How to Use ChatGPT Without Sounding Like It
AI isn’t replacing human creativity—it’s helping wellness practitioners save time, stay visible, and write content that sounds like them. In this episode, Samantha chats with copywriter and strategist Sarah Cook about how AI tools like ChatGPT can help you simplify your content creation process, maintain your voice, and bring more authenticity to your marketing. They talk about how to use AI responsibly, how to avoid generic copy, and how to set up your own “AI copywriter” to support your business without losing your personality or professionalism.
Key Takeaways
AI can handle much of the writing process—but your unique stories and experiences make the content connect.
Creating a brand voice document helps AI tools produce copy that truly sounds like you.
Use your real language and examples from client experiences to humanize your marketing.
Avoid overused phrases, repetitive punctuation, and common AI “tells” in your copy.
ChatGPT’s new project-only memory feature helps you organize business content separately and securely.
Always double-check facts, protect client privacy, and make sure your copy reflects your brand values.
Sarah Cook
Sarah Cook is the owner and creator of Wellness Writer, offering copywriting programs for holistic health and wellness practitioners. She’s a StoryBrand Certified copywriter and a former naturopathic doctor, with over a decade of writing experience in the wellness space. 2025 is the year Sarah has fully embraced AI in all of her offerings. Through her programs and resources, she supports practitioners who are ready to be the voice of their brand and leverage AI to call in the most aligned clients to their practices.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Samantha: I am Samantha Mabe, website designer and founder of Lemon and the Sea, and this is Elevate your practice. If you're a holistic health practitioner ready to grow your practice without wasting time on things that don't work, you're in the right place. Each week I share a website, SEO, and marketing advice along with guest experts so you can bring in the right clients and feel confident about how you are showing up and serving the people that you help. Let's get started.
[00:00:38] In this episode, I'm talking with my friend Sarah Cook, about how you can use AI and ChatGPT specifically to make your content sound like you faster. We have a lot of great conversations about how you can use ChatGPT from a technical standpoint to the pieces that are going to really help you get your brand voice in place so that all you have to do is get things that last 20% and it will streamline your marketing so much.
[00:01:15] Sarah Cook is the owner and creator of Wellness Writer, offering copywriting programs for holistic health and wellness practitioners. She's a StoryBrand certified copywriter and a former naturopathic doctor with over a decade of writing experience in the wellness space. 2025 is the year Sarah has fully embraced AI in all her offerings. Through her programs and resources, she supports practitioners who are ready to be the voice of their brand and leverage AI to call in the most aligned clients to their practices.
[00:01:45] Hi Sarah. Thanks for coming back and talking to me again.
[00:01:49] Sarah Cook: Hey Samantha. I'm so happy to be here.
Meet Sarah Cook: From Copywriter to AI Strategist
[00:01:52] Samantha: Can you expand a little bit on your bio and tell us who you work with and kind of what your business journey has looked like?
[00:01:59] Sarah Cook: Oh my, my business journey. Well, I will say, I made a huge shift and pivot just heading into 2025. At the point when really like AI became completely unignorable in the copywriting and content creation realm. At that point , I was a copywriter and doing copywriting VIP days and so you and I knew each other well working with clients. I would write their websites or their sales pages and you'd design them.
[00:02:27] And really what happened, towards the end of 2024, I had some really aha moments essentially. Even on one VIP day, I had been working with a naturopathic doctor, wrote her sales page, at the end of the day, I had like 45 minutes left and I was like, okay, I'm gonna put her sales page into ChatGPT. I'm gonna give it a few ideas of how I would want some social media post to help her with this launch. And literally in that last 45 minutes, I was able to create high quality, good posts to help her with her launch. That night I said to my husband, I'm like, 'I am burning down my business.'
The 80/20 Rule of AI and Copywriting
[00:03:04] And it was just sort of this realization that essentially AI, when it comes to creating content, it could do 80%, I would say, of what I was previously doing as a copywriter. And there is that other 20%, which is very learnable, it's very teachable. It's also very critical to make a huge difference between copy that you can tell is generic and just generated by ChatGPT. That 20% really is the huge difference and makes copy that actually will connect with clients, make conversions and help these practitioners grow their practices.
