How to Get Time Back as a Coach or Creator: The 5 Tools I Use Every Day

This show is powered by Others Over Self. Hit that subscribe button to keep training your brain. This is Hardcore and At Ease, a show about people who are keeping their edge without going over the edge. I'm host Shelly Rood. Today I'm giving you my top 5 tools that I use Every day in my work as a business advisor, I'm constantly asked for how people can level up their game, and I'm not hiding the answers. Everyone should take that step forward when they're ready. From AI and content creation to how we can get our message out to the world quickly, efficiently, and without doing things the old way. Technology is an incredible gift to us all. Let's harness it together. Today's episode is my gift to you. This is Hardcore and At Ease. Hey there, friend! Thank you so much for joining us today. Our episode is a little bit off the cuff because my email is getting flooded with some really well-intentioned people asking for some very basic business advice, and so I thought, you know what? For this week, let's just lay it out there. I'm going to give you my top 5 tools that I have really sunk my teeth into over this past year, And they are helping me rock out my business and take my productivity to the next level. Now, I say all of that with the caveat that it's not all about just productivity. We are not trying to be busy for busyness' sake. What we are trying to do is preserve our quality of life. We need to get the most out of every minute that we have here on Earth because we don't know how many minutes of those we have. And so today is a gift to all of you hardcore people who are grinding away and hoping to know, is there a better, is there an easier path, Shelly, that I could be taking to do my work? And so the answer to that is located within however many minutes we have here. All right, I've got 5 tools for you, and we are going to start with AI. When it comes to an AI platform, there are 2 very big front runners that you can choose from. Either ChatGPT or Claude. Yes, there's a lot more like Gemini, and there's specific suites of specific AI tools that you could be using. But for the sake of today's conversation, let's keep it high level, man. If you're gonna choose whether you do a paid subscription to ChatGPT or a paid subscription to Claude, my answer is if you are a content producer of any sort, I would recommend going with Claude. I do have both platforms and I do use both platforms for different things. Claude seems to be a little bit more intuitive with the way that I do work. Now, inside of Claude, I have folders that are set up for each project that my company is working on. I have one folder set up for the company overall. This is our large business strategy, which includes our branding. You always want to make sure that you don't forget where you are in the midst of all the work that you're doing for others. Every client has their own folder, and inside of every client folder goes their contract. It helps to make sure that the deliverables that we're creating is exactly what we signed up to be able to create for them. Also inside the client projects are all of the reports that we give back to the clients, whether they're done weekly, quarterly, or annually. That way we can ask Claude to help generate real odd data that talks about growth numbers that you're not going to be able to find just through an internet search. It's a really cool thing for a client to be able to hear that how they define success has grown exponentially since they started working with you. We have found that delivering this type of quarterly data to our clients helps us retain them on a consistent basis. Aside from the client files, we also have individual project files. For instance, I have a project specific to this podcast. It's called my podcast project. I also have a separate file for Substack, which we're going to talk about a little bit later. But Substack is where I teach all of my writings, and those writings get turned into a book. When you're thinking about how to set up your projects in Claude, make sure that you remember to have an overall company project. You want to have client projects, one for each. And you also want to have one project for each of the areas of your business, such as a podcast, such as content article writing. If you want to think about this from a military standpoint, in the Army, you've got an S1 who does admin, an S2 who does intel work, an S3 who works on operations, really that strategic side of getting things done. You also have an S4, which is logistics, your bullets, your beans, making sure you got the stuff that you need to do the thing. And there's also an S5, which is public relations. So definitely think about how you've got your company projects set up. Maybe you need one for each of those 5 areas that I know every company has. Before we jump into the next tool that I recommend, I want to make sure we don't gloss over the beauty of a skill. Now, a skill, an AI skill, is a set of instructions that you can write and you can train your AI to do on your behalf. A skill is like a prompt, but way at the next level. If you're not familiar with skills, I strongly encourage you to do some research on your own, figure out how to write and develop out a Claude skill. Write as many as you feel comfortable creating, and then get them uploaded into Claude and start integrating skills into your project creation. Examples of skills that