How to Use AI to Tell Your Story w/ Storytelling Expert & 8x Author Gabrielle Dolan

AI can generate a clean, “correct” story in seconds, but most of it is strangely easy to forget. That’s the tension we sit with today: more content than ever, and less of it that feels real. I’m joined by eight-time author and storytelling expert Gabrielle Dolan to talk about storytelling in the age of AI and why authenticity, emotion, and human energy are now the differentiator for leaders, creators, and brands.

We get practical about business storytelling and personal branding. Gabrielle breaks down a simple framework that most people skip: start with the message, then pick a story that supports one clear point. We talk about why you don’t have one story, you have many stories, and how short, specific moments can communicate values, build trust, and make your communication land in presentations, interviews, and everyday leadership. We also call out the common traps: stories that ramble, stories that try to cover everything, and the risky idea that “making up a believable story” is somehow acceptable in a low-trust world.

We also explore how to use AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude without losing your voice. Gabrielle shares insights from her new book, Story Intelligence: The Craft Of Authentic Storytelling Made Smarter With AI, including a blind test where AI scored fine on clarity but low on authenticity. If you want your content marketing, corporate communication, and speaking to stand out, the goal isn’t sounding smart, it’s sounding like you.

Subscribe, share this with a friend who’s relying too much on AI drafts, and leave a review with the one story you think only you can tell.

Learn more about Gabrielle's work and books: https://gabrielledolan.com/

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:48

All right. Well, hello, hello, hello, and welcome to Soul Tech with Cynthia. You guys are so amazing. Thank you so much for all the wonderful feedback. You love the tweaked name. So thank you for reaching out to me. I am super excited about today's episode because we're going to be talking about a subject that I think is really relevant to all of my listeners. And that is uh storytelling in the age of AI, uh, with the amazing eight-time author Gabrielle Dolan, who's written extensively. All eight of your books are on storytelling, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Yeah, they're on storytelling or communication, yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

Yeah, yeah. So we're we're gonna be digging into what she does because I think it's gonna be really helpful for everyone who listens and helping to position yourself uniquely in in such um extraordinary times. So welcome, Gabrielle. Thank you. I'm excited to be here, Cynthia. Yeah. So take yeah, just take a moment to tell the audience a little bit about your your work.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Yeah, so I um I I worked in corporate Australia at one of Australia's largest banks, and uh that was 20 years ago. And it was in those sort of last roles there in technology and change management that I sort of started to realize that when you shared a story, people sort of seemed to get the message better and you could sort of influence an outcome more. So I um I I was really convinced that storytelling was a communication skill, a leadership skill, an influencing skill. No one was talking about storytelling. So I actually decided to leave my corporate job and teach people how to tell stories more effectively. And it'd be fair to say the first um the first couple of years were pretty slow. People would go, What the hell has storytelling got to do with business? Um that was that was you were ahead of your time. You really were. Yes, I tell my children that. I'm saying, listen to your mother, I'm so ahead of my time. Um, and and that and that's what I do. And now um, you know, and I always think storytelling's important, but in a world of AI generated content, uh to me now it's absolutely critical. Like you, you know, you just if you're using AI generated content, it's just all bland and it's starting to sound the same, and it's sounds like AI. Um, but your stories are needed more than ever. But um, but AI is not the enemy, and used wisely, AI can actually help you find and refine your stories.

SPEAKER_00 3:07

Yeah, I really uh I totally agree with you. Well, I I've uh it's a sort of an interesting uh thing I've gone through personally. Uh as an agency owner, one of the big things that I did was help companies tell their own stories, but I switched to being an author and speaker, and it is a lot different to try to try to tell your own story and know what will matter to them because what matters to you or what you think is

Why Stories Matter With AI

SPEAKER_00 3:33

important isn't necessarily what's gonna resonate with with people. And and it's so important now in such a competitive environment with AI being able to do a lot of things and having gifts that outpace AI and knowing how to tell stories, especially your own, is gonna help not only position you competitively in the marketplace, but helps position you as an individual, as a personal brand.