[00:03:48] And so at that point, essentially I decided my business is now focused on that 20%, where it's like, what can I do to really help practitioners leverage this incredible tool, which saves them so much time, saves them so much money. It really almost levels the playing field in a way, like gives them advantage that small practitioners, solo practitioners never had without having big budgets to be able to hire their own in-house copywriters and teams and things like that, it's actually a huge advantage, but how can I help then bridge that 20% so that they're not embarrassing themselves with generic chat copy and actually creating content that does call in their right and aligned clients to their programs and their practices.
[00:04:35] So that's when I made that big shift, really just earlier this year. And, so now I run a copywriting program where we heavily focus on, okay, how can we leverage ChatGPT, and yet how can we also bring in all of these sales, psychology copywriting frameworks, everything that I've always known and done with copywriting, how can we bring that in just to make content work for these practitioners. So I'm running that copywriting program.
Moving Beyond Copy-and-Paste Content
[00:05:05] Another thing I've kind of just shifted around over the last year was that previously I had been running this social media content membership where I fully wrote fully written captions, fully written email newsletters. My members got these bundles every month and they loved it, right? But again, what I was doing is not that much more than what ChatGPT can now do. And the fact is that the way marketing is changing so rapidly, copy and paste content is not helping anybody anymore. And what matters now is that we're telling stories and we're connecting and we're sharing things from lived experience. If you're not putting something in your content that people can't just get from their own chat with ChatGPT, you're not gonna move the needle in your business.
[00:06:01] So anyway, I literally just closed down that, version of my membership and I'm running a much lighter version to just support practitioners in their social media in a way that's more giving them prompts, giving 'em ideas, giving the storytelling hooks, giving them trending things so that they can really be sharing things that are relevant and gonna actually help them move the needle rather than just like, Hey, here's five tips kind of thing.'
[00:06:27] Samantha: I think it's so interesting with AI that people are either all for it or against it. You see all the time, I can tell exactly if this was written by AI, and so we want the real stories and the real stuff. And so it sounds like what you're doing is kind of combining both of those things: here are the prompts to give you some ideas and then you actually have to take it and make it your own so that people will connect with it. But you don't actually need to spend an hour figuring out what your caption should say on Instagram.
How Practitioners Can Use AI Strategically
[00:06:55] Sarah Cook: That's a huge thing, right? Mostly I'm working with solo practitioners who are wearing a lot of hats in their business. They don't have a lot of time and to be honest, Instagram, social media is not necessarily the best use of their time. If they have a block of time to work on their business growth, they might be better off creating their next lead magnet or setting up a little mini workshop they could run - something that's actually going to move people into their ecosystem and convert them into sales. There's a lot of things that they could be doing. So yes, social media is really great way to stay visible and stay connected, but I really, really don't want that to be consuming all of their time. I want that to be quick and easy for them so that they do have that mental freedom, that time freedom to focus on things that will probably move the needle more significantly in their practice.
[00:07:54] Samantha: We see these places spend a ton of time on social media and we forget they're probably big practices that have like a front desk person that could do it, or they hire these huge marketing firms. You and I work with smaller practices, like it might just be one person and they're never gonna be at marketing firm $10,000 a month. And that's fine, but then the expectations have to change. It amazes me how much some of these firms will do and how much they charge.
[00:08:25] Sarah Cook: It used to be that you either had to have a huge budget or you really had to just be naturally good at creating content, kind of naturally creative, to keep up with this. But literally now it really is possible to keep up with it. It's possible to stay visible on your Instagram account, to send out your weekly email, and also have enough time to be serving your clients. The fact is with ChatGPT, it really can streamline things so much that it really, I think, gives a leg up to the smaller practitioners who didn't have that before.
Overcoming Hesitation Around AI
[00:09:03] Samantha: So what do you say to people who are in the health and wellness space that are still really hesitant to use AI even when it comes to like marketing and writing?
[00:09:13] Sarah Cook: I believe that if this tool exists, we want the people who are doing good things in the world to take advantage of it. I don't see why we should only let the big guys take advantage of it. Even if there are negative things about AI, which there are, I say we should get it in the hands of people who are doing good and just take full advantage of it. That's all.
