing over AI and its impact on the global workforce. And the wars in the Middle East and the Ukraine didn’t even make their top 10 issues list. So I mean we could talk all day long about whether AI is good or bad for
01:47 – 02:03
Rochelle Moulton: global business, but let’s 0 in on how in this early age, relatively early age of AI, we can become better strategic communicators and even leaders because I think it’s far more interesting to talk about how we can use AI strategically.
02:04 – 02:26
Jessica Mehring: Oh, yes, absolutely. I was, I was actually shocked too. I went to the Davos website and just kind of went through their 4 takeaways. And you’re absolutely right. AI was in the mix on all 4 of those. That’s so telling, right? To where we are in the world, where we are in the marketplace with AI being such a hot topic.
02:27 – 02:52
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, I then read another piece that said that the Davos things are always wrong. Because it’s the CEOs who are insulated from anyone ever disagreeing with their opinion. So we’ll see. I mean, right, it could go either way. But maybe we could start by giving generative AI a quick definition. What is it specifically compared to say, other types of artificial intelligence?
02:53 – 03:34
Jessica Mehring: Yeah, I’m glad you asked that question because I do feel like there’s a little bit of confusion around what generative AI is and isn’t. Generative AI in a nutshell is AI that creates content. And that can be written content, audio, video, images. This is AI that creates, which really is different than the AI that we’ve had in our lives for decades. When you think about Alexa or you think about Arumba or you think about Siri or any of those kinds of devices and software that we’ve had in our lives for as long as I can remember.
03:34 – 04:17
Jessica Mehring: Predictive text, that’s another 1. Predictive text on our phone or in Gmail. That’s all AI. Even grammar checkers. The grammar checkers in Word or now there’s really advanced software that checks our grammar, That’s all AI. So we’re used to AI in our lives in those ways, but generative AI is different because it creates. And it does this through natural language processing. So it understands human language and then produces a human-like response. What was so interesting to me, I did a deep dive on this back spring of last year, I did an independent study with the university
04:18 – 05:02
Jessica Mehring: and looked at how generative AI is impacting strategic communication. And of course, because I was just living and breathing that subject, I was talking to a lot of people about it. And what I was shocked by is how people didn’t really understand what it was, what generative AI was, but also didn’t understand some very serious limitations, which are still limitations today, even though there have been updates since I did that study. 1 of the limitations, of course, being hallucination. And I hope that your listeners all know what hallucination is. It’s when chat GPT lies to us.
05:03 – 05:43
Jessica Mehring: It’s when generative AI gives us a very confident factual response that isn’t actually fact. And when I was talking to people about this a year ago, I got some really funny responses. People would say, oh, hallucination. What a fun word. Did you make that up? No, no, I didn’t make up the word hallucination. That’s the term for when These tools lie to us when these tools give us facts that aren’t facts. And I realized that people are using tools like chat GPT without understanding that not everything chat GPT was giving them was true.
05:43 – 05:45
Rochelle Moulton: Yes. People didn’t know
05:45 – 05:45
Jessica Mehring: that.
05:45 – 05:46
Rochelle Moulton: That’s interesting.
05:46 – 05:56
Jessica Mehring: The average person I spoke with did not understand that, which was really terrifying when you think of this environment of disinformation that we’re living in right now.
05:56 – 06:01
Rochelle Moulton: We’re in an election year. This is not the year for that to happen.
06:01 – 06:43
Jessica Mehring: Oh my goodness. Yeah, so that’s something I’ve really been talking about a lot. I’ve been doing some student teaching, I’ve been TAing classes and giving presentations to students at the university. And that’s 1 thing that I’ve really hammered on is these tools hallucinate. If you are using tools like ChatGPT, and that’s just 1 example, to help you create your content, then you need to check every single fact it gives you. I mean, fact check until you’re blue in the face. You cannot trust this output as fact because it’s not fact. Generative AI is a prediction model.
06:43 – 07:13
Jessica Mehring: The tools like ChatGPT are, they predict the next right word. They are language prediction models. These are not tools that know the difference between fact and fiction. ChatGPT doesn’t have ethics. It’s doing what it was programmed to do, which is give you an answer to your question. Whether that answer is true or false, well, it doesn’t know that. That’s your job as a user of these tools. It’s your job to check your facts.