SPEAKER_01 3:56

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I I I sort of think that you know your brand, your brand are literally the stories people share about you, and so you have to be sharing those stories in in the first place. Um, but when you said Cynthia, it's you it's hard to write your own stories. I when I do work um especially with comms marketing and comms people, they're so used to writing stories for other people or the company, and I get them to focus on no, no, you need to start sharing your stories. And that as long as they really struggle, it's like they've spent their whole career doing it for other people. And it is and it is hard to share your own stories because you know, because we you know don't want to feel like we're bragging and boasting about ourselves all the time. But they're there's such a powerful way to communicate, um, you know, whether it's your own values or what you want to achieve, or just you know, a message you need to communicate.

SPEAKER_00 4:47

It's so true. Uh yeah, I tell people uh all the time, because I've been I've been using AI like a lot of people from the moment generative AI hit, I was like, oh, I gotta play with this, especially as an artist. And I tell people all the time, like, I want you to think about generative AI that you come across. While it's stunningly beautiful and very cool looking, it is incredibly forgettable. And no matter how stunning it is, no matter how wild it is and crazy and whatever, you will forget it. And I believe, and this is just my theory, that one of the reasons that generative AI is forgettable is because it does not have it cannot harness harness, it may be able to harness our history and our technology and and our books, but it cannot harness human energy. And when you remove the human energy from the action, it but it has a shallowness, which I think is what's true for uh generative AI copy and text. It might be technically accurate or technically correct, but it's lacking in the soul. Yeah. And that I think that just goes back to what you were saying about learning how to tell your own story.

SPEAKER_01 5:51

Yeah. I uh I totally agree. I um I Cynthia, I feel like I feel like a bit of deja vu. Um I I'm old enough to remember when PowerPoint first entered the workforce. So, you know, this is this is going back about 36 years now. Um, and we were all excited because we used to have the overhead projector and the transparencies, and it like, you know, it was so hard to create one slide. And then PowerPoint came and we just thought with this technology, our presentations are just gonna be like amazing, like, you know, there's there's little clip art characters, and you know, you can transition your slides from the left or the right or the dissolve from the middle. And we sort of got sucked in that this technology would make our presentations like so much more engaging, and of course it didn't, right? It like you know, the death

PowerPoint Lessons For AI Content

SPEAKER_01 6:42

by PowerPoint is is a thing, so it didn't do that, and I feel like we're at that space with AI that we think oh AI can produce all these content for us, it can produce these stories, I can do so much. Um, and we and it's coming out, but it it's sort of going, but that that like it doesn't have soul. What you said, it literally doesn't have soul. It's when I um, you know, the the reason I wrote my last book is I had uh people, I'd be in workshops and people would say, Can, you know, will AI replace storytelling? And I was like, oh my god, I was actually horrified that people were even asking me that question for a start. And then other people would say, Can you use AI to help with your stories? And my first reaction was like, No, you can't. That's cheating. I'm you know, I'm a purist. But I thought, well, you know, if you if you consider yourself a storytelling expert, you probably should look into this. And and so I did, and I started to experiment with, you know, ChatGPT and Claude, and I would sort of say, I would I would go in and say, Can you write me a personal story, like in the first person around uh risk management or innovation? And I'd get this the story would come back, and I was actually I was about to say pleasantly surprised then, but it wasn't pleasantly, I was disturbingly surprised how good it was. Like it's sort of like, oh, actually that's that's not bad, that's pretty good. But it was missing something. It was lacking something, and what it's lacking is that you know, that human energy that you just said. It's it's lacking, and it sometimes it's hard to put your finger on what it's lacking, but it's lacking that. It's that it's lacking human energy, it's lacking emotion, it's like it's lacking soul. It just something doesn't feel right, um, because it's it doesn't feel real, because it's not real, because AI wrote it.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

