How to Best Leverage AI in Your Sleep Consulting Business with Kerri Nachlas
This week on the Becoming a Sleep Consultant podcast, I’m joined by my friend and colleague, Kerri Nachlas. Kerri is the founder of the Parent Coach Certification Course, and someone I admire deeply for the thoughtful, ethical way she approaches her work, as both a parent coach and a sleep consultant.
We’re diving into an important and timely conversation about artificial intelligence, AI, and how it’s beginning to show up in the world of sleep consulting and parent coaching. While these tools can be helpful, there’s a real risk of losing the human connection that makes our work so impactful.
Kerri and I discussed:
- Smart ways to use AI to support your workflow
- Where over-reliance on AI can hold you back as a coach or consultant
- And whether our field is truly “AI-proof” or not
Whether you’re already using AI in your business or just starting to explore it, this conversation will help you think critically about what to embrace, what to avoid, and how to stay grounded in your own voice.
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Transcript:
Intro: Welcome to Becoming a Sleep Consultant! I’m your host Jayne Havens, a certified sleep consultant and founder of both Snooze Fest by Jayne Havens and Center for Pediatric Sleep Management.
On this podcast, I’ll be discussing the business side of sleep consulting. You’ll have an insider’s view on launching, growing, and even scaling a sleep consulting business. This is not a podcast about sleep training. This is a podcast about business building and entrepreneurship.
Jayne Havens: Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Becoming a Sleep Consultant podcast. Today, I’m joined by my friend and colleague, Kerri Nachlas. Kerri is the Founder of the Parent Coach Certification Course, and she’s someone I admire deeply for the thoughtful, ethical way she approaches her work, as both a parent coach and a sleep consultant.
Today, we’re diving into a timely and important conversation about artificial intelligence, or AI, and how it’s showing up in the world of sleep consulting and parent coaching. With so many new tools at our fingertips, it can be tempting to let AI do a lot of the heavy lifting in our businesses. But when it comes to communication, coaching, and client relationships, there’s a real risk of losing the human touch that makes our work so effective.
In this episode, we’re breaking down where AI can be helpful in streamlining or supporting your workflow, why overusing it can actually hold you back as a coach or a consultant, and whether sleep consulting and parent coaching are truly AI-proof fields. So, Kerri, let’s get into it. Welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.
Kerri Nachlas: Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m so happy to be here.
Jayne Havens: So let’s just jump right in. Where have you personally seen AI bring real value in a coaching business, whether it be yours or someone else’s?
Kerri Nachlas: So I use AI to give me the information I want to share. So, for example, I send out text messages throughout the year to remind my clients that I’m thinking about them, that I am invested in what season we’re in and what they’re going through during that season, as parents and as it relates to what we worked on as client and coach. So throughout the year, I’ll send out text messages. For example, I’ll send out stuff around spring break about traveling. I’ll send out things around Fourth of July about decibel levels of the sound machine and ear protection to help with the big booms of the fireworks, things like that.
When I do that, I am a little bit wordy. And so I send it through AI, and I give AI all of the information I want to share with my clients. Then I say, “Can you take this information, turn it into two or three sentences that I can text out but don’t lose the message?”
Jayne Havens: One way that I’m using AI is if I’m sending an email to, you know, maybe it’s somebody who I want to network with or somebody I want to connect with. I will write an email myself. I’ll literally open up my email screen and I’ll write it. Then I’ll copy and paste it into ChatGPT or whatever AI platform I’m using and say, “Hey, can you clean this up for me a little bit and just polish it?” And it spits it back out just a little bit better than what I would have done on my own. So it’s always my original words. It’s always my original message and all of my thoughts. But it cleans up punctuation.
It makes the language flow a little bit more seamlessly. I would say that that’s my favorite way to use it.
One thing that I was also thinking about — I haven’t done this myself, but I’m thinking about brand new sleep consultants who maybe are just getting started. I would think that AI would be a great platform to just ask, “Who should I be reaching out to? I’m a brand-new sleep consultant in Baltimore, Maryland. I want to network professionally with others who are in adjacent fields also supporting families. Can you give me some suggestions for who I might reach out to?” I bet it would spit out a really great list. I’ve never done it, but I bet that would work really well.
Kerri Nachlas: I think it would. One of the other ways that I think it’s great for new sleep consultants as they’re building their business, because at the beginning, we’re working on a budget. We’re working on a budget that sometimes doesn’t exist. And so they’re doing their own websites. They’re doing their own flyers. I think AI is a fantastic way to get your message across, putting in what you need and want out of it, and then using that for your website verbiage or your flyer verbiage. But it has to come from you first, so it has your voice to it.
Jayne Havens: What would you say are the biggest dangers of relying on AI too heavily, especially when you’re just getting started learning how to coach families?
Kerri Nachlas: Okay. So I feel pretty passionately about this. Because I know that when I started out, I had a coaching voice that I needed to grow and grow into. I also had to learn how to use the verbiage in an effective way so that I wasn’t creating triggers for my clients. I wasn’t creating, like, sometimes your message gets lost in the tone or the context. I didn’t want that to happen either. And so you have to grow your own coaching voice. And without your own coaching voice, you can’t always have an AI in your back pocket. I know that I laugh.
Because when I say that, I think about when I was growing up, they said, “You won’t always have a calculator in your back pocket, so you have to learn math.”
Well, we literally have a calculator in our back pocket now. However, AI is different. Because when you’re talking, like we are right now, I cannot rely on AI to answer these questions for me or to put it in a voice or a tone for me. So they have to have their own way of thinking and doing and putting words together so that it’s effective, it’s filled with heart and compassion, and it has the information in it that they need. That’s really hard to do on the fly if AI has been the only person that’s done that for you up until that point. So that’s my biggest reason why.
But I also feel like it takes away the creativity that you would put into your business. Because if AI does it for you and they do it well enough, or they do it actually maybe even better than you could or would, you stop thinking about it. You stop thinking, how can I do it differently or better? How can I add more of me to it? Because you feel like, “Well, they did it pretty great. So I’ll just leave it at that.” I do feel like we lose a lot of our coaching voice when we rely on AI in the beginning.
Jayne Havens: Yeah, I also think we lose our confidence when we rely on AI, right? You know, if we are using AI to write our sleep plans, for example, and AI is writing these beautiful sleep plans and then we go and get on a phone call to talk about what some other computer program wrote that we didn’t write ourselves, it’s really hard to speak into that process if it’s not your process, right?
Kerri Nachlas: Right.
Jayne Havens: You know, this isn’t really AI related, but I always like to bring up the example of when you taught me how to be a parent coach. You had all of this verbiage that you use regularly in your business. You would share it with me, and I would try and talk about it the way that you were talking about it.
Kerri Nachlas: I remember this.
Jayne Havens: It didn’t feel like my own, and I felt really uncomfortable using it. You were giving me full permission to use it. You were like, “It’s okay. I’m sharing it with you. What’s mine is yours.”
Kerri Nachlas: Right.
Jayne Havens: So it’s not that I was stealing your verbiage; I had your full permission to use it. But actually, I wasn’t comfortable coaching families in that capacity until I adopted my own coaching verbiage in my own language.
Kerri Nachlas: Your voice.
Jayne Havens: In my