07:13 – 07:21
Rochelle Moulton: What about the creative aspect of this? Can it give you answers that are actually lifted from someone else’s content?
07:22 – 07:53
Jessica Mehring: It can. Yeah, it absolutely can. There’s always the risk of plagiarism, which again, I’m really hoping nobody’s taking the output from from these tools and then publishing it as their own for many reasons, 1 of them being, yes, there is the risk of plagiarism. Generative AI was trained on a mass amount of data, much of it scraped from the internet and much of it under copyright. So there’s that issue. But then you also have the issue of AI output is not protected by copyright.
07:53 – 08:08
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, that was where it was going to be my next question. What you’re saying is if we use let’s take chat GPT as an example, if we use that to write something and we add some other pieces to it, we can’t copyright that completed piece.
08:09 – 08:45
Jessica Mehring: Yeah, when you add your own words to it, it’s a fine line. But if you are taking output from these tools and you are not editing it, changing it, making it your own, if it is direct output from a tool like chat GPT, and we’ll just keep picking on chat GPT because that’s the most popular right now, But if it’s directly copied from output from chat GPT, it is not protected by copyright. And same thing goes for image generation tools. If you use mid journey to create a book cover, your book cover is not protected by
08:45 – 08:56
Jessica Mehring: copyright. Somebody else could use the same book cover. Interesting. Yeah. Not a lot of legal protections for, for creations, for content from AI output.
08:56 – 09:23
Rochelle Moulton: Although, I mean, I’m sure it will get better, but there’s nothing I’ve pulled out of chat GPT that I would want to put my name to so far. I’m glad to hear that. I’m sure it’s going to get better, though. There’s only 1 way that curve goes. But I did see in a LinkedIn post that you do not use AI at all for writing. And obviously, writing is how you make your living writing in strategic communications. Talk us through your thought process with that.
09:23 – 09:55
Jessica Mehring: Yeah, well, and to be clear, I know we’re talking about a lot of negatives with generative AI right now. There are some positives. And I went into my independent study a year ago feeling very positive and came out on the other side a little more pragmatic So I feel like there’s a lot of pros and cons. I’m happy to talk about when it comes to my own writing I use chat GPT and tools like that for as a thesaurus to help me come up with more creative words. I Use it to help me brainstorm analogies. I
09:55 – 10:35
Jessica Mehring: use it to Help me think through a structure of a piece or maybe re-swizzle an outline if something isn’t flowing quite right. I use it to summarize my own work, which helps me see holes in my thinking. What I do not use it for is writing. And there are a few reasons for that. 1, 1 big 1 for me is language homogeneity, and that just means that everybody sounds the same. Yeah. And I saw evidence of this in the study that I did last spring, which was essentially a literature review where I was looking at actual
10:35 – 11:21
Jessica Mehring: studies done by social scientists and there is already evidence that generative AI is creating language homogeneity. That means a lot of written content specifically is sounding the same. We’re all sounding the same. There’s very little differentiation. There’s been a big push, of course, to remove bias from content, which in Fairness is a good thing, but the resulting content means that everybody sounds exactly the same. Now, I’m a professional writer. I write copy for my clients. I write books. I’m the author of business books and romance novels and cozy mystery. Business
11:21 – 11:21
Rochelle Moulton: and romance.
11:21 – 11:45
Jessica Mehring: Business and romance. Yes, yes. What a combo. My own voice is important in the content that I’m writing for myself and for my business. My clients’ voices are important in the copy that I’m writing for them. And I wanna make sure that we’re not all sounding the same because how boring would that be? Well, and
11:45 – 11:52
Rochelle Moulton: then why would you need a writer, right? You just go to chat GPT and type in this thing and just pop it into wherever you’re going to
11:52 – 12:05
Jessica Mehring: use it. Yeah, well, and I work with technology companies. So differentiation is everything. If my clients all sound exactly alike, how do their customers know who to choose? Exactly. That’s a big reason.