Yeah, yeah, uh, it's uh it's great at organizing. It's I I've been using so I'm writing a book on consciousness right now, which comes out in October. And uh Congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, it's the mission of all the work I do. And I'm like, you know, you still haven't written the book on consciousness yet, but it's the mission of all your work. It's probably time to do that. And I've been using uh different platforms for research, and uh, and it is really great for researching research and organizing things in a succinct way. And it it asked me, would you like me to write the first chapter? And I was like, No, I'm writing the book myself. And it was like, Congratulations. You're you're the first author that has said that to me. I know, right? Right. But I I mean I did use so my third book was a conversation with artificial intelligence. Um I wrote a premise, I wrote the premise about what had happened to the American dream and where we are or where we needed to be. But the rest of the book about the issues we have in America was me conversating with AI about how we could actually cure a lot of the issues here. And but it says that on the cover. But a book, I would never pretend to write a book that I didn't write, but it is great. I think it's a great tool. Um, so uh what are some of the things like when you teach uh or you're writing your books, what are some of those key elements in storytelling that you think a lot of people just don't know, don't haven't learned yet?

SPEAKER_01 9:55

Yeah, like I think um when it comes to storytelling, so a lot of people will go, well, I I don't have stories, like and or you know, I don't have a story. It's like it's not one story, it's lots of stories. And I always my premise is especially in business where I, you know, like whether people are going for job interviews or you know, got to do a presentation or communicate to their team or whatever, I always come back to what's the message? What like what's the actual message you're trying to communicate? And people really struggle to answer that. And it was like, well, if you're not clear on the message, you're not gonna find a story. So it's sort of like don't start with the story, start with what are you, what's what are you trying to communicate? So, and helping them drill that down to like a single message. So I think one of the biggest mistakes people make is um they want a story that covers

Storytelling Basics People Miss

SPEAKER_01 10:43

off everything. So it's like um I I still have people ring me and go, can you help us um come up with our organizational story or our brand story or our strategy story? It's like there's not one story that's gonna communicate your entire brand or your entire strategy. Lots of stories will do that. So the first, I think the first mistake people go to is they're not clear on the message. Um I I talk about four different the four different types of stories that you should share in the book. And one of the most powerful stories, yet underutilised stories, is a personal story. As in it didn't happen at work. So I'm not talking deep, dark personal stuff, but it's just something that didn't happen at work and how you can connect it to a work message. Now, whether that work message is one of your person one of your leadership values, personal values, or the company values or purpose, or just anything like innovation, or you've got to give a presentation around risk management, like how you can share a personal story to do that. So it's thinking of the personal stories. And um and then I think the other, or I'm gonna say two other really common mistakes. They go too long. So people are telling their story, it just goes way too long. So my advice is like one minute, 90 seconds, 60 to 90 seconds is a good, you know, aim for that. And the other thing, sadly, and I can't believe I still have this conversation in my workshops with senior leaders, is some people still think uh it's okay to make up stories as long as it's believable and gets the message across, it's okay. And and I sort of then, you know, talk to them about like, but why would you make up stories when you've got so many stories? Like so many. And the reason they're making up stories is they just think their stories aren't important enough or big enough. And um, sadly, a lot of these conversations I have are with senior leaders in industries like the finance industry, um, professional service firm industry, where they're already coming from a low level of trust. It's like people like we are in a world of distrust too. Like, you know, I don't know if you follow the Edelman report, but they they produce a global report every 20 years, and it's the trust is at its absolute lowest because we don't it's really hard to know what to believe. So why so my thing is like don't add to that. Like, don't add to that by making up stories or exaggerating your own stories, just use your real authentic stories.