[00:09:43] Samantha: I think it's helpful what you do and kind of what we're gonna talk about is you're not just letting it create whatever it wants. You're guiding it. It's gonna sound like you, it's not something that's just like spit out whatever you want and I'm gonna copy and paste it.
Finding Your Voice with ChatGPT
[00:10:00] Sarah Cook: Absolutely. One of the biggest things that my students in my program are taking away right now is they say it's helping them find their voice. They say it's actually helping them get more clear on their message. That's powerful. That's amazing. And it's really different.
[00:10:17] I have one student who just said on our coaching call the other day, she was like, 'I can't believe I'm like happy about this and I'm saying this, but I just fired my VA' because she realized that her VA had been doing all of her social media, but it wasn't her voice. What she said was, 'what I've found is that nobody else can actually like capture my voice as well as I can. And now that I have this tool to help me do it, I can do it quickly and easily to where it wasn't worth it for me anymore to have the VA doing that.' And of course she's like, 'maybe I will come back around, have a VA for this or that other thing sometime. This is not about not having help.' But the fact was through the process of her working with ChatGPT, actually getting in there and creating some of her own content, she felt like she was really becoming more clear on what things she wanted to say and how she wanted to say them in her way, which is really, really cool.
Creating Your Brand Voice and Messaging Guide
[00:11:15] Samantha: Do you have any tips to help people do that? Get it to sound like you, give it the output that they want, and make sure that it's actually doing the job of saving us time.
[00:11:28] Sarah Cook: I teach this in a little mini course essentially, where we start by creating a brand document, and that has all the most important messaging points about who you're serving, what you're about, what your offers are, all of those types of basic messaging about you and your practice. We also create a brand voice guide by actually providing ChatGPT with other things that you've written or said. I have a client, she is incredible at speaking. She's an acupuncture functional medicine doctor and she's been on TV , she does podcast interviews. That's just how she communicates very, very easily verbally. Which is opposite of me, where it comes through my fingers. But what we did for her is she took transcripts from podcast interviews and uploaded those into ChatGPT, and then used that as the basis of, 'Hey, analyze this for my voice.'
[00:12:29] We create a voice document based on previously created content or previously recorded videos, podcasts, et cetera. And that's like one of the best ways to get in there. And you can even then prompt it with things that's like, 'what are some analogies that I tend to use a lot? What are some phrases that I tend to use a lot? Are there certain phrases that are kind of like common in the wellness space that I don't say?' And you actually have the tool analyze your brand voice for you. And then you have that document that you load into your account so that it's always available.
[00:13:05] And we use projects for that. You know, the tech of it always changes inside ChatGPT accounts, but at this moment in time projects are perfect for kind of setting up a project as your brand copywriter. So we upload your brand document, we can upload website copy, we can upload sales pages, and then all of that works as kind of like this background information so that Chat can kind of act like that second brain for your business.
[00:13:33] Samantha: I did your course and I set up my AI copywriter and it was so helpful to think about like, 'okay, what do I say and what don't I say is a big one that I really liked. Here are all of my services that I offer. Here's kind of the way that I talk.' I had lots of podcast interviews and writing I could give it so that when I ask it to do something, it's really close to what I actually want it to say.
[00:14:03] And I set it up in a project so then I can go back and reference it. I can pull from it again and kind of have it as like this continuous document that's always learning and referring back to that information that I've shared with it.
Keeping Your Content Updated and On-Brand
[00:14:17] Sarah Cook: Exactly, I think what's interesting too is as business owners we're just inherently creative people. We tend to change and evolve over time and we add little offers or we change our lead magnets. And so it's not like we can create one brand document and then that lives forever.
[00:14:35] But what's nice is that, you know, anytime you do make those little shifts in what you're offering or little shifts in your messaging or small shifts in how you recognize who your ideal client is, you can just go in there, update your brand vibe document. It's very easy, you can just update it as your business evolves and move that into the project that you're using to write all your copy.
Avoiding Common AI Writing Red Flags
[00:14:57] Samantha: You feel like there are any things that people really have to look out for, even when they've put all this stuff in and kind of trained ChatGPT, that they still have to be like, okay, I know that I'm gonna have to review it for. Apparently the Oxford comma is now a sign of AI, which makes me sad 'cause I'm an Oxford comma girl all the way.