12:05 – 12:14
Rochelle Moulton: You said earlier that, you know, there are lots of pros and cons, and we were kind of focusing on the cons. What do you see as some of the pros, especially after you did this study?
12:15 – 12:53
Jessica Mehring: These tools are really great, I think, as jumping off points for your own thinking and for your own creativity. I think a lot of us who are in more creative spaces especially can suffer from what I call the blank page blues. And that just means sometimes you’re staring at a blank page and you just don’t know what to put down you don’t know where to start you’ve got a lot to say or maybe you have nothing to say but it just feels absolutely overwhelming to be staring at a blank page. And generative AI can really help
12:53 – 13:28
Jessica Mehring: just get those creative juices flowing when you just go back and forth with ChatGPT, have a conversation, see what comes out of it. That can be a great jumping off point for your own thinking. And you can even ask ChatGPT, hey, I want to have a conversation with you about this topic. Can you ask me questions about it? And it will. And you can answer back and have a conversation with ChatGPT and just to get your creative juices flowing. Now another thing that you can do with these tools is to start structuring your thoughts in better
13:28 – 14:07
Jessica Mehring: ways. I’m big on structure because no matter how great your idea is, no matter how unique your take is, if you don’t structure a piece of writing well then your reader can’t follow along and they’re gonna drop off and they’re gonna go to something else. So structuring your writing is really important And I think that tools like ChatGPT and other generative AI can really help us to just think through how we might structure something for a logical flow. And tools like ChatGPT are also evening the playing field in some ways. Now there’s a lot of people
14:07 – 14:58
Jessica Mehring: in the world who are really great ideators. They are creative thinkers. They come up with really unique takes on things, but for 1 reason or another, maybe it’s a neurological difference, maybe it’s an educational difference, but they struggle to put their ideas into strong writing. Now that’s something that I think generative AI can really help with. Folks who are strong ideators but maybe have weaker writing skills, this is an opportunity for them to get their ideas down in more structured and effectively written formats so the rest of us can get the benefit of these creative thinkers.
14:59 – 15:31
Rochelle Moulton: I just have to share an example. I was working with a client who really didn’t like to write. And I’m not going to say that he couldn’t write, because he could. Really super smart and very creative, but was really intimidated by writing. And he literally used ChatGPT to help him write his website and to help him write some marketing descriptions. And obviously it needed work. But what I loved about it is I could see the difference in his confidence at the very beginning to once he had gone through and produced a first draft that he could
15:31 – 16:09
Rochelle Moulton: feel good about. So, yeah. And there’s a lot of people who are really good ideators, as you call them, who aren’t as comfortable writing. Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. So, 1 of the tenets of your work, which I know this audience is radically in sync with, is that storytelling fosters empathy, which helps us to connect with others. And of course, that draws in clients and buyers who ultimately buy our stuff. Do you see storytelling any differently with the proliferation of AI? I mean, can we use storytelling as an even more powerful tool now? Like, how do you see
16:09 – 16:10
Rochelle Moulton: it?
16:10 – 16:38
Jessica Mehring: That’s so interesting that you asked this question because I really have been feeling like storytelling is more important than ever, which is a big statement because storytelling is how we’ve communicated human to human since we lived in caves. It’s always been important. That has been a fundamental tenet of human communication. But now it differentiates us from the machines.
16:40 – 16:40
Rochelle Moulton: True.
16:40 – 17:09
Jessica Mehring: Yeah. AI cannot replicate human experience. AI can replicate a lot of things, but it can’t replicate human experience. And because it can’t, it can’t replicate how we humans relate to 1 another. And story is how we relate to 1 another. So Chad GPT might be able to tell you a story, but there’s going to be a fundamental lack of humanity to it.
17:09 – 17:11
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, you can feel it.
17:11 – 17:18
Jessica Mehring: Yeah, you can. You can feel it. It doesn’t have human experience, and our stories come from human experience.