SPEAKER_00 13:43

Yeah, no, I agree with that. And uh yeah, I talked to my uh I teach uh introduction to public relations at one of the schools uh to people in their 20s, and I tell I tell them, you know, you have to sometimes you have to actually really dig for the story. So like just for example, I I generally did when I was early in my in my early days of marketing and PR, I usually had a famous chef, or the the owners were really famous, or the interior designer was some insanely famous guy. And so that was always a good way to hook um uh and build a story off of. But there were times when I didn't have anybody or anything uh uh to really work it. And one in particular, I looked into the building that it took place in, and it used to be a speakeasy. But it took it to it took me just continuing to be like, okay, let's dig into the people, okay. It's not the people, let's dig into the menu, it's not the menu. Let's do they bring anything into the country that's never been brought

Finding Real Stories By Digging

SPEAKER_00 14:40

here before. I actually got uh avocado, not avocado oil, that oil, that Moroccan, Moroccan oil, like the first story in the US on that. I was like, I'm I was digging for something. Anyway, my point in all this is um sometimes you do have to get creative, and sometimes you have to go into the history of a company and find out like why was it originally stuck? But don't just take the surface. And if you're really struggling for something, sometimes you have to just get really creative. I don't believe in inventing stories, um, although my memory mansion was so wild, I've been kidding about you. I'm like, no, I was actually the tame version of some of the crap I've done. Um, but it's really great when you get to a place in life in your 50s where you stop giving up flying what anybody thinks about you.

SPEAKER_01 15:21

Yeah, that is there, there's there's that that is one of the great uh benefits of getting old. There's not too many, but yeah, not not not giving a crap about what other people think is definitely one of one of them.

SPEAKER_00 15:34

Yeah, I think when you and you said that about to the executives, and you're like, you don't invent something. If you if the story is not authentic, people can feel it even if they don't know what's off. And the person saying it will carry the energy of someone full of shit.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I I I actually I actually um you know say if you're making up stories, like you'd want to be a really good actor because when you retell a story, you don't just retell it, you relive it. And people people sort of sense that. And um, you know, I'm from Australia. Australians have the highest bullshit detectors going on, and it was like so, but and you know, I think most people do, but you you don't, you know, you you do, you you don't just retell it, you relive it. So it's you know, it's just absolutely not worth um um making up stories. And again, what you were saying, sometimes you've got to dig a little bit, and just people sort of think, I don't have stories, and especially when it comes to um company brand stories or your own brand stories, it's like going and and it's not sticking with the standard, you know, case studies. Like that that's another mistake. People think case studies are stories, then they're they're not stories, they're case studies. They you know, I run a business on storytelling, I absolutely use use case studies, but they serve a completely different purpose. So it's how you can find those stories. Um in my previous, previous book, Magnetic Stories, I talk about the diff the five types of brand stories, and that's I think that's that's what you were sort of talking about. Digging, digging to find. Is it a really cool thing that this company did or this, you know? I remember I actually uh interviewed a uh I did a case study in the book on um this really cool restaurant in Florida in in the US, and it was just like they're known for customer service, and the stories they shared on their social media were just so super cool and such great examples of how you just share tiny little stories to build your brand.

SPEAKER_00 17:30

Yeah, no, which which which restaurant was it? Because I'm in Florida.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

Oh wow, so it's the um oh my god, I've got a mind brain. It's the it's it's a Spanish restaurant.

SPEAKER_00 17:39

Yeah, don't worry, don't worry about it if you can't. And I know that feeling you when somebody like asked you a question, you're like, that was three books ago.

SPEAKER_01 17:45

Yeah, no, so uh but you know what, I remember the story. So one story, and I put it in the book, it's the Columbia, the Columbia restaurant. Anyway, they shared a story on Valentine's Day about this couple that was celebrating their 71st, 71st wedding anniversary. And now we're talking about, you know, that's a sign of love. And they uh they talked about on their first wedding anniversary, they came to the Columbia restaurant to celebrate their first wedding anniversary. And on their second anniversary, they came back and coincidentally was seated at the same table for the next 69 years. Columbia restaurant had reserved that table for them to come back and have their wedding anniversary. Now, and so it was sort of like it was a story about the couple, but the subtle message is you're going, oh, that is super cool for that restaurant to do that, right? And I'm and you know, I'm going there next next time in Florida, I'm going there because like how how amazing. So like it's things like stories like that that are really sticky.

