In this presentation, Steve D. Valentine shares how he transformed his personal brand after a painful life transition by using large language models as a thought‑partner. He recounts his own story of divorce, rehab, and a 27‑year real‑estate career, and explains why most agents misuse AI – they skip the crucial step of teaching the model who they truly are. Drawing on podcasts by Jeff Woods and Robert Breedlove and the book Vivid Vision by Cameron Herald, Steve outlines a three‑step framework: (1) train the AI on a deep, interview‑style identity using 15 personal and 15 business prompts; (2) define a vivid, three‑year vision that aligns personal and business goals; (3) assign the AI concrete roles (CFO, CMO, etc.) to generate plans, content, and strategy. He emphasizes prompting the AI to ask clarifying questions, integrating human review and a brand specialist to avoid the AI’s “yes‑man” bias, and continuously iterating the process every few years. The talk concludes with a call to download the prompts, start the identity interview, and let the trained AI become a personalized, strategic partner for real‑estate agents seeking to build authentic brands that reflect their core values and drive measurable results.
Chapters
So, let's dive into the personal brand and the step that you might be missing that I discovered through actually a really hard personal journey where I went from separation and marriage and rehab and a successful real estate business and trying to rediscover who the hell I was after rehab. And this is really where it started. How are you building your personal brand with AI? And what I've learned over the last 18 months that might apply to you. Let's jump into this. Listen, I've got beginner novice expertise in AI at this point in time, but here's what I found by asking 100 real estate agents how they're using it and finding out they're using it wrong. Not necessarily wrong, but they missed a step. So today I want to make sure that you start with the right step, and I've got some stuff here for you that will really help you. But first, I want to mention, uh, Jeff Woods did a podcast, and this is really, really helped me start to understand AI and how to utilize it as a thought partner, not as an order taker. So let's back up a little bit into this podcast. Robert Breedlove on What Is Money podcast on Spotify, episode 569, uh, down here in the show notes. It's an amazing podcast that talks about— Jeff Woods also wrote a book called The AI-Driven Leader, which I'm in the middle of reading. He talks about how to gradually start to using it, and one of the things that I really love about what he talks about because I teach this very much in the real estate business, is ask more questions, get better results. So a lot of times we're asking AI questions when the reality is we should be prompting it or telling it to ask us questions to clarify the objective or our goals or who we are. So let's dive into the personal brand and the step that you might be missing that I discovered through actually a really hard personal journey where I went from separation, marriage, and rehab, and a successful real estate business, and trying to rediscover who the hell I was after rehab. And this is really where it started. And so my right hand, Tammy, brought to me and she said, hey, in all the things you've been doing, all the things that you've learned since rehab, and all the things you've changed, I don't think you know who you are. So let's interview and see who you are before we start to change the business model based on what you're thinking. You ever gone through hard life circumstance like divorce, death, something changes that all of a sudden you're like, "Who am I and what am I supposed to be doing? Where am I supposed to be going?" So, for me, it started with, you know, I was a heavy drinker. I got really successful. A lot of things happened through a lot of irons in the fire. To to go, you know what? I'm about to burn everything down and I need to fix myself before I can do anything else. And then I realized I didn't know who I was because in that process, my head and my heart got disconnected. So where was the best place to learn who I was without a filtering process? Tammy sat down and she says, let's just start asking questions. And we had both listened to this podcast and we started to go through and go, well, let's make it our thought partner. And we were very novice at doing this. And we sat at the conference room table for hours, 5 questions at a time. But the difference was I wasn't writing and I wasn't answering Tammy directly. I was actually answering the interview questions on AI, completely open thought process where my head and my heart could really connect the answers and I could talk as fast or as slow with as much emotion or as little emotion as possible as I walked through these questions. And it kept going deeper and asking me better questions until it got to the point that it was like, "Oh, this is my morals. This is my compass. This is who Steve is. This is what Steve stands for. And this is what his voice is." And then we took that person after hours and hours of interview and we started to ask the same questions about where the business, real estate business, what we had built in flipping houses and the real estate traditional side of the business, all the different things that we were doing, and starting to go, okay, well, now what direction does the new Steve want to take these businesses? And we started to unravel some more and uncover some more things. And then you start to add in some negative clarity. One of my favorite books is by Cameron Herald, Vivid Vision, and you start to learn the things that you love about the business After 27 years, I have a lot of experience in the business. And so after 27 years of doing so many different segments of it, I kind of forgot who I was and where I was going. And so by using this identity prompting and getting your AI to know who you are at the core so that you can then build a business around the core voice that it is. So if you're building a personal brand, sells widgets or a personal brand that sells real estate, this is a great way to deep dive so that when you're marketing, when you're behind the camera, when you're doing things, when you're with clients. See, in my business, this is about getting know to know me so that I could portray my business in a way that it represents me and also attracts business rather than selling business. So, I learned to just morph and evolve through through this process, which we've been doing for 18 months now. And it's the best part when you get all of this to a point that you understand your core values and you understand who you are as a human being and you understand exactly where your business is, right? We have to have a baseline first if we want to grow