17:20 – 17:53
Rochelle Moulton: Well, it’s also interesting with our audience that we’re talking to today because it’s women primarily, although we do have quite a few men who listen in. And 1 could argue, I’d love to hear your take on this, that women are even more wired for story than men. But the other side of that is that most of the people listening are experts at what they do. And a lot of us have been told, myself included, don’t tell stories because you have to look like the authority. You have to be kind of corporate and in control and you
17:53 – 18:07
Rochelle Moulton: have to modulate your language and yourself, right, to fit in. Now, we know that all of that is not true, but it’s still been inculcated in many of us. So what do you say about that?
18:07 – 18:09
Jessica Mehring: Oh, wow. Okay, so I have a lot
18:09 – 18:11
Rochelle Moulton: to say. I gave you a lot to unpack. I know.
18:12 – 18:52
Jessica Mehring: This was something I looked into relatively recently to see if there were any actual studies that could show that women were more wired for story than men. And listening too is another element of storytelling and communication that I’m very interested in and that I study a lot. I looked for studies showing what I feel a lot of us think, which is that women are more wired for listening than men, and I couldn’t find any strong evidence to say that. My personal belief is that a lot of this is socialized, that men and women are equally strong
18:52 – 19:08
Jessica Mehring: storytellers and equally strong listeners. We’re maybe just socialized a little differently. Now I want to know who’s out there talking about how we shouldn’t be telling stories because that is heresy. Well, you
19:08 – 19:46
Rochelle Moulton: have to remember, you know, and again, I don’t want to put my own situation and replace that for the listener, but In my case, it was a big consulting company. And the idea is that you are a corporate soldier. You keep your personality to a minimum. You fit in with the environment. You use the royal we when you speak. Those kinds of things. And the thing is that experience is not that different than it is with many corporations, probably not like small, nimble companies and some on the edge tech space companies, but that kind of traditional
19:46 – 20:14
Rochelle Moulton: companies selling soap and detergent and mainframes, for example. There’s a lot of that still in there. And I’ve worked with people who’ve just come out of that environment. And it feels so empowering to them to go, Oh, my God, I can say this, however I want to. I can be who I want to be I can say it the way that I want to but it usually takes a while for them to give themselves Permission to do that because they’re so wired from being a different way
20:15 – 20:56
Jessica Mehring: Wow Yeah, when we lose that storytelling aspect of ourselves, we lose all human connection. But you know, that that actually is really good for my business because companies hire me to come in and bring the humanity back to their marketing. Because I think they, they see they’ve lost it with the royal we, they’ve lost it with that disconnection that they’ve created. And storytelling is such a fundamental part of how we connect human to human. And in the end, whether we’re talking about a small business or a global enterprise, as business people, we are selling and marketing
20:56 – 21:33
Jessica Mehring: and engaging with human beings, even in B2B. Even when we are selling and marketing and engaging with B2B companies, there’s still human beings on the other side of that screen. And storytelling is how we connect human to human. Narrative is how we cognitively process social information. That is how the human brain is wired. And to lose that, to lose that in how we engage as businesses is to lose all our humanity and then to lose touch with the humans who are our customers?
21:34 – 21:49
Rochelle Moulton: A mic drop. If anybody listening is still thinking about whether or not they can and should, I put that in quotes because I hate should, should tell stories, just listen in.
21:49 – 21:50
Jessica Mehring: Oh, please, please.
21:51 – 22:12
Rochelle Moulton: So I want to kind of intersect this with AI. So how can we use AI then to help us communicate strategically? So we know we want to use story, We know we want to use story. We know we want to use some of the tactical tools that AI provides us. Can it help us communicate more strategically and how?
