Life Is Lifing: How AI Became My Family Command Center

When you are looking at the best opportunities to integrate AI into your life, it typically is where there is repetitiveness. You do something every single day or every single week. You now can get AI to help you with that thing.

Welcome to the next evolution of the podcast, entrepreneur school in the AI era, we are here to figure out how to integrate AI into the business you've worked so hard to build in a way that still feels like you. I'm your host, Kelly Sinclair, award winning marketer turned AI platform co founder, AI has fundamentally changed how I thought about work systems and what's actually possible. This show is about navigating that new reality together. It's going to be a wild ride, my friend, but I truly believe there's a way to leverage AI in a way that's intentional, human, centered and aligned. It's an ongoing evolution. So let's explore, because AI may just be the unlock you need to achieve the life first business you truly desire.

Okay, so I want to paint you a picture of what my life looks like right now. First of all, I was sitting down to try and record this podcast episode, and I kept getting text messages from my kids at school. One is like, it's too cold. Please bring me some sweatpants. And the other one is like, I forgot my tri fold. I need it for my project right now. And I'm like, Oh my gosh. I guess this is why I work from home, and this is why I'm happy that we live three minutes away from the school, because, yes, I ended up taking them their things. But overall, life is just a little bit crazy right now. I just got back from Anaheim, California last week, where I attended the Social Media Marketing World slash AI business world conference, met some amazing humans, lined up some really great guests for upcoming episodes of the show. You are going to love them. And then when I returned home, I landed back straight into softball season. Okay, my ball parents out there. You get me. You understand what this means. It is absolutely madness, and both of my girls are playing this year. My youngest is also still in gymnastics, where she is doing year end competitions, and we are talking six days a week of ball minimum, plus additional tournaments on the weekends, practices for two kids, overlapping, sometimes in two different cities, and I am basically spinning around in circles every day, going, Okay, who needs to be where, who's driving, who, and what the heck are we eating and when? Like, I think I just eat every night at a ball diamond. But that also requires being super organized, right? Oh, and in the middle of all of this, my oldest just turned 13. I have a teenager now, and I can't even with that.

So, yeah, that's the season. I'm in a tech co founder building and trying to get an AI platform called wave off the ground, and I am a mom in the deep end of the family logistics pool. I'm not telling you this for a pity party. I'm telling you this because I think it's really important that we keep it real about what life is actually like behind the scenes. And honestly, when I first started this podcast, that's what it was really all about, bringing you the real stories of how to navigate life and business at the same time. And I think for a lot of us, especially in the women building businesses, we can see other founders and entrepreneurs, and we think they have got it all figured out, and that there's some kind of magical system, and that they're not losing their minds, trying to remember if it's a home game or away game, and which one of my kids team hats am I supposed to wear tonight? And I just want to say no, that is this. Is it like? This is what it looks like. And I'm just gonna lay it all out there, vulnerably for you, because I just think it's important to be honest about it. But I also have some goods to share about this experience, and that is that, you know, bringing it back to AI, I have actually been using AI to help me manage this chaos. It's not just a business tool. It is a life support literally, I have been building what I'm calling my family command center, and it's really helping to streamline this madness. So today I'm going to take you behind the scenes. We're going to share what this season really looks like, how I. Using AI in ways that go way beyond content and marketing strategy, and something that I took away from Ai business world as well, that I think every single one of you needs to hear right now.

All right, so let's talk about what this typical. There's no such thing as a typical week right now, quite honestly, is just sheer exercise in navigating family logistics. It's just madness with two kids in softball, one of them who's also in gymnastics and still singing lessons, and there's competitions and tournaments and all the things, and it's such a short season, right? Like, I have to remind you, we live in Canada. It is like it didn't stop snowing here this year until the very last weekend in April, which was rude, honestly and but that means that our season is very short. It's the end of the year, push before summer. Everybody stops doing everything in July. So it's kind of one of those things where I know there's a light at the end of the tunnel, and it's very temporary, but it takes a minute to, like, roll in and get it flowing, because that is not happening yet. I will tell you our kids are playing soft bell on alternating days. So one is Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and the other is Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday. So basically, I have Saturdays off if there isn't something else going on, which last weekend there was a gymnastics competition on Saturday. This coming weekend, there is a ball tournament all weekend. In addition to that weekly schedule, which also includes four more hours of gymnastics every single week. So it's madness. And my kids activities start at four sometimes, and sometimes for the older one, I am driving all the way to South Calgary, which can take up to an hour or more to get there. And you know, so we have to definitely lean on carpools, grandparents and strategizing. But essentially, I just want to be able to, like, participate in this and not have it feel like painful, right?