have helped me are a tone skill. I've already helped a couple of my business associates develop out their own tone skill. Essentially what we're talking about is a multi-page document that teaches your AI your tone of voice, your perspectives, the way that you talk and communicate, and it uses that tone of voice skill when it's developing content or rewriting content on your behalf. This right here is the secret sauce that will help you stop looking and sounding like AI when the things that you're using AI to help you create are starting to flow out. You can specifically state in your skill, don't use em dashes, don't use negative parallel construction. Most writers understand that there's a handful of these obvious things that AI likes to put into its writing, and you can teach your Claude how to take those out and sound more like you. All right, so tool number 1 is Claude, and we talked about setting up some projects and also the power of skills. The 2nd tool that I'm bringing to you today as a business advisor is Substack. Substack is an online community specifically meant for creators. So if you're a coach, if you're somebody who is a pastor or a counselor, somebody who works with a lot of people from a creative standpoint, you definitely want to consider getting on Substack if you're not there already. One of the biggest benefits that I have found about Substack is that I can publish consistent articles. Think about it like writing a blog, but those blog posts can add up to something more. If you're looking for me on Substack, you can type in Shelly Rood and find me. And what you'll find is that my Substack publication— I only have one right now. It's called Mission Wildflower, and it is specifically for women veterans and for people who love women veterans. What's so cool about Substack is you can be an author like myself, And have multiple publications. Right now, I'm only writing for the Woman Veteran Voice as the audience. In the future, I absolutely plan on opening up another publication that will help me with more of the business advisory work like what I'm doing right now. A major benefit to Substack is the community itself. You can connect with other authors who are writing with similar things in your ecosystem. You can co-author articles together without having to worry about who owns the rights to what. Substack has been a game changer for my company when it comes to the development of our intellectual property. We fall into a rhythm where we're publishing multiple times a week, and having that accountability of both free and paid subscribers helps make sure that we're pumping out quality content consistently. The 3rd tool that I'm recommending today is along the lines of community, and it's called Circle. Circle is a community platform where you can have and bring people together Under a shared community. You can think of Circle like a Facebook group, except it's private. It's not on Facebook. Other companies that I know use Mighty Networks. Mighty Networks and Circle are very similar. I love the integrations that Mighty Networks have. However, I do find the price point to be a little bit higher than where we're at right now as a company. And so we've developed out our Others Over Self Society specifically on the Circle platform. What's so great about coming into that platform is that you can speak to your people in a private space without requiring them to join some bigger type of social media network. As you know, I do a lot of work with women veterans, and women veterans can be very cautious about whether or not they want to get on social media, what they want to be sharing. So when we tell them that we have our own private online network, they feel safe and it's a comfortable place for them to come in and share. Another benefit to Circle is content creation and hosting. We have courses. That's right. We have courses that you can take and host inside of your network. We even use this function for our staff training. I have multiple contractors that work with me. Sometimes they come in and out as the years go on, and having that online training course for my contractors, it's hosted in Circle. They belong to the community. They know exactly where to find it. And they can start consuming that content and getting certified right away. And one more quick feature that I really enjoy about Circle is that it's anonymous. When you join, your email address isn't posted for everybody to be able to see. If someone else in that community wants to send you a direct message, they can, and you even have the option to toggle that off so that nobody can send you a private message. I have found that the Circle platform is very easy to work with, and I recommend it to anybody who's starting to get an online community going. To a Tool number 4 that I'm recommending today is specific to podcasting, and the tool is called Riverside.fm. Riverside.fm has been our go-to over this past year to keep Hardcore and At Ease on the air. We didn't start out recording in Riverside. We started out with something else, and I was getting set up with a very high-end guest, and that piece of software stopped working. In fact, it actually glitched so bad that I had a chipmunk voice for a minute there, and my guest is— Oh my gosh. Texting me saying, Shelly, what is happening? You sound like a chipmunk. I was mortified and embarrassed, and in that moment I said, forget this, we're going to try something else. I pulled up Riverside FM, went