22:13 – 22:57
Jessica Mehring: I think that AI can help us be better storytellers. If we know the story we want to tell, whether that is our story, maybe we’re a founder telling the story of how we founded the company, maybe we are a brand telling our brand story, our mission, vision, values, or maybe we’re marketers and we’re trying to tell the story of our customers so our customers can see themselves in our marketing content, which that’s a lot of what I do is help my clients connect with their audiences by telling their audiences stories. To write stories that are effective,
22:58 – 23:32
Jessica Mehring: there are certain things that we need. We need a narrative, which is the overarching journey and the purpose, the who, who’s the hero, who are the characters, what’s their goal, what are the obstacles, that’s your narrative. And then you need the story, which that’s the series of events culminating in the solution to a problem. You need the narrative and you need the story. And AI can help us kind of work that out. Once we have a general idea of the story we’re telling, then we can collaborate with tools like ChatGPT to really work out more of
23:32 – 24:17
Jessica Mehring: the details of how we wanna present that. What I love to use it for is to make the language more vivid too. I would love to see more technology companies embracing this. My clients are great about it. I love working with my clients because they just, they really lean into vibrant language when we use it strategically. Think about using tools like ChatGPT to develop analogies that can help your audience to understand a concept within the context of their own experience. Create a metaphor that anybody can relate to. Use chat GPT as an extended thesaurus to come
24:17 – 24:26
Jessica Mehring: up with more vibrant verbs so we’re not leaning on those those ugly adverbs that we’re all trying to cut out, right? We’re all trying to cut out our adverbs.
24:27 – 24:38
Rochelle Moulton: It’s so funny you say that because I always have thesaurus.com open in my browser and it never occurred to me to use chat GPT for that it’s a really interesting use case.
24:38 – 25:20
Jessica Mehring: Yeah I used to use a tool called Word Hippo. I loved it because it was just it had more it gave me more than a standard thesaurus did but chat GPT does that but it allows me also to keep going so if I ask chat GPT give me give me 10 different ways to say enable Like let’s get that word out of our vocabulary and give me 10 different words or phrases that mean enable. And maybe there’s 1 word in there that’s, oh, we’re getting close, but we’re not quite there. I can prompt it again to
25:20 – 25:50
Jessica Mehring: say, take number 3 and give me 10 variations of that. And it’s almost this branching thesaurus that really gets me, it really helps me 0 in on language that is precise. It’s exactly what I mean to say. It’s vibrant in that it’s meaningful and different, but not in an overly academic way. And yeah, it’s just, it helps me use language more effectively.
25:51 – 26:10
Rochelle Moulton: I’m kind of underlying AI can help you be a better storyteller. I don’t think that’s intuitive at all. It’s kind of a non obvious outcome from AI. So I that makes me really excited about how we can use the technology. That’s good. I’m going
26:10 – 26:10
Jessica Mehring: to connect
26:10 – 26:38
Rochelle Moulton: this to you talk a lot about the role of listening and how relational leadership is replacing authoritarian leadership styles. I feel like we could just switch out communication for leadership in that sentence. Most everybody I know doesn’t appreciate authoritarian style communications like, you must do it this way because I know best. So again, in this age of AI, how do we make listening our superpower?
26:39 – 27:08
Jessica Mehring: Oh, I love this question. We’ve seen a transition in the last 3 decades from leadership being authoritarian or hierarchical to then we stepped into this transformational leadership model framework And now we’re stepping into relational leadership. I’m sure you’ve noticed it too. There’s a lot more conversation around empathy.
27:09 – 27:09
Rochelle Moulton: Mm-hmm.
27:10 – 27:54
Jessica Mehring: And that’s our relational leadership models coming about. Empathy is becoming a superpower for leaders. And to really develop empathy, we also need to be able to develop our listening skills. Listening is how we develop empathy. And when we think about this in the communication context, communication involves transmission and reception, speaking and listening, or writing and listening. And when we talk about communication and when we talk about leadership, often we are talking about the transmission piece of that. How do I say things in the right way? How do I write things in the right way? And we
27:54 – 28:39
Jessica Mehring: leave off the other side of the coin which is reception or listening. They are equally important. You can’t communicate as human beings if you’re not doing both speaking and listening. Listening, it helps us understand each other. And when we’re in a leadership position, listening helps us find solutions that work for everyone. It really allows us to become those relational leaders. And another thing people don’t really think about with the listening aspect of communication is that listening is an activity. Listening is not a passive thing. It’s an activity that we do. And so it’s something that we
28:39 – 28:59
Jessica Mehring: can improve on. Once we become aware that, ooh, maybe I’m lacking in the listening part of the communication piece. Listening is something that we can learn how to do better. And when we learn how to listen better, we become better leaders, better communicators, and just all around better human beings. And
29:00 – 29:25
Rochelle Moulton: the word you left out is better sellers of stuff, right? That too. I know, we all wanna be good human beings and we also wanna be able to sell our stuff to people who need it and who will value it. But yeah, I love that. And if you ever doubt if listening is an activity, listen intently to someone for a half an hour and see if you don’t feel that you’ve used energy in that exchange. Yeah.