SPEAKER_00 18:53

Like, yeah, and it means like to somebody on the surface, and you're like, oh, they had this table that they it's all in the delivery and in the detail.

SPEAKER_01 19:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um the Columbia restaurant. So um and you know what? That that's like I I've forgot the name of the restaurant for a while. I didn't forget the story. I absolutely didn't forget the story, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:11

Which is easy to figure out when you're you're like, so the stories will still carry carry with people. Uh I uh I I've learned to uh as an agency owner, I learned to um do something that always made the bosses nervous. I interviewed everybody, and and sometimes that was a lot because it could be it could be a couple hundred people that I was interviewing. It wasn't every single person in the company, but they were people who've been there for either a long time or and that is how I found to uh it was a great way to find out the the real story because the one that you're getting on the surface, or the one that you may hear as an employee of a company, or you know, you may even take over as the CEO, but what you're getting is more recent. So just as an example, I had interviewed a bunch of people at uh it was the the oldest um uh fastener company in the country, um, which sounds really boring, but if you actually understand fasteners that grommets and washers, they hold everything together. So you could be sitting in a room with several hundred of them and you wouldn't even know because they're in everything. And interviewing the staff there, the average person had been there for 30 or 40 or 50 years. Wow. Turns out the company is two almost 200 years old, and they originally started by selling their their product to both sides in the Civil War. Oh, cool. Yeah, and they were fo they had photo. I mean, we had to dig, but we found we pulled photos up, and so we set up the whole thing to be about their 200th anniversary and um and showing their history as a company and that you could trust a company that had been around for 200 years and had employed employees that had been around for that long. So storytelling is really fascinating. Um tell me, you've got a new book that you can you share. Can you share anything on this new book?

SPEAKER_01 20:49

I can. So the the book, um, it's called Story Intelligence. Oh and the tagline is the craft of authentic storytelling made smarter with AI. So it's it's funny, Cynthia. I tell the people, I've got a new book, story intelligence. Like, oh right. And then I do the tagline, the craft of authentic storytelling made smarter with AI. They go, oh wow. So um, so yeah, it's it's I s this is this is definitely my last book on storytelling. I know I said that the last book, but I I feel it, I feel it in my bones that this is the last book on storytelling. Um, so I I feel like it's 20 years of my career is in this book. So it's it's a look, it sort of goes through a little bit about why storytelling's important and why we need it now more than ever, but it then it goes into a really practical, practical guide on how to use storytelling,

New Book And AI Authenticity Test

SPEAKER_01 21:38

all the different ways you can use, you know, storytelling in presentations. There's so many examples in there. Um, you know, there's a chapter on how to find your stories without AI, and then there's a chapter on how to use AI to find and refine your stories. I go through the four different types of stories um I spoke about. Um, there's one chapter that probably should, it goes back to what we were talking about that the AI stories lack soul, is I did a test. So I came up with six different topics. I wrote a story for each of them, and then I got ChatGPT to write six and Claude to write six, and I got people to blind test rate them. They they had no they first of all, they had no idea any of them were generated by AI. And what was really interesting is my stories, I got them to rate them on a whole different things, but the two things um that are important is authenticity. So did it feel real and did it make sense? And my stories, clarity and authenticity were sort of rated the same, but all of the AI stories, clarity was rated okay, as in the story made sense, but authenticity was really low. So again, it's it's just reinforcing that you can look at a story and on the surface you could go, yeah, that makes sense, that's a good story, but it's it doesn't feel real and it's lacking that that soul that we spoke about. So that there's a there's a sort of there's a chapter in that as well. So um yeah, I'm pretty proud of it. It debuted at number one on Australia's business books and it hit um on Amazon Hot Renew. Yeah, I was very excited.