or we want AI to be our thought partner and we want to do what all the craziness online is about where it's going to grow your business and do all these things. It's really hard for somebody, let alone something, to build your business if it doesn't know who you are and where you want to grow and why you want to grow it. So if we go back up, you're like, hey, my objective is I want to be a real estate agent that nets $500,000 a year, does 50 to 60 transactions, works 40 hours a week. My main human being that I talk to is a 40-year-old single woman who has 2 kids. I don't know, I'm just making shit up. The point is, when you go really deep on this is who you are and where you are, then and only then can you now describe where you want to go. And in Cameron Herald's book Vivid Vision, he talks about triple your revenue in 3 years by having a vivid vision, not by having goals. And so he had this great big visual of what he wanted the business to look like. And it's really hard to have that great big visual if you don't know what you want your life to look like. So this is a combination of a little bit of identity and a little bit of self-work, and then a little bit into the AI to give you a baseline of who you are now, what your experiences are in whatever business that you do, but especially in real estate. Because now in real estate, it's packaged up my 27 years of experiences and different things that I've done because it interviewed me. Tell me what your experiences are. What have you done in real estate? What haven't you done? What do you want to do? Where do you want to go? And then it'll start stepping you through who you want to be and maybe who you should be following. Who you should be adding into your life. Who you need to take away from your life. The goal is that it's going to give you some sense set standards to operate by. And by doing this identity, I believe that in 3 years you're going to want to repeat the process. Why 3 years? Well, there's no method behind the 3 years, but here's what I do know for myself, and I know from several other people that I know in the process, is that while Cameron Carroll talked about the Vivid Vision being 3 years for a business, if we do it as a person and we utilized the AI to help us prompt through who we are right now and where we want to go. For me, it challenged me in that 3 years. And I know that from 4 Christmases, what changed from not knowing who I was to absolutely knowing who I was and the changes that I made. And now what the changes will make not only in my business, but in the people around me, because I'm watching people take their identity and learn who they are and make that more important than what they do. And so by doing this, you're really going to know who you are and then you can really know where you want to go by understanding who you are. So utilize AI as this tool. The prompts are below this, just an identity quick test, right? It's not even a test. It's just walking you through the prompts. So the prompts are 15 questions personal, 15 questions business. It's a baseline idea for you to start with. Your goal is to take your AI, and I prefer Claude for this, and take it, start it before you mess it up and get it trained on who you are. And then you're going to operate as a thought partner and you're going to start giving it roles. Just like what Jeff Woods talks about in here is that now you have to give it a role. So step one, well, AI is going to get to know me, right? Or you. And then it's going to get to know your business. Where you're at currently, not where you want to go yet. Step 2 is going to be, okay, what is your vivid vision? What are your goals for yourself personally and your business so they coincide? And then step 3 is going to be taking it and giving it roles and saying, hey, I want— my objective is to create a business plan and a vivid vision for the next 3 years. I want you to be my CFO, my CMO, You got to go through and be very specific or break it down and go, I want you to be my chief marketing officer that designs my Instagram, my cohesiveness, and go through that process. Now, that is all amazing there. What I will say, there's some human elements that I would add in this because ChatGPT or the LLMs can very much be yes-men, yes-women, just yes to everything. You're the greatest thing since sliced bread. This is a way to ideate thoughts and bring them to surface and then go to your team or a partner or your inner circle of friends and say, this is kind of my business plan. I've been working through ChatGPT, interviewing back and forth, or Claude, or whatever it is you're using. And now I'd like to go through it with you and see if it makes sense. What we did was one step further and we actually hired a brand specialist to take the language and the things that we worked on and then work it through a brand strategy for the personal brand, for the business, so it would be cohesive. And that's where all of this came from, was a year worth of work in unraveling where we had been, the experiences that matter, and where we wanted to go. So today, download these prompts, get started on it, get really quiet. And as much as I love journaling and writing, that's not what this is for. This is for deep-rooted conversation. So that you can train somebody, the LLM, the AI, who you are at the core so that it can help you build the core of your business based on who you are and the goals. And then you'll have an LLM that's a thought partner that you can go, hey, I'm writing Instagram posts today for the next 21 days. Here's a couple of stories. Give me a couple of ways to guide my clients or attract clients or do this. And now you don't have to feed it as much information because it knows your head and your heart and what your business does. And now you have a business partner that can also be trained to help your staff, your team to operate with inside the company boundaries because you've trained it going along the way. And now you have this producing thought partner machine that is all yours, that knows you, knows your business, and knows where you want to go. Hey, I'm Steve D Valentine. I have flipped more than 1,000 homes and been in the real estate space for 27 years. My goal in life has changed so much where I want to have an impact through this channel where my real estate experience of owning so many homes and being part of more than 10,000 transactions across 27 years right here in Phoenix, Arizona makes me an expert in all kinds of real estate, from investing strategies to home buyer strategies to luxury, it doesn't matter what it is because real estate is about strategies, not sales, and it's about clarity, not confusion. At the end of the day, we offer options over ultimatums, and we can help you get where you want to go through your goals, your dreams, through our strategies.