29:25 – 29:26
Jessica Mehring: Oh my goodness.
29:26 – 29:41
Rochelle Moulton: I mean some people really gain energy by listening. I mean a lot of politicians when they’re not talking are actually quite good listeners. They will sit and listen to what their constituents have to say and it’s not always said in a pleasant, pretty way.
29:41 – 30:19
Jessica Mehring: Oh yeah, well I wish more politicians would do that. I just came across a story in a book I’m reading, a book on listening of all things, and it talked about how Eleanor Roosevelt, back during the Depression and during World War II, she traveled across the nation and listened to the stories of the average American, and then took those stories back to the White House. And of course she had a radio show, so she was telling a lot of these stories and interviewing a lot of people for her radio show. And I was so struck by
30:19 – 30:50
Jessica Mehring: that, that the First Lady traveled away from the White House. And of course, yeah, back then, that was even even more bonkers for a woman to do that. She traveled across the nation and she listened. And because of that, we had solutions to the depression that I don’t necessarily think we could come up with in today’s environment where politicians don’t listen quite as actively.
30:50 – 31:27
Rochelle Moulton: Oh plus I think we read the same book it was the Doris Kearns Goodwin book it’s called No Ordinary Time but the other thing she did during the war is she is the 1 that helped to get some of the civil rights movement. She helped to spark it. I mean, obviously she was reacting to what she was listening to, but she was a helper in getting that done. She was responsible for having daycare at a lot of these big munitions factories that were in places that were building planes and bombers and trucks for the war so
31:27 – 31:47
Rochelle Moulton: that women could be in the workforce. Unfortunately, they closed them all at the end of the war. But yeah, it was that listening because she had no need for childcare. She was born a wealthy woman of privilege, but she listened and she shared it in a really profound way. I love that example so much.
31:47 – 32:00
Jessica Mehring: Me too. When I came across that, I was like, oh my gosh. I really dug in and read up on Eleanor Roosevelt. I’m so in awe of what she did. It started with simply listening.
32:02 – 32:23
Rochelle Moulton: I want to talk just a little bit about your business, Jessica, because you shared some interesting info with me, but I don’t want to cut off this conversation about empathy and listening and storytelling. Is there something else that you’d like to say about this that kind of wraps it up with a with a big red bow?
32:24 – 32:27
Jessica Mehring: Oh wow, I really wish I’d come prepared with like a one-liner for you.
32:29 – 32:33
Rochelle Moulton: That’s okay, Some complex things don’t do well with a one-liner.
32:33 – 33:11
Jessica Mehring: Yeah, I mean, I just, to kind of really hammer this, in the age of AI, storytelling and listening being an important aspect of that is more important than it’s ever been. Because AI will never be human. And as humans, storytelling is how we relate to 1 another. It’s more important than ever. It reveals our humanity in ways that AI will never be able to replicate. And it connects us human to human company to customer in a way that AI cannot replicate. Here here. There’s your 1 liner. Yes,
33:12 – 33:42
Rochelle Moulton: I love that. Jessica, I think I told you this before. We usually I will open with someone talking about their business. We usually have soloists who do that, but we have people who have agencies. But what’s so interesting to me is you actually have what we would all call a firm, a consulting firm. And so I’d love to hear you talk a little bit. I know you started out initially as a soloist Right. Yeah, so how long did it take you to say hit your first hundred thousand when you did that?
33:43 – 33:48
Jessica Mehring: I hit my first hundred thousand within the first 2 years of leaving the corporate world.
33:49 – 33:55
Rochelle Moulton: Good, good. And so when you started your firm, do you have the same name that it does now?
33:55 – 33:59
Jessica Mehring: Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s telling to how I think.
