Safe and Sound

Welcome back

Welcome to Talk to Walk, your go-to newsletter empowering small business owners with clear, actionable AI insights to boost your success from day one!

Its the dog days of summer, and the team at Talk to Walk is currently focused on vacation and family. We hope you are making the most of the summer too. With your Thursday coffee, read up on a new list of tips and stories to help you walk.

Prompt of the week: How to Write Quickly

When AI started to get better, people began completely outsourcing their writing to AI.

When I write this newsletter, it’s usually the day before it goes out, squeezed between back-to-back research calls with clients.

It’s not ideal.

But luckily, I have AI to give me a hand.

Still, I’ll be honest:

When AI writes content for me, it often comes out feeling… robotic.

It’s grammatically perfect, sure. But it lacks that messy, human touch and my personal voice, I take pride in.

Instead, I’ve built a system.

Step 1: Brainstorming With ChatGPT

Since ChatGPT knows I write this weekly, I usually kick things off by asking for topic ideas. Prompts and ideas to think about, rarely helpful, but it gets me thinking and I start researching topics.

This is, without question, the hardest part. (And no, I’m not outsourcing that to AI just yet.)

Step 2: The Vomit Draft

Once I land on a topic, for 5 minutes, I dump everything I’m thinking into the chat.

Fragments. Stories. Half-sentences. Bad metaphors. It’s messy.

I hit “Enter.”

ChatGPT hums with approval, no matter how rough the draft, and starts organizing my chaos into something coherent.

It fixes the structure, cleans up grammar, and threads together the point I was circling around.

Step 3: Editing in Notion

I copy the draft into Notion and go line by line.

About 30% of each sentence gets rewritten. Sometimes more.

But the heavy lifting is already done.

What used to feel like a mountain now feels like a sharp little hill I can sprint up.

Why This Works for Me

This might sound like a lot of steps for one newsletter article.

But writing something that feels professional, thoughtful, and me, this quickly, is a feat.

If I magically knew exactly what I wanted to write about, I could pump out a newsletter in an hour or less. But alas,

“How to” of the Week: Be Safe

Everyone needs to hear this:

Even if you delete your chats, AI tools don’t forget.

Most AI platforms (including ChatGPT) log and store your conversations to improve the model.

And even if you clear the thread, your data was already processed, indexed, and (sometimes) retained.

What This Means for Your Business

If you’re dropping client names, sensitive pricing info, internal docs, or even rough drafts of a pitch, you might be leaking more than you think.

Switching to “Incognito” doesn’t guarantee that nothing’s saved or monitored at some level.

How to Stay Smart (and Safe)

Here’s a simple rule of thumb:

“If it would go in a private Slack channel or locked Google Doc, don’t paste it into a free AI tool.”

Better practices:

• Use tools with clear enterprise privacy policies (ChatGPT Team, Claude Pro, Perplexity Enterprise, etc.)

• Strip or anonymize sensitive details when asking for help

• Save final outputs outside the AI environment

• Avoid using AI as your long-term memory.

Yes, AI is still wildly helpful.

But the safest way to use it is to think of it like an intern on an open mic:

Smart, fast, but anything you say might get repeated.

This Week’s Challenge

Review the last 5 prompts you’ve written.

Ask yourself:

“Would I be comfortable if this showed up in a competitor’s inbox?”

That’s all for now.

Got an idea we should chase next? A favorite tool we should test? We read every suggestion.

And if you’re not subscribed yet... well, what are you waiting for? Come walk with us.

Catch you soon,
The Talk to Walk team