And I want to say too that this is, this is this is me just trying to normalize what? Obviously, this is a choice first of all, that we've made as parents. This is not what you have to do. You do not have to be crazy like us. But we have made this decision that we want our kids to experience different activities, learn how to play team sports, that there's a lot of advantages for that, and my husband really loves coaching them in these games, so in ball, and he also coaches hockey for my oldest daughter, and that's really important to us from a relationship building perspective as well. So while I can sit here and go, Oh my gosh, this is crazy, I also wouldn't have it any other way. So that's just the choice that we make. But the reality is that this conversation cannot be about balance. It's not about balance. It's about how do we survive and still move things forward right now in the season that we're in? So that means, like, really letting go of some expectations around different areas of what things look like in our lives, changing how we feel. I can't put the pressure of having a home cooked meal every night and a tape with all four of us sitting around the table, because that's just not going to happen at all. So different things have to be okay. And I also was thinking like I've had, you know, I've spent money on working with a nutritionist in the past, and I have a lot of really great recipes, and not that they're hard to achieve or anything, but it's just more that I care about nutrition, especially because my kids are in so many activities they need to be not eating McDonald's french fries for dinner every night, because that's not going to give them the fuel that they need.

But I was thinking about it this weekend, and I'm like, Well, I have a little more time on the weekends to cook and enjoy a nice home cooked meal, so I've just switched what I'm thinking about, I'm like, let's let takeout support us, and easy meals support us through the week, and then we can do nice, nutritious family meals on the weekends when we have time for that as well. So sometimes it's just a perspective shift as well. And I think this is all to say that you may be in a season like this too, and feel like you're failing, but you are not. It's just, it's just madness for it's just temporary. And the also, the truth is that founders don't just have it all together, either. As I reflect on how life is, lifeing. Right now, and the fact that I have a teenager in my house, and I'm kind of going, how did that happen? I feel like I've been telling her she can't age since she was 10, and yet here we are, and she's as tall as me, and she's wearing my clothes, and it is crazy, but it also reminds me that this is why I chose entrepreneurship. When I lost my mom nine years ago and my kids were both under the age of four, I said to myself and to my husband like I'm not willing to give away this time to others, to me having a job where I have to show up and do somebody else's mission. My mission is to build a life first business, to be able to be interrupted in the middle of my morning before I've even finished my first coffee, and have to go to the school and drop off the sweatpants and the trifold boards so that they can do their project, so that when they get home from school, I am here and I can take them to All of their 1 million activities. I i chose that So on one hand, it can sound like a complaint, but I'm absolutely super grateful that I have the ability to even face this challenge of navigating this season, and I think that actually leads in nicely to why I feel like AI can be so supportive, because it's here to allow you to offload, outsource, and

create tools that will help you to be able To focus on the things that actually matter to you in your life. So thinking about how AI can be your co pilot, and I want to just break down the example of what I've been doing from the family command center. This is something that I'm working on creating as a tool that I can sell, hopefully on our platform wave as well, that can help you to navigate your crazy weekly schedules.

For me, what it needs to do so I already have a bit of a system with respect to how we like do a weekly weekly family planning meeting with my husband, which involves writing down what everybody is doing, what time, where it is, and deciding on dinner. And the dinner is very dependent on where everybody is going to be. And so does that mean that I have time to cook at home and then people are going to be coming home and eating later? Do we have to eat super early? Do I have to bring a portable meal now, can I be creating, like a crock pot thing that can just be sitting there for people to grab and go as they're in and out at different times of the evening? What actually makes sense? Now, that's the hardest part to me. It's not writing down the calendar, even though the calendar can look crazy, side note, when I was away in Anaheim, it was the first week of softball season, and my husband successfully got our kids to 14 activities in the five days I was gone without me being here. So this is why I'm also very grateful that we have both parents available to execute on this craziness. But for the family command center, it's actually really about the thought process, like, not just what do I want for dinner, but do I have time to cook it? Who's going to be able to eat it? What time will it need to be served to whom? Because they have to go to an activity before or afterwards. That is what I'm trying to build into the family command center, the logic of how to make that decision.