33:59 – 34:00
Rochelle Moulton: I think so. It’s
34:02 – 34:04
Jessica Mehring: always been Horizon Peak Consulting.
34:05 – 34:10
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. So you were clear, 1, that it was consulting and 2, that it didn’t have your name on it.
34:11 – 34:52
Jessica Mehring: Yeah. I knew in my bones that an agency model was not for me. I just, I’d worked on the agency side of the house. I know how an agency model typically works. And it just did not suit. And I know back in the day, I was breaking the mold a little bit by giving the company a name that was not my own. That it was not a personal brand. I was purposefully creating a brand that could stand apart from me, even though I was the only consultant in the firm. And I entered the world of online
34:52 – 35:29
Jessica Mehring: marketing and online business, which is all about personal brand and naming things after yourself. I purposefully chose not to do that because again, I just knew in my bones that there was something here that was part of me, but not me. And I didn’t know exactly what that meant at the time. And I didn’t know exactly what direction I was going to grow or the firm was going to grow, but I knew that the way I structured it as a consulting firm that didn’t have my name, it gave me the flexibility to grow in whatever direction
35:29 – 35:43
Jessica Mehring: I wanted to. I could choose to have a team or not. I could choose to brand it, you know, with my face all over the website or not. It gave me flexibility.
35:45 – 35:49
Rochelle Moulton: So what did you do? So how long was it just you?
35:50 – 36:30
Jessica Mehring: It was just me for probably the first 5 years. And I would hire contractors here and there to help me. When I had a big project, I would hire contractors on a project basis to just expand my bandwidth, maybe help me with the research or do some first draft writing. It was about 5 years before I really felt like, okay, this is something solid, stable. I know deeply who my audience is. I have a methodology that really works to get these companies extraordinary results. It’s a methodology that I can repeat. It’s a very high touch methodology.
36:31 – 37:09
Jessica Mehring: And so it felt almost impossible to train somebody else in it at the time but at that five-year mark I started hiring contractors who they were just a level up and they really they got it They got it and when I would explain my approach, when I would explain how I do things, they got it. And that was the first time I felt like, oh, okay, maybe there’s a possibility here where I can have a regular team. And I’m not just hiring 1Z2Z contractors, but I could put people on retainer and maybe eventually have employees because
37:09 – 37:13
Jessica Mehring: I’m seeing the possibilities now with people who get it.
37:14 – 37:50
Rochelle Moulton: Well, and what’s so interesting is I would almost bet the actually I would bet as long as the stakes weren’t really really high, I would bet that it wasn’t that the people changed, it was that you and and I’ve seen pieces of your methodology, some of the things you have on your website are really locked and loaded. I can tell there’s a methodology behind it. And so my educated guess is that you had that and that gave you the confidence and it also gave you over time the words to start to use with people. And then
37:50 – 38:00
Rochelle Moulton: you met people where your words resonated. And then it’s, oh, maybe, maybe these are the right people. Maybe I could teach them. But I think it was both. Right?
38:00 – 38:03
Jessica Mehring: Yeah, you know, I bet you’re right. I bet you’re right.
38:05 – 38:18
Rochelle Moulton: I could totally be off base, but it’s just as I was listening to you, I was feeling like, yeah, because you have confidence in that methodology because it’s been road tested. You know, in your first year, it wasn’t road tested yet.
38:18 – 38:56
Jessica Mehring: Yeah, that’s true. And I think that I wonder actually if 1 would have happened without the other because as I hit around that 5 year mark, and I really started feeling solid in my methodology and my messaging, and I started meeting these people who got it. I was also able to test that messaging and test that methodology with these folks. So it was a bit of give-and-take there where I was expressing my approach, they were giving me feedback, I was honing it and improving it and so as they learned, I learned and we kind of grew
38:56 – 39:38
Jessica Mehring: together over the last 5 years. I joke that it took me 10 years to find this team. I have a team of contractors who I have on retainer and I hope my next phase of growth is to get folks employed and not just retainer, but actually make them employees in this next phase of growth but I feel like it took me 10 years to find these people they are just they’re so good they’re so brilliant they are proactive communicators they understand my approach They treat my clients with the utmost respect and love Which is how I
39:38 – 39:55
Jessica Mehring: want my clients treated they approach the work with integrity and quality And I’ve worked with a lot of people in 10 years. And to find people that I can just deeply trust like this is so special.