SPEAKER_00 23:09

Congratulations, sorry, on Amazon.

SPEAKER_01 23:10

Yeah, Amazon Hot New Releases, it reached uh like number one in four different categories. So, like, you know, I love that. I love that. Business, communications, presentation. Even social skills. It reached number one in social skills. So and there is there is you know a chapter on how you can use it in speeches and eulogies and like it because it's a it's a it's a day-to-day communication skill. It's not just a business skill.

SPEAKER_00 23:33

Yeah, I know I agree with that. And I I I think something that for for people uh takeaway that I have just from not only listening to you and your work, um, you have you guys, you have to train your AI on how you think. You have to teach it what your brand is. And a lot of people use it without considering that. So I imported my books because I I tell a lot of personal stories, which is a a lot of why the I do the work that I do. I imported my books, everything, a lot of things that I had written um to teach it how to how to help me better. And so yeah, I think that's the one that we that often gets left out. It's like, you know, you need to teach your AI who your your brand is. Now you can use it to help you figure out what that is, but yeah, you can.

SPEAKER_01 24:13

But you still gotta be care you still gotta be careful with that. So I, you know, for example, I I've got my own paid, you know, model, and I it sort of gets to know you. But the other day I put something in um just to do a bit of an edit, it was like uh I and I I said

Training AI To Match Your Voice

SPEAKER_01 24:30

something like, I teach people to communicate more effectively through sharing um stories. And it came back going, I teach people how to communicate more authentically by stories that bridges the gap between uh impact and trust. And I'm going, what the hell? What what that what the hell does that mean? Um but the trip, but the trap is you could go, oh that sounds good. Like that sounds smart. Um, so my thing is it might sound good, but does it sound like you? And you have to you sort of always gotta question that.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

Yeah, no, no, I agree. Oh, what a fascinating conversation. I really enjoyed this conversation. If our listeners want to go check out your book and your other books, where would they go?

SPEAKER_01 25:17

Okay, so it's available globally to like Amazon or the usual ones, just uh look up Story Intelligence, Gabrielle Dole, and you'll find me. Um, you know, I'm active on LinkedIn, so stay connected. And I've got my own website, keeping it real with Jack and Ral on the Rail. So um, if you like listening to podcasts, which clearly you do because you're listening to this amazing podcast, um, then you might want to come over and have a listen to my podcast as well.

SPEAKER_00 25:43

I love that. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your your extraordinary experience and storytelling. I'm sure our listeners are gonna be now going, hmm, how to how do I roll this into what I do? Yeah, absolutely. So thanks for joining us today. Uh, all right, you guys, if you're not already a subscriber, what on earth are you

Where To Find Gabrielle

SPEAKER_00 26:04

thinking? There's so much dumb information out there. And here at Soul Tech with Cynthia, you get intelligent conversation, something to help raise your level of consciousness instead of drain you, uh, like an energy vampire. Uh so if you're not already subscribed, please subscribe and share the show with your friends and family. If you want to learn more about my work and my new book, um Soul Tech, the Art and Science of Higher Consciousness, 12 Codes to Higher Consciousness, go check out that and my other three books um at CynthiaLelliot.com. And of course, if you want to learn about the work that inspired the name of the show, um, my 501c3 nonprofit, the Soultech Foundation.org, uh, which is committed to sharing educational programs and events with uh the community, the public to help uh raise up underserved uh uh women and children um in the age of AI. So you can go check out that and learn more about the events that we have coming up

Subscribe And Closing Thoughts

SPEAKER_00 26:56

at soultechfoundation.org. Uh and of course you can find me on all the social media platforms under Cynthia L. Elliot or Soltech with Cynthia. You guys have an amazing week. Thank you again, Gabriel. I will we're gonna stay in touch. Uh and uh uh we'll be back more with soon enough, you guys. Uh, did that actually come out correct? We'll be back with more soon enough. Yeah, yeah, it did. All right. Bye, you guys. See ya.