So therefore it needs to understand, like with anything AI, it needs context, right? The context it needs is not just my calendar, but who is driving? How far away are these practices or games? Will I be coming home afterwards? So then, therefore, do I have time to cook? Say sometimes I take my youngest to gymnastics. I leave at 330 she gets a ride home at six. So I actually have time, because I drop her off and I come home and I have time to make dinner that night. If there's no ball or whatever happens to this is the part that's really the unlock. It's not just like, oh, I. Got a nice, fancy schedule that has a meal planner in it. It's I have a tool that helps me do the thinking that's hard, the thinking that hurts my brain and makes me frustrated. So being able to, like, unpack what that thought process is, explain that to AI and have it do that pattern recognition and create that strategy for me. That's the real value of using AI for this system. So I give it schedules. I have it find conflicts. We identify who is driving to each thing. And then if I also the fact in my house is I'm the only cook my husband is working in the city. He's usually meeting me at a ball diamond somewhere, so he's absolutely not available, nor does he ever want to be the cook. That's just, that's not a real I cook. He cleans. That's our that's our relationship agreement. But then we have to, like, figure out a meal plan that works around this. So it's about helping me to think better. It's not just a fancy dashboard that replaces a piece of paper.

So I'm really excited to get that streamlined. I'm sure it'll take me the entire ball season, because there's almost too many variables. Sometimes that's a challenging thing with AI is if they're if it's not something like, Yes, I do have to do this weekly planning consistently, but that plan is going to be different every single week. That makes it a little more challenging to produce something that's a helpful tool. When you are looking at the best opportunities to integrate AI into your life, it typically is where there is repetitiveness. You do something every single day or every single week. You now can get AI to help you with that thing. So that's just a consideration, and if you want to talk more about this particular challenge, this particular like family command center, just reach out to me. I'd love to chat it through with you. But the whole point of me bringing that up is that AI is really not just a business tool, although that so helps me in my business because I'm organized in my personal life, I can, you know, spend my my mental capacity on my business things, instead of just constantly being worried about who's going, where, who's eating, what? How do we live through these next six weeks? And now I'm opened up to being able to use my brain for, you know, launching a new AI platform, and we are in a very big, important moment in our business right now, and I'll give you a little update just at the end of this episode, in a minute on wave and where we're at and what it might mean for you, if you want to check it out soon.

But I wanted to share quickly a learning from Ai business world. So the conference was fantastic. I personally was there for the hallway chats, for the relationships the people who I got to meet, the ability to talk to the speakers after their sessions, not so much the actual training, because what I learned was that there are still a lot of people, in fact, most of the people in the audience, there are still very much early stages. Learning how to use AI learning, what is a Claude skill? Learning, how the basic setups of systems, et cetera, work, and that is great. What is great about that is that it means that there's a lot of people who are still really early. So even at a conference literally called AI business world, probably one of the, you know, foremost strategic teaching environments available for AI right now. That's where the audience is. So if you also are feeling like you're just getting started into things, that is totally perfect right now. And what I want to recognize about that is it's about curiosity, right? You exploring your curiosity, finding things that light you up are give you wins in this AI space, because that's your journey, and I think that's what's really important. It's and it's really great news. That's actually how I got here. I just started exploring and being curious and trying different things, and that just led me to, like, being really excited about what I was able to create, the systems, the tools, the supports, the now I'm like, super nerding out about the family command center and a point. I get in my personal life, I have so many systems already built for the business that helped me produce this podcast, write emails, create strategies, all of those kinds of things.

