Until a couple of years ago, I was not a tech person. Actually, that is an understatement. I knew how to do really basic things on a computer, but to me it was more or less a glorified typewriter.
Then I moved countries and realised that if I wanted to continue and grow my work, I had to put it online, and that was massively confusing.
I have been an aromatherapist and coach for 35 years. I know my work, I know what I want to say, I know how to work with people, and I have decades of experience behind me. I’m really good at what I do and I love my work.
The problem was that suddenly I had to understand platforms, mailing lists, CRMs, domains, websites, funnels, integrations and a whole new language full of abbreviations that everybody seemed to understand.
I didn’t and I felt like an idiot.
So I did what you are supposed to do. I took courses, joined a mastermind and learned about marketing, offers and all the things I was supposed to do to bring my work online. I learned a lot of valuable things, but there was one really important piece missing.
Nobody taught me how to actually physically DO any of it. That awful tech!
I had all this new knowledge, but every time I tried to put it into practice I got stuck because of my lack of technical knowledge. Someone could tell me what I needed to do, but then I would go to the platform to actually do it and have no idea where to start. Which button? Where is the thing they are talking about? What does that mean? What am I supposed to press?And where?
It was like somebody putting me in a car when I had never seen the inside of a car before and saying, “Right. Drive.”
Uh, no.
At one point I wanted to add the recipient’s first name to an email. That’s it. I couldn’t find the button, so for an entire week I had conversations backwards and forwards with the company trying to figure out what I was doing wrong.
Eventually, one person realised that the problem wasn’t on their platform, it was a setting on my computer that meant some of the buttons weren’t showing.
The bloody button wasn’t there.
How was I supposed to know that?
And that was the problem over and over again. When you know nothing about technology, you don’t even know what you don’t know, and you don’t necessarily know what question to ask because you don’t understand enough to know where the problem is.
I felt frustrated and lost because I had all this want and hope and excitement for my work, but I couldn’t move it forward.
Of course, I could have found someone to do it all for me, but I wanted to understand how to do it myself. I just needed someone to show me how.
And then AI came along.
There wasn’t one great Eureka moment when I suddenly understood what AI could do for me. The realisation grew as I started experimenting and asking questions.
How do I do this? How do I connect that? Where do I find this?
AI would give me the steps, but quite often even those steps were completely over my head, so I would say, “I don’t understand. Make it simpler.”
And then simpler again. If AI had been a real person, it would have slapped me already.
Eventually we would get down to what I call baby language: press this button, now look for this, click there.
THAT I can do.
And whenever I get stuck, I take a screenshot. I know how to do screenshots! I show it to AI and ask, “Is this right? Where do I press now?” and we continue from there.
This is what changed everything for me. I didn’t have to go away and learn an entire new language before I was allowed to use the technology. I could learn while I was actually doing the thing I wanted to do, and if I didn’t understand something I could keep asking until the explanation was at a level I understood.
The ultimate Eureka came when I decided to connect my own domain to my Substack.
I had owned my domain for years because it is my name, but it had just been sitting there inactive. Meanwhile I had started building Hera on Substack, and slowly it had become everything I had wanted from a website. I could write there, use audio, have different pages and organise my work the way I wanted. With the help of AI I had even developed my branding and colours, something I had never needed when I was working as a therapist in the ordinary brick-and-mortar world.
Now I wanted my own domain connected to it.
The complication (apart from the obvious tech stuff) was that my domain provider is in French, and my French is nowhere near good enough to understand technical instructions. I don’t understand them in any language!
So there I was, dealing with technology I barely understood, in a language I didn’t understand well enough, trying to connect two platforms and sort out all the little things that went with it.
And this is where AI became extraordinary for me. It can speak any language!!!
I could show it what I was seeing, ask what something meant, tell it when I couldn’t find what it was talking about and keep going step by step. If the instructions were too complicated, I asked for simpler ones. If my screen didn’t look the way it was supposed to look, I took a screenshot and showed it what I could see.
Eventually it worked.
When I typed in my own domain and my Hera site appeared, it felt amazing.
For someone who understands technology, connecting a domain might be nothing special. For me it represented how far I had come from spending an entire week looking for a button that wasn’t visible on my computer.
And this is why, when I hear all the discussions about AI, I sometimes think we are missing part of the story.
AI has saved me an enormous amount of time, frustration and probably a fair number of mistakes, but most importantly it has given me access to things I didn’t know how to do.
It hasn’t given me my professional knowledge. I already had that.
AI is like a secretary. It’s not me and it can only do what I ask of it. Admittedly, it is a very patient secretary who doesn’t seem to mind if I ask the same question seventeen times because I still don’t understand the answer.
I use it to help me understand technology, figure out platforms, connect things, correct my mistakes, work with my wording and deal with all those things everybody else seems to understand when I haven’t got a clue what they’re talking about. Sometimes it gives me exactly what I need, sometimes I have to keep questioning it, and sometimes I tell it that what it has given me is rubbish and we start again.
Because AI is a tool. A great tool, but it needs to be used with basic common sense.
You still have to think and decide what you want. You still have to question things, check things and say, “No, that’s not what I mean.” AI can help you enormously, but you are still the one driving the car.
Your knowledge and expertise is yours.
There are so many women my age with enormous amounts of knowledge and experience who built their professional lives before any of this technology existed. We weren’t taught it because there was nothing to teach. Then the world changed around us and suddenly, if we wanted to continue working, create something new or put our knowledge out into the world, we were expected to understand a completely different way of doing things and learn a new language.
If you don’t understand that world, the technology can become a wall between you and everything you know you have to offer.
For me, AI made a hole in that wall.
If I met another woman my age who had something she really wanted to put into the world but was sitting there thinking, “I can’t do all this bloody technology,” I would tell her to use AI, and then I would walk her through the first steps till she understood how to use it properly.
Because you don’t have to understand the whole digital world before you can enter it. You can learn as you go, ask the stupid questions, ask them again when you still don’t understand, take a screenshot and ask where to press next.
That is pretty much how I built Hera.
One bloody button at a time.
Love, Anna
P.S. If this spoke to you, come closer. Anna’s Atelier is the paid part of Hera, €9 a month or €90 a year. It’s where we work with this time of life through body, mind, emotions and scent, and where I ask every woman the same question: what can I do for you? If you’re not ready, read along for free and my essays will come straight to your inbox. You are welcome either way.
The first 25 women who join the Atelier for the year get a 30-minute session with me.