ChatGPT Health Won’t Replace You (Unless You’re Doing This)

Michelle Leotta:

Welcome to the Health Coach Power Community Podcast. I'm Michelle Liotta, ex corporate girl turned certified health coach with over 15 years of experience growing a successful online practice. I started out with no idea what I was getting into and learned a lot of lessons along the way that have given me the freedom to do the work I love and raise two boys as a single mom.

I created a health coach power community over a decade ago to make it easier for health coaches to build a career they love and make the world a better place.

Is ChatGPT going to replace health coaches? Only if health coaching stays transactional instead of transformational. In this episode, I'll explain that there's been a lot of buzz about ChatGPT replacing jobs of all kinds, and now we have ChatGPT Health. Have you heard about it? Oh my. Among health coaches, I've seen Fear Dismissal and curiosity.

I think that this moment is incredibly clarifying for help coaches because when information is instant, I mean, it is unlimited. It is right in your pocket at all times, and it's free. We gotta get really, really honest about what people are actually. Paying us for, do they wanna pay us for anything? You know, health coaching has changed so much, certainly in the 17 years since I first got certified.

And even in just the last year or two, major shifts, I mean, for most coaches. Clients come through personal connections, right? It's your friends. Your friends of friends. It's word of mouth. It's your network that does the heavy lifting, at least for a while. But once that well runs dry, and it always does, eventually your marketing has to get so much smarter.

Now, these days, the question becomes fairly unavoidable. Why are you? Why now? And why not ChatGPT? Oh my goodness. So let's talk about where a lot of you are right now. So I have the vantage point of talking with so many health coaches every single week, and what I see for many of you is that you've been coaching for a little while.

A year, a couple of years, you've worked with real clients, you've made some money doing this. Amazing. Even if it feels like peanuts right now, it is substantial. You're earning something. My first client was my cousin, and then after that, my second client was a long-time reader of my health blog that I had at the time.

So I was earning, but compared to my corporate career, like it was nothing. That's how you start, though. All good. At some point, you realize, oh man, you've gotta get visible to a wider audience. Instead of being the obvious go-to health girl or whatever, within your circle of acquaintances, standing out and getting noticed, it gets a little bit more challenging, doesn't it?

And this is exactly where AI enters the conversation. As tools like ChatGPT just get more and more sophisticated, it starts to feel like they are competing with us. What, like we didn't expect that? I certainly didn't expect that when I went to Health Coaching school 17 years ago. You're gonna feel perhaps like you need to justify your value more than ever before and.

We have always been doing that as health coaches; people have always asked, what's a health coach? And we gotta figure out how to answer that question. And now they're also like, can't I just have ChatGPT write up a diet and exercise plan for me, or even talk me through it when I don't wanna go to the gym.
ChatGPT isn't just information, is it? People are leaning on it for emotional support, too. Whoa. The story just gets worse and worse. It's even available in the middle of the night. Uh oh. But here's the good news, actually, it reminds me of a client that I once had. She came to me to lose weight, and her questions were all about how to lose weight, but.

You know, over the course of conversations, I came to know her. I saw her as a whole human being, not just a list of questions that I had to answer. So when things weren't changing with her weight, we tried various things. And one day I asked her point-blank, who cares? Like, who cares if you lose weight? You know, I challenged her belief that she needed to lose weight at all.

After all, she had a great husband. She had a successful career. She had lots of friends and a fun life. Why did it matter so much? Now, a human can do that. A human can see the whole picture, even the parts that our clients are just alluding to, without specifically telling us all the details. We catch nuance.
We can understand the tone of boys. Unlike ChatGPT, if we're brave, we don't have to be agreeable all the time or tell our clients that, yes, that's a wonderful idea. No matter what they say, we can challenge ourselves. We can confront our clients. We can use reflective questions and call out inconsistencies and blind spots.

Yes, that's like my favorite part of being a coach. We're a thought partner, not a yes man, not an advice dispensary. My client realized that weight loss really didn't matter at this point in her life. She'd been chasing it since she was eight years old. But she did have this dream. It occurred to her that it had been like simmering in the back of her head somewhere for many, many years.

She said, you know what? I've always wanted to climb Mount Everest base camp, and I can't. It requires, you know, certain fitness requirements. Well, you'll never believe it. But within months, she got there, literally booked the trip, and went with her husband. So I don't believe that we have to compete. All in fact.

That story reminds me that the opposite is true. It's time to become more human than ever. Now listen, before we go deeper, I wanna let you know if this idea resonates with you. If you're curious about how to have a bigger impact and grow your client list and do it all, as you know, as a human. Being someone who has limited time on the calendar and is not available in the middle of the night.

Oh, please go to health coach power.com/grow for my brand new free training. That's health coach power.com/grow. Now, I was a little confused about ChatGPT Health at first. It's a magical health coaching robot. Thank goodness. I thought it was, that's what it sounded like from what I understand now. It's really just a secure layer for handling sensitive health information.

It's a data solution. That's it. That's all it is. And for a long time now, people are already using ChatGPT for help with their health. I use it to help with my meal plan. I mean, it's out there, it's getting used. The only difference is now they're making it more secure so someone can upload. Sensitive health information, but it's not a different or dedicated app to replace health coaches.

It's just an evolution of how ChatGPT works when it comes to this type of data. And data is helpful, of course, but coaching has never been about data. People crave human connection. You know, when I talk to some of my podcast listeners for the first time, they're like, oh my gosh, it's you. I can't believe I'm talking to you for some reason.

All you have to do is record your voice into a microphone, and you get some weird, like celebrity status. I swear I am wearing pajama pants right now. But anyway, it is that human connection that gets us so excited. Look at online courses as an example. I say this as someone who has created many online courses through the years, but they are notorious across all industries for never getting completed, which means people are not getting results from them.
Very, very frustrating if you've ever attempted an online course, but why is it like that? It's just information, right? Like people need. People. That's been true, and it'll always be true, and people need more; hear me on this. People need more than resolving a health symptom, you know, and that's what ChatGPT might be able to help with.

For the right user who knows how to ask the right questions and prompt it the right way, et cetera. Let's just say, right? Let's just say my client back then had used ChatGPT to lose weight. Maybe it would've worked eventually. Maybe she would've gone down a few dress sizes, but she never would've realized her dream of going to Mount Everest.

It just wouldn't have come up. So my challenge to you is, how can you bring more humanness to your coaching? I mean, think about how, like, literally how you're working with clients. Are you attempting to sell a faceless online course not working these days? Or do your clients actually have the opportunity to form a bond with you and you with them?

Far more fulfilling, by the way, I would say. Move toward more interaction with clients, not away from it. And that's in a world that offers all the tools to do so. Even in your marketing, how can you be more human, less of a robot? How can you invite people into a conversation, not an automated funnel? It's actually very freeing.

I've been enjoying it very, very much because for years it has been about adding more tech and more tools, and more scaling. But what if you could earn well, and you could change lives and you could do it without all those systems? What if in a world of AI? Being human is your health coaching superpower.
Go to health coach power.com/grow and see what's working now for health coaches to grow, make an impact, and do it all with less time and less tech. I'll see you next time.

Thank you so much for listening to the Health Coach Power Community podcast. Please take a moment, leave a written review on Apple Podcasts. It helps us reach more coaches and allows me to bring you this free content every week to join us live. Ask your questions and have a direct line to me. Join our free Facebook group at healthcoachpowercommunity.com.