And now, you know, I'm just everything's like icing now, all the little extra pieces, but that's the truth, is that you just have to start. You have to start with curiosity, not waiting for some kind of perfect moment or a feeling of readiness, because that's not going to happen. And give yourself permission to be a beginner and experiment, because it's the reps that you put in that are going to build the confidence. I certainly didn't see this coming. I've said that before about a million times. I never set out to become an AI tech co founder, but here we are building a platform called wave, which is doing like amazing things. We are currently working with a few high touch beta clients where I'm actually like completely migrating their current bots over to our platform and building them out as a bot squad that they can onboard their clients to inside of their programs. So I'll share a little bit more about what some of our creators are doing and how it's going over the coming weeks, but we are really looking at this like an experiment, obviously first to test how well the bots work on our platform. So far, really good with respect to that being able to use different llms to program those bods that are typically only built on chat, GPT, we can build them on Claude, llms like sonnet or Opus or even haiku. If it's just a small task. I think you have to do a whole other podcast on how to choose the right LLM because I think we just sometimes think, like, the best is the best and not then you're sometimes like,

Well, do you really need a PhD to do admin tasks? And the answer is no, so, so lots of really great things are happening over on wave, and we are getting really close to actually being able to release what I'm calling the self serve creator account, which means you don't have to come through the high touch beta. You can do it yourself. So I will be opening it up to be like you can just buy a subscription, and that's going to happen in the next few weeks. So if that's intriguing to you, if you're interested in looking at how you might turn your expertise into a bot squad and sell it through wave, because that's what we're all about. We're here to help you to build and sell your AI tools based on your expertise in a very secure way. Then just check the show notes for a link to our waitlist, and I'll make sure that you get the first round invitations, because we'll be releasing this in small chunks, so that we're not, you know, overwhelmed with too many people, but also we like the people who are first, the people who are the early adopters, that's who are really here to support as well. And we love that. You know, at that reality of that is that we're still in the experimentation and learning what is, what does our platform do when there's lots of people using it. How is it functioning? What are the opportunities for us to make some improvements and optimizations? And we're just we're just doing that constantly.

So check the show notes, get on the waitlist and reach out to me if you want to learn more about wave and about building your bot squad too. So here's what I want you to take away from today. First, if you are in a crazy busy season right now, whether it's sports and kids and travel and birthday and all the things, there's no wrong way to do that. It just is what it looks like sometimes, and you can still show up for your business and move things forward, even in a mess, especially in the mess second AI is not just for your business, so start thinking about how it can support your life. Build your own version of a family command center. Use it to think through your week, to meal plan, to organize yourselves. Use it to take some of that mental load off of your plate, so that you can breathe a little easier and be more present for the things that matter. And third, wherever you are in your AI journey, you are not behind. I just stood in a room with 1000s of people at AI business world, and I can tell you, most people are still figuring this out.

So give yourself permission to be exactly where you are and just take that next step. That's it. That's what I got for you today. And a reminder, if you want to be one of the first to get your hands on, wave as a creator, when we open up the self serve accounts, make sure that you're on our wait list. The link is in the show notes, and we are rolling out access in waves. Oh, I love the name. So the sooner you're on that list, the sooner you can get in. All right, talk to you next week. Bye for now.

So give yourself permission to be exactly where you are and just take that next step. That's it. That's what I got for you today. And a reminder, if you want to be one of the first to get your hands on, wave as a creator, when we open up the self serve accounts, make sure that you're on our wait list. The link is in the show notes, and we are rolling out access in waves. Oh, I love the name. So the sooner you're on that list, the sooner you can get in. All right, talk to you next week. Bye for now. Thank you for listening. If this episode got you thinking about how AI is impacting your business and what it might look like to integrate it in a way that actually fits. I'd love to help you think that through you can book an AI strategy chat using the link in the show notes. It's a space to talk about where you are, what's shifting, and how to move forward with intention. And if this episode was helpful, please share it with another business owner who's navigating this evolution too, and make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss what's coming next.

Thank you for listening. If this episode got you thinking about how AI is impacting your business and what it might look like to integrate it in a way that actually fits. I'd love to help you think that through you can book an AI strategy chat using the link in the show notes. It's a space to talk about where you are, what's shifting, and how to move forward with intention. And if this episode was helpful, please share it with another business owner who's navigating this evolution too, and make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss what's coming next.