[00:15:18] Sarah Cook: The thing that drives me crazy, because there are certain styles of writing that historically were actually good copywriting skills, right? The Oxford comma, I agree. I like it. I used to like the em dash, that is a punctuation that I used to use. But ChatGPT overuses it to the point that now we have to kind of go back and use it very, very sparingly, or our copy screams that ChatGPT wrote it, right? So the em dash is definitely one of them.
[00:15:56] Even the rule of three, this is also historically great in copywriting, you list things in three. So if you're describing something right, it's like, ' this is good for your hormones, your gut, and your mood.' 1, 2, 3. It sounds good, but what is so bizarre is that ChatGPT has overused that so much that you start to see every sentence has the rule of three. And so now I'm going back and I'm changing every time that it has a list of three, I just change it to a list of two. And not every time, but the problem with it is that it uses some of these mannerisms to repeatedly, essentially, and so you just kind of have to thin it out.
[00:16:42] There are certain sayings that, it seems that they are kind of going through phases because initially it was transformational and skyrocket and unlock, but now other phrases are creeping in repetitively, or I see them a lot in the content that I'm working with. Like, 'you are not broken.' The first few times I started to see it, it was like, 'that's okay.' Well, now I see it in everything that comes out of ChatGPT, right? So I think that it might kind of shift over time what phrases it starts to repeat. That's definitely one example where I would eliminate anytime it says 'you're not broken.'
[00:17:20] Another really clear one that, again, a good copywriting tactic gone bad, is this concept of starting with, I call it a negative anchor. I don't actually technically know what it's called, but anchoring something in like, 'it's not.' So ' it's not that you're lazy, it's that you don't have a plan.' That's very ChatGPT, which again, that used to be a great way to anchor it in something that's negative and it's fine to do it here and there, you just don't wanna do it every other sentence.
[00:17:57] It's really just like thinning out those repetitive types of things.
[00:18:02] Samantha: I would stay away from Threads telling you, ' this is the top sign it's AI,' which they like to do. But if you just actually read what ChatGPT puts out, you're gonna notice like, okay, you've said this a million times, maybe I need to edit that. And I think that's a key that a lot of people miss, you actually do have to read it and you might have to make some changes. You can't just copy and paste and put it on Instagram or on your website. Especially now as the other machines are getting smarter, they're looking for content that humans wrote and so we're kind of co-writing.
Make Your Copy Sound Real—Not Robotic
[00:18:37] Sarah Cook: 100%. What you need to do is you actually need to think, what do I have to offer here that somebody cannot just get by searching on Google or by asking ChatGPT themselves? This is becoming more and more important. I think it used to be something that was really easy to overlook, but now I'm almost like you need to put at least one little phrase to show that this is based on something that happened to you in your life, that you have seen or observed in your life, that you saw happen to someone else, something from your experience that shows this is actually coming from you.
[00:19:20] This client came and asked me to look at her flyer she had printed out for a perimenopause workshop and the title was 'Perimenopause 101: Education and Empowerment.' That is just all 100% generic words. That tells me you just asked ChatGPT to summarize what is this workshop about? It's about perimenopause 101, empowerment, and education. Those words mean nothing to anybody.
[00:19:43] And so what we have to do is we have to actually think about what are the words that my real clients would be saying? They're probably saying, 'Could it be perimenopause? Am I in perimenopause?' They're 40 years old and aren't thinking they should be having hormone changes yet. And so we have to reword it so instead of calling that workshop 'Perimenopause 101', we're gonna call it 'Could it be Perimenopause?' Because we have to actually just think about: how do people actually speak in real life? What are they actually thinking in real life? and just bring it back to that.
[00:20:19] Samantha: I really like that tip. I find that ChatGPT is also really bad at SEO research. You can tell it to find keywords and it will pull stuff out, but people aren't searching for those keywords. So you do have to kind of double check in that. And then if you tell it, okay, here are the keywords, and to put it in the copy, it does like to sprinkle them in a little bit too much.
[00:20:44] Sarah Cook: There are kind of those two aspects. What I teach is one aspect is getting that set up of your account. You're always training it, you're keeping it's memory focused on your business. So that's one piece of it is more like the logistical aspect of using the tool.
