Bring yourself.
The moment you stop talking to the Australian Taxation Office and start having a conversation.
There’s a voice most of us keep in reserve.
You know the one. Formal. Careful. Every word chosen for precision rather than personality. It’s the voice you use when you’re on hold waiting for a government department, when you’re writing a complaint to a company that has wronged you, when the stakes feel high enough that being yourself seems like a liability.
It’s not a dishonest voice. It’s a protective one. It exists because there are situations where getting it wrong has consequences, and the safest thing is to be correct rather than human.
For a lot of people, that’s the voice they bring to AI.
And I understand why. A new technology, unfamiliar rules, not quite sure what it responds to — better to be careful. Better to be precise. Better to sound like you know what you’re doing even if you’re not entirely sure you do.
The only problem is that careful is the least interesting version of you. And the least interesting version of you gets the least interesting conversation back.
The moment the guard came down
I can tell you exactly when it happened for me, though I didn’t recognise it as a moment at the time.
I was in the middle of a long session — the kind where you’ve covered enough ground that you’ve stopped performing competence and started just talking. I made a flippant comment. Something silly, not especially considered, the kind of thing I’d toss into a conversation with a colleague without thinking twice. A dad joke, possibly. I’ve heard them all — from my father, from a dear colleague who delivered them with the same straight face — and occasionally one just arrives, unbidden, in the middle of a serious conversation.
The AI played along.
Not in a hollow, customer-service way. In the way that a conversation plays along — picking up the thread, adding something to it, turning it back with a lightness that matched the energy I’d brought.
And something shifted. Not dramatically. Just — my shoulders dropped a little. The careful voice stood down. I stopped writing for the record and started just talking.
What followed was some of the most productive conversation I’d had. Not because I’d found a technique. Because I’d stopped using one.
What you sound like when you’re actually yourself
Here’s what I’ve noticed about the conversations that produce something genuinely useful, surprising, or worth keeping:
They don’t sound like submissions to a government department.
They sound like the conversation you’d have with a smart friend who happened to know a lot about your problem. They have asides in them. Metaphors that arrive because they fit, not because they’re correct. The occasional admission that you’re not entirely sure what you’re asking yet. Humour — not performed humour, just the natural kind that surfaces when you’re comfortable.
They have you in them. The specific, irreducible, occasionally flippant you that exists when nobody’s evaluating you for correctness.
That version of you is not less rigorous. It’s more present. And presence, it turns out, is exactly what makes a conversation go somewhere.
What the AI actually notices
The things that make a conversation feel alive to you are the same things that make it more useful for the AI.
The metaphor that seems like a throwaway often contains more information than the formal explanation. The flippant aside that you almost deleted frequently reveals something true about what you actually need. The moment you stop writing carefully and start writing honestly — the AI notices. Not in a sentimental way. In a practical one. It has more to work with. The response reflects that.
The corporate voice, careful and precise, gives the AI a task. Your actual voice gives it a person. Those are different things to work with, and they produce different results.
You don’t need to manufacture personality for the sake of it. You just need to stop suppressing the personality you already have.
The permission slip
I want to be clear about what I’m not saying.
I’m not saying be sloppy. I’m not saying precision doesn’t matter or that thinking through what you need is optional. My last post was about bringing context and specificity — that still stands.
I’m saying: bring context and specificity as yourself. In your voice. With your natural rhythms and your instinct for metaphor and your occasional dad joke and the particular way you explain things when you’re talking to someone you trust.
The AI is not the Australian Taxation Office. It is not evaluating your diction. It is not going to send you a compliance notice because you used an informal sentence.
It’s just a conversation. And the best conversations happen between people who have decided to actually show up in them.
You’ve done the work. You’ve caught yourself mid-reaction, understood the conditioning, started the conversation. The only thing left is the simplest and the hardest part.
Stop talking to the ATO.
Bring yourself.
Sandi is a Melbourne-based problem-solver, crisis-averter, and translator of the technical into the human. She spent decades being the person everyone called when something was broken, confusing, or just needed explaining properly — earning a reputation that preceded her wherever she went. Now she’s channelling that same instinct into AI: making it accessible, practical, and genuinely useful for people who think it isn’t for them.