Personal Growth, Building with AI, and Parenting Skills

I'm taking time in August to invest in myself. Goals include building real products with AI, increasing my capacity as a coach, and adding tools to my parenting toolkit. Here's how it's going.

Hey everyone,

This week’s post is a bit different. I wanted to share a mid-year personal update. More specifically, I designated August my personal growth month. I am taking time off regular coaching to invest in my personal development as a coach, as a builder using AI, and as a mom of 2 high-energy boys.

Here’s how it’s going.

1. Deepening my capacity to hold space

One of my first learnings as a coach was that often, the client struggles I have trouble with are the same struggles I have myself. To better support others, I must first invest in my own capacity to manage challenging emotions, stay with difficult conversations, and not bring my own constraints, limitations, and biases into the session.

As some of you know, I am doing an Integral Coaching Training with New Ventures West. A huge part of the learning for me has been, and will be, about healing and grounding in my core values.

My top growth areas? My inner critic is quick to judge and wickedly harsh. I get angry quickly when I don’t feel heard. I don’t stay long enough with the problem and the emotions before getting into solutioning and doing.

The growth here is slooowwwwwww.

It is measured in weeks, months, and likely years. I’m progressing in my daily sitting meditation practice. I am reading and learning a lot from books like Fierce Self-Compassion, Life Is In The Transitions, No Bad Parts, Let Your Life Speak, No Boundary, and a whole lot of Brené Brown (and small world — one of my clients plays Pickleball with her!!). Finally, I am doing a lot of pottery and gym time — both ways to get out of my head and into my body to find grounding and flow.

2. Building with AI: Custom GPT, New Website, and AI Agents

As a product builder at heart, it’s been difficult to only dabble in AI “on the side”. I was like a kid at Christmas when August rolled around and I jumped fully into experimenting with ALL THE AI TOOLS.

First, I built myself a custom GPT for repurposing content. I had seen the output of someone else doing this for me, and I was dying to try my hand at it.

I spent about 48 hours on it…and it’s pretty good!! One of my top learnings was to ask it to create the prompt itself. Here’s what helped me get to a final prompt I liked:

• I gave it samples of before and after (e.g., here’s a LinkedIn post derived from this Substack newsletter), and then asked it to write the prompt.

• I gave it a collection of my top LinkedIn posts and asked it to analyze common patterns. I then gave it a collection of top posts from top leadership creators on LinkedIn, and asked for their patterns. Finally, I asked it compare and contrast my success patterns with those of others.

• When I had a list of potential factors and patterns to include in the prompt, I handpicked the patterns that spoke to me and felt more “me” in how I write. As many have found, human intuition and judgment are still a critical step.

• Lastly, I did a lot of trial and error. Every time we “learned” something from a new source or analysis, I would ask AI to update the master prompt and then do a sample newsletter article to LinkedIn draft post conversion. I would then edit the draft and feed back the final version I was happy with. This iterative approach helped the AI learn faster.

I ended up with Claude as the base model. I tried ChatGPT and Perplexity as well. Perhaps GPT-5 was a bit faster at learning, but I preferred the UX for Claude and ended up committing to Claude for iterations. I would like to try building a YueGPT next, but right now it’s in the “solution looking for a problem” phase.

Then, I tried out Gamma and Lovable for making a new website. I’ve been wanting to get off Wix for some time and give my website a makeover (mostly pure ego).

I fell in love with Gamma! It was easy to use, AI-first, and hooked me from the start. I asked it to make a better version of the existing site, and it did not disappoint. Over ~15 hours, I managed to transform the entire thing. It’s now live and looks pretty good and slick!!

Check it out: https://theuncommonexecutive.com/

There is also so much more potential (and also some rough edges that need polishing). I struggled with some of the UX of the elements. I spent too much time color-coordinating sections. I ran into a technical SSL certificate issue when I transitioned the custom domain host (and broke my website and Substack for a few hours). My long-time friend, now PM at Gamma, received a series of Looms with feature requests and bug reports. =)

Finally, I plan to spend some time in the second half of August using AI Agents (and Zapier, Airtable, etc) to save me some operational time. I hope to create some repeatable workflows for lifecycle emails, lead generation, and Maven course operations. Stay tuned!

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3. Maturing as a Mom

Okay, this is the hardest job in the world. My kids are getting to the age where it’s not just about physical and mental survival; it is increasingly about actual parenting skillset. I’ve come to realize that, as much as I love my parents and they loved me, they lacked a lot of parenting skills. For them, yelling, intimidating, instilling shame, and appeals to authority were the playbook. I also did not grow up with siblings (thank you, one-child policy in China), so all concepts of sibling rivalry and jealousy are very new to me.

Without great role models from our own families, my husband and I are jointly consuming a lot of parenting content. I’ve really enjoyed watching Dr Becky’s parenting workshops on Good Inside. She grounds all her strategies and tactics in human psychology and trauma responses, and is so real in all her work.

Then, it’s about making the time to put those strategies into our daily routines. I am doing weekly “special time” with each of my kids, where they lead and I follow. I am taking the 5 minutes to stay with my kid during a tantrum (and be late) rather than rush to be on time and cut them short. I am learning to step out of the room to just breathe (and remind myself I’m not running from a tiger trying to eat me) when I am overwhelmed and reactive.

I’m far from perfect. I most definitely still “lose it” when my kids do the pee dance at a park. But I have more parenting tools in my toolbelt, and can slowly see the improvements in my approaches and a resulting stronger connection with each kid.

That’s all folks! I’m traveling to China with my family, so there will not be a newsletter next week. See you the following week at 3:14 pm.

Yue