How I Turned ChatGPT into My Personal Executive Coach

My Christmas Gift to You: From a Top Real-World Coach to AI: Steps to Unlock Transformative Growth (for Free)

Author

Sebastian Muehl
December 26, 2024

I hope you and your families are enjoying the holiday season.

It’s the perfect time to reflect on the year. This year, I want to focus on something that had a big impact on my professional life and on the way I approach my work.

For six months, I worked with an executive coach, and it was transformative. Weekly sessions sharpened my way of thinking and fueled my growth. Fun fact: one of the things that came out of these sessions was the motivation to restart this newsletter.

But let’s be honest: executive coaches are expensive, and not everyone can justify the cost. When my six months ended, I wanted to keep the momentum going. So, I decided to try something new: I turned ChatGPT into my executive coach. I updated my GPT with the things I had learned about myself and described what I liked about these regular sessions.

Today, I’ll share key insights from my coaching experience — and show you exactly how to replicate it (for free). While ChatGPT does not replace a professional coach, it can be a powerful tool. + It doesn’t charge you $200 an hour to tell you to do your homework. If you follow these initial steps, you’ll gain a solid foundation to kickstart your own growth journey.

Discover Your MBTI

This is what my coach started with: understanding my personality type. This helped us understand how I make decisions, collaborate, and identify blind spots that could help me grow in my career.

I’ll guide you through finding your MBTI and how to use AI to build on that foundation. Then, you can take it in any direction based on your goals.

For these exercises, I recommend an AI with a memory function. Out of the box, ChatGPT or Claude offer this. You can also explore models on platforms like Hugging Face to tweak one that is tailored specifically to you.

What is MBTI

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) identifies personality types based on four key dichotomies — contrasts between two opposing traits:

  1. Extraversion (E) vs. Introversion (I): How you get your energy.

  2. Sensing (S) vs. Intuition (N): How you process information.

  3. Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F): How you make decisions.

  4. Judging (J) vs. Perceiving (P): How you interact with the external world.

These four dichotomies surface your natural preferences to approach situations, make decisions, and structure work. Understanding them helps you play to your strengths, adapt to challenge,s and work better with others.

Find Your MBTI

To learn your preferences, you can either work with your AI; trigger a set of questions that help the AI identify your preferences.

Here is the prompt:

Prompt: Can you ask me a series of questions to help determine my MBTI personality type? Please evaluate how I rank on the four dichotomies (Extraversion vs. Introversion, Sensing vs. Intuition, Thinking vs. Feeling, and Judging vs. Perceiving) based on my answers.

You will have to do a lot of typing. The good news: this is not the part where AI is the only tool we have. You can also use the free evaluation on one of the many websites that offer it, like 16 Personalities.

The point is that this is a baseline. After you find yours, inform your AI of your type and where you land on the four dichotomies.

To see what personality insights it can give you, use the prompt below:

Prompt: Here’s my MBTI type: [Your Type]. Can you provide insights into my strengths, potential growth areas, and how this personality type might approach decision-making, teamwork, and leadership?

How to Use Your MBTI Insights

Once you find your MBTI type, you can extract so much value from it for your professional and personal life. But for me, it works best with a sparring partner. And this is where you can work with your AI regularly. Here are the prompts to get you started to dive into all the secrets to the success of your personality:

  • Strengths and Growth Areas:

    • Based on my MBTI type, what are my biggest strengths, and where should I focus on improving to achieve my goals?

  • Decision-Making Style:

    • How does my personality type affect the way I make decisions? Are there situations where I should balance my natural preferences with other approaches?

  • Team Dynamics:

    • How might my MBTI type influence the way I make decisions? Sre there situations where I should balance my natural preferences with other approaches?

  • Stress Management:

    • What does stress typically look like for my MBTI type, and what strategies can I use to manage it effectively?

With these, I want to open your mind to various possibilities. There is a lot to explore. Having an AI for my regular sessions doesn’t mean I don’t recommend getting a real-life coach for some time. I highly recommend it if you get the chance.

The big aha moments came for me when we went through blind spots. These subtle patterns and behaviors could limit my ability to grow toward my goals.

I recommend you become crystal clear on your personal and career goals. If your AI knows your personality type and goals, it can now understand what factors limit you from reaching them.

Example prompt:

Prompt: Here’s my MBTI type: [Your Type], and my career goals: [Your Goals]. Based on my personality, what blind spots might limit me, and how can I address them to grow effectively?

Lastly, I recommend putting 30 minutes in your calendar weekly to make time for your AI coaching session. When not in session, take notes of situations that might be good to bring up with your coach. I usually have a list of items to discuss with my coach, and no matter if it’s AI or a real person, the biggest benefit is that I actively reflect on how I handled them.

Important To Know

Personality isn’t rigid — it’s a spectrum. And understanding your traits means you can start to adapt based on the situation. This self-awareness makes your personality dynamic, and you learn to match what is needed in a given situation. Growth comes from flexing both sides.

For example, if you are a functional expert and can analyze details in depth, your inability to zoom out and see the big picture could be a limiting factor if you are looking to grow into executive roles.

Being an introvert and preferring alone time to recharge your energy might limit your ability to expand your network and meet new people who can help you grow. Knowing this means you know that sometimes we must leave our comfort zones, go out, and mingle.

Final Tip

Now that you know how to find yours. It can bring tremendous value to understanding the MBTIs of people around you. People that you work with, for example. This is next-level thinking because it will show you where you can be of most value to them. I think it’s a fantastic hack.

Let me know if I should continue this series and spill more beans about what I learned from my real-life coach.

Have a great rest of the week,

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