[00:20:58] The other piece of it is what can we do to bridge that last 20% to make it actually really high converting content to call in my clients. That's where we bring in our stories, our examples from our life. That's where we remove all the em dashes, where we look at the wording. And is that's how my clients word it or is that just how ChatGPT describes it?
[00:21:21] The overall copywriting with AI thing is optimizing those two pieces: the logistical use of it and then the really humanizing part.
Understanding Project-Only Memory
[00:21:32] Samantha: So I know OpenAI, which is who does ChatGPT is always making changes. Are there any that you've noticed recently that people need to pay attention to in this third quarter of 2025?
[00:21:47] Sarah Cook: Project only memory is really cool. So the idea here is that inside of your ChatGPT account, all the default settings are so that pretty much anytime you have a conversation, it contributes to your account memory. You do have a place where you can look at and review what specific memories are saved in your account, you can delete ones that are irrelevant. But it is actually building a web of memories related to anything you converse with it about. And so because of that, you do wanna be a little bit careful in how you use it.
[00:22:27] I am going in and using it primarily for my business, for creating marketing content and if I'm going to want to use ChatGPT for something totally unrelated, like this past summer, I was planning a summer road trip for my family and all these random things completely unrelated to my business and my marketing, so for that, I wanna keep it separate, essentially from my main memory. And it used to be we could only do that with temporary chats. That would be one way that it keeps it totally separate.
[00:22:58] And the other way, now, is that we have something called project only memory. And so I love this because you can set up a project and at the moment that you set the project up, you can toggle a setting that says, I want this to be project only memory. That way it exists in its own little capsule. Any conversations you have in that project do not contribute to your account memory. It's like you're keeping your memory clean. And so this is perfect to use, especially there is some sort of stuff that you like to do in your ChatGPT account that's not related to your business.
[00:23:33] Samantha: I think that's helpful 'cause I don't need it to bring the recipes that I'm planning for the week into my copy or ' how do I email somebody about this thing?'
[00:23:42] Sarah Cook: It will bring them in, it will make some sort of analogy or reference to it, and it's like, no, no, no, no, no. That is out of context.
Privacy, Ethics, and AI in Healthcare
[00:23:52] Samantha: Because we work with health and wellness providers and there are some ethical and legal considerations, so what do we need to be aware of when it comes to ChatGPT and AI and those kind of pieces of privacy, Facts, and things that we have to think about more than just somebody who's using it for other stuff?
[00:24:13] Sarah Cook: Privacy is huge. I was on a call with a mastermind of doctors the other day and a lot of them are using it for chart notes and so we were kind of in a conversation about that. The fact is, you can do that, but you have to make sure there are no identifying information for your patients, right? Because any information that put into Chat conversations can be used to train their models on the back end. And so you just literally have no control over where that information ultimately ends up or potentially would get spit out into somebody else's conversations? And so privacy is definitely a huge thing. There are certain ways that you can change your privacy settings on the backend, but I'm not gonna get into the legalities of that. It's beyond my scope for sure. I would just assume that anything you put into conversations with Chat, you need to assume that it's not private. So that's really, really huge.
[00:25:18] Yes, you do have to fact check. Say you're writing a blog article and you're wanting to find some references to back up what you're saying, like you always like to use magnesium in your patients with headaches, but you wanna find evidence of research to back that statement up. Yes, you can search for that directly while you're chatting with ChatGPT. It can search the web, it can search for references. One thing I like to do, because if you just say, can you find studies on magnesium and headaches, a lot of times it will pull blog articles that they're secondary references. The best thing that I have found is literally to say, 'can you pull studies from Pub Med?' And that just gives it a little more direction to usually find more relevant studies, those types of things. Of course, it's just like any time if you're writing in a little bit more of a research backed style, you have to go look and see, is that actually a relevant reference? Does that say what I think it says? Of course. But it can be used for that. It's just that little tip of always double checking that anything you're taking from it, you cannot assume it is true fact. You do need to confirm elsewhere it is accurate.
Copyright and AI-Generated Content
[00:26:44] Samantha: Okay. And do you know anything about copyright and content with ChatGPT?
