Hello, who is this please? Learning to write in your own voice.

Well this is a novel experience.

For the vast majority of my career, I have been the strategic communications advisor / ghost writer for one chief executive or another. It's a skill one doesn’t take lightly: to capture another person's priorities, the language they use when feeling (insert emotion here), their patois, colloquialisms, level of formality vs familiarity, and even trickier, their humour. To write something that makes a busy executive feel as though they had written it themselves: that has long been my measure of success.

Only now it's little old me. I'm that chief executive (bit of an overkill for a sole trader business, but you know what I mean). There's no-one above me. So I get to write as just, well…me.

I have always described myself as a "fast writer".

Words swoosh and swirl continuously around in my head like a whirlpool, spinning at such pace that they have cut deep corkscrews into the bedrock of my brain.

So when it comes time to write something, it's more about pausing for a moment to let the words lash the keyboard in a torrential downpour. My writing is much more an exercise in review and deletion, than casting about for ways to reach my desired word count. I guess I'm lucky?

Particularly in this moment in time where AI is big, it's kinda here, but we don't really know who's paying for it, or whether it'll still be here in 12 months once the electricity and water bills start arriving, or how much we'll be asked to slash our usage once those Claude tokens start adding up.

So how does one work out one's own voice?

I'd love to say this is an exercise in altruism, but we're all here to make a buck. And we shouldn't apologise for it. No doubt there are hundreds of academic discourses on the subject.

For me, it's three steps:

1. Work out what your values are. There are heaps of free online tools. Truly understand this about yourself.

2. Work out what you're offering / selling. Don't try and be all things to all people. Pick a couple of things that you know you're good at, and that people need to spend money on.

3. Work out who is going to buy what you're selling. Specifically, the people whose values align with yours. This makes them easy to spot. Create a few avatars, and practise talking to them in a way that cuts through.

In essence: you have to sound like the genuine you, but you're talking to a specific group of people about a specific subject. Easy, right? Right??!

If the machines don't take over the world (guess who watched Dune waaaaay too many times in her twenties), once you work out your voice, you can absolutely teach your AI pet of choice to do some of the heavy lifting. But please, never ship direct from AI. Always take the time to read it carefully. And like my bosses of old, don't be afraid to go back and say, "I'm not sure this bit feels like me. Can we try again?" Don't compromise. Being you is something that nobody else on the planet can do. So make the most of it.

And if you've made it to the end of my very first "me" blog, wow. Just wow. Surely you've got something better to do? Get up and go make some sales calls or something.

See you back here in a month.