Still struggling with how to articulate what you do as a consultant? Our friend Claude has a new mirror to hold up for you.

I’ll back up. I’ve been continuing to level up my Claude game, and just this week finally gave it access to my Gmail.

Scary, I know, but here’s how I got my worrier’s brain past it:

• I only gave it access to my work email account, not my personal
• It by default only gives read access
• It can draft emails for you, but requires your approval to send/delete anything

If you want to connect yours, just go to Customize —> Connectors and add Gmail. (Scary simple, actually)

Then from the chat, I could click on “From Gmail” which opened up some new options.

One of the immediate use cases to explore the connector seemed kinda gimmicky, but I tried it anyway.

It was a suggested button that said “Generate a ‘personal brand statement’ based on how I communicate in email.”

My cynical side rolled my eyes at ‘personal brand’. 🙄 (You might remember my thoughts on that trap.)

I also expected something quite limited because most of my emails are logistics/transactional in nature (or so I thought).

But I wanted to test the connector, so I went for it.

It actually loads in a longer prompt:

In short order, Claude had read through a sample of recent emails and used its new visualizing capability to create the following widget:

Its 'personal brand statement' was actually more like a true positioning statement — something that we all tend to dance around, but struggle to execute well.

I thought Claude's pass (and three alternates) were surprisingly accurate, given I assumed the source material was largely administrative back-and-forth emails.

Under that, it also generated a pretty enlightening critique of my tone as a professional — extracting how I write into how I show up as a professional.

And finally, it gave some options on expanding this analysis into an About page or speaker bio.

None of this is perfect, it still requires some massaging on your end.

But overall I found it super useful and unexpected, and all in exchange for easing up on my control grip just a bit and letting these tools do what they’re pretty darn good at doing.

💡

-Wes