[00:26:51] Sarah Cook: So there's something that is like called accidental plagiarism or AI plagiarism and that is when if ChatGPT provides you with something that accidentally is something somebody else already published with their name on it, they own the copyright to it. And it is possible for this to happen because the way that ChatGPT comes up with its answers is just searching this vast database of information, including all the information on the web, and it could accidentally provide you something that you would be infringing on somebody else's copyright if you literally copied and pasted it.
[00:27:33] I will say that I do not worry about this on a day-to-day usage basis at all. Primarily, if you use it the way that I teach where you are setting up with your brand message, your brand vibe, all that you're brain dumping what you want it to say. This is a huge thing that I teach, is that you really do need to start in your own mind of what is it that I wanna communicate here? You can just dump that in and when you provide enough of that sort of input, you are much, much, much, much, much less likely that Chat's gonna go out and pull something random that someone else wrote, right? It's actually gonna take all that input from you and you're gonna get something back that's really customized to you. And so for that reason, I do not lose sleep over it.
[00:28:27] But if you are gonna be asking it generic questions, and if you are going to say, 'Hey, write me a blog article on the topic of magnesium for headaches.' Then there's a chance that it's gonna pull some things somebody else wrote, so it is important to be aware of that.
[00:28:47] Samantha: It sounds like we just need to make sure we're not letting it do all the work. We are giving it the prompts, we're giving it the voice. These are all of my ideas, can you make it actually sound like something I can publish and not just a list of random things that I put together?
Think of ChatGPT as Your In-House Copywriter
[00:29:04] Sarah Cook: Think of it as your in-house copywriter. I always think about back when I was blog writing, one of my clients is a functional medicine doctor here in Denver. He was very brilliant. He was very busy. He would just get these bursts of ideas while he was working with patients. He would do a voice memo note and send that to me and it would be like, 'hey, I keep seeing these women. They're depressed, they're fatigued. Their doctors wanna go on antidepressants and I run their labs and I see that they're low in iron, but it's not just low iron, it's their ferritin. And it's not really flagged because it's not technically all the normal range, but it's low ferritin. And I have all these ideas and I wanna blog article on low ferritin and depression in women and blah, blah, blah.' And he's would brain dump and then I would turn that into content. And that's exactly how you have to use ChatGPT. You have to think that you're brain dumping this voice memo on some brilliant copywriter they will turn it into something for you.
[00:30:06] Samantha: I love thinking of it that way. All those things that you're like, 'oh, I should write a post about that,' just put your thoughts in and let it take them and write something for you.
Where to Find Sarah and Her AI Tools
[00:30:16] All right, Sarah, where can people find you online and check out what you are doing and resources? Anything you wanna share?
[00:30:26] Sarah Cook: You can find me on Instagram. My handle is Sarah Cook dot wellness writer. You can find my website at wellnesswriter.com. I do tend to switch out my freebies frequently 'cause I have fun with it, but right now I have something really fun out there. It is called Dazzle. It's a custom GPT that I built that will actually create an entire Instagram setup for you. You put in very brief information about you and your practice, and it will write your Instagram bio. It will write pinned post captions for you. It will give you some storytelling hooks specific to your niche. It really is this really great kickstart to freshen up if you have ignored your Instagram page. And it's really important because even if you're only once a week or something, posting something on Instagram, that could be the first place people meet you when they see you online. And so it's really important to have your Instagram profile looking professional and legitimate. And so Dazzle will do that for you very easily in ChatGPT.
[00:31:37] I also have a freebie that's just a really good like tutorial on the set up, some of those things that we talked about. If you were like, 'what are you talking about memory and settings and projects?' I do have just like a 12 minute tutorial that's free on my site as well. So those are a couple freebies on my site right now, and we can put those links in the show notes as well.
[00:31:56] Samantha: Yep, I will do that. Well, thank you so much for coming on and talking through all this and giving people better ways that they can use AI.
[00:32:05] Thanks for listening to Elevate your Practice. If you enjoyed today's episode, follow the show and leave a review. It helps more practitioners find these tips and start growing their practices with confidence. And don't forget to check out the show notes for links and resources from today's episodes.
[00:32:25] I'll be back next week with more strategies to help you build a thriving practice.