39:55 – 40:26
Rochelle Moulton: Well, it’s also what I love about your story is that I think a lot of us think if we’re going to go an agency or a firm with employee route, that you have to do it all up front. That you have to just come out of the chute, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, identify everybody who’s going to work with you and it’s done. And typically, unless you’ve got a big war chest, it typically doesn’t work that way because it takes us time to hone our craft, our methodologies, our processes. It takes us time to figure out
40:26 – 40:46
Rochelle Moulton: who we wanna work with. Like who’s the right fit with you as the leader, with your clients, with the methodology, and who can actually take it further. I mean that’s what I heard there too, is that in finding these this sort of step up in terms of the people that you were working with, you were also getting really helpful feedback
40:46 – 40:46
Jessica Mehring: to
40:46 – 41:14
Rochelle Moulton: help codify the methodology. So yeah, there’s no embarrassment about taking 10 years. I think it’s amazing that you’ve done that and you’re clear on what you want to do next. And yes, this is the soloist women podcast, but there will be times that you want to have employees that you want to grow in a particular way. And to be able to follow that is just terrific. That’s exactly where we want everybody to be.
41:14 – 41:20
Jessica Mehring: Well, yeah, that’s why we left the corporate world, right? That’s why we became business owners is so we could choose our own path.
41:20 – 41:40
Rochelle Moulton: Exactly. Exactly. So let me ask you just 1 more question, Jessica, if you could go back 10 years ago, right to who you were when you started your business, what is the 1 thing you’d advise her to do? Take a deep breath. That’s a good 1.
41:41 – 42:23
Jessica Mehring: Take a deep breath. It’s okay that you don’t know everything right now. I want to know everything right now. I wanna know everything right now. I wanna know what the future holds. But so much of being a business owner is feeling things out and seeing how your methods work, seeing how your clients respond, see how you feel in different positions. I never, honestly 10 years ago I did not think I would ever want to have employees. The thought of managing people ever again, Oh my gosh, no thank you. But in 10 years time, so much has
42:23 – 42:37
Jessica Mehring: changed. And so I have grown in some ways that I never would have anticipated. And I would have loved to have just taken a deep breath 10 years ago and enjoyed the ride a little bit.
42:37 – 42:48
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, I hear you. That’s excellent advice. Jessica, we’ll be putting all sorts of links to you and your content in the show notes, but where’s the best place for people to learn more about you?
42:48 – 43:08
Jessica Mehring: You can go to horizonpeakconsulting.com slash Jessica. And that’s a good jumping off point to learn a little bit about me and some of my thinking around storytelling and AI and listening and learn more about Horizon Peak and what we do for our clients.
43:09 – 43:24
Rochelle Moulton: That’s awesome and I will say take a look at her resources page as well even if you’re not in the market to learn what she’s teaching there, it’s an excellent example of how you can build your methodology into something that you share with your audience.
43:24 – 43:31
Jessica Mehring: And no, yeah, no sign up required. That was a strategic choice as well. You can download those resources without signing up for anything.
43:31 – 43:57
Rochelle Moulton: Yes, exactly. So, Jessica, thank you so much. I enjoyed getting to know you over the last, I guess it’s only been a week that we’ve had some discussions back and forth, but this idea of really being able to use generative AI to take us in a different direction, to become better storytellers is a really important message and I so appreciate your generosity in sharing it.
43:57 – 44:04
Jessica Mehring: Well thank you so much for having me. This was the Best conversation I’ve had in a long time. Thank you so much.
44:04 – 44:23
Rochelle Moulton: Well, thank you for that. So before we say goodbye today, if you’re looking to connect with like-minded women working in the B2B space, be sure to check out the link to my soloist women community in the show notes. It’s at RochelleMoulton.com slash soloist-women. That’s it for this episode.