ahead and did a subscription. Within 5 minutes, my guest and I were in the recording studio, and you can listen to that episode. It's episode number 17 with Carrie Mead. Riverside FM has been doing a lot of amazing upgrades even in this past year. It used to be where you could really only have one person in person, like in my studio here, and then if you wanted a second camera angle, you would have to bring it in separately. Now the platform has upgraded to allow multiple cameras and multiple microphone sources from an in-person source. And yes, our podcast is absolutely taking advantage of this, and starting next week, you're gonna see More than one host on Hardcore and At Ease. I have a big announcement coming soon, and as our show grows and expands, so does the cast and the beautiful voices that you hear here. You're still going to have me, Shelly Rood, as the main host. We're also going to bring in 3 co-hosts, all business advisors of different sorts, giving you a multidisciplinary approach to how we live out our lives as hardcore and at ease. Riverside FM has been really good, and it still feels to me like it needs a little bit of polishing after we hit that record button. Which brings us to our final tool of the day. Tool number 5 is Descript. Descript is editing software, and after we finish our podcast recordings and our video interviews through Riverside FM, we export the audio and the video, and we bring it into a software editing tool called Descript. I have found that some of the features in Descript you really can't find anywhere else for such a great quality. In particular, they have one called Studio Sound. Studio Sound takes the audio track and helps enhance it so that it would sound a little bit higher quality. This has been a huge game changer because sometimes I bring on guests that, let's face it, they don't have a podcast setup in their own places. So yeah, the audio is a little gargly or there might be a dog running around in the background. Descript is really powerful with being able to edit those audio tracks to clean up and give you a professional quality sound. To date, I think there's only ever been one interview that I've had to scratch because I couldn't get the audio cleaned up good enough. Another feature about Descript that I really appreciate is that it comes with a stock media library, both audio and video stock. So when you come with that subscription, you gain access to countless music tracks and sound effects. Video clips, GIFs, and B-roll that you can use while you're editing your materials. As you know, Hardcore and Eddies is not just an audio show. We absolutely have a YouTube channel, and some of our YouTube watchers love to have a little extra spiciness worked into the show. I find that the stock footage that we pull from Descript is not only professional, but there's a wide variety, so we can find some of those more difficult pieces that describe what we're looking for. Especially when it comes to those military clips. Not a lot of stock footage is out there when it comes to military vehicles or people in uniform. You know what you're talking about. You see this obvious stock footage and the uniform is on backwards, or they're wearing some type of camo that's only used in Uganda, and we're not talking about Ugandan soldiers. So props to Descript and for whoever does their military sourcing with their B-roll. Another really good function with Descript is that you can use it to create clips. I can do this in Riverside FM as well, but I have found that if I make clips in Descript, they're just a little bit of a higher quality. So after our show episode is edited, we can go back through and we can pull out small 90-second chunks of the best highlights of that episode and break them down into Shorts that we can share on our social medias. And there you have it, a quick recap of our 5 top tools that I, as a business owner, have dug my teeth into this past year. The first one is Claude, our AI assistant. The second tool that I highly recommended today is Substack for content creation and publication. The third tool to add to your roster is Circle so that you can have an online community. Number 4 is Riverside FM if you're looking at doing any sort of video interviewing or audio interviewing, like podcasting. And finally, tool number 5 is Descript. Descript gives you that secret sauce of that next-level editing and polish that you know everything with Shelly Rood involved has. I really appreciate you listening to the episode today. You know, as a business advisor, I work with a lot of solo entrepreneurs or people who maybe only have part-time contract work, if anything. It is hard. It is hard to run and operate a business. I want you to know that you're doing a good job, especially if you're on the lookout for what's new, what's upgraded, and how to have better processes in your workday that can give you more time back to yourself. That's what it's all about. Today was a short and impactful episode for you. I want you to pick just one of these tools. It could be Circle, it could be Substack, Claude, Riverside FM, or Discord. Just pick one, put it into your system, and see what you can do with it. Do great things this week, and I will see you next Tuesday as we talk about more ways to keep our edge without going over the edge. Until then, stay hardcore, be at ease, and trust the process. You're listening to Hardcore and At Ease. Keep the conversation going at join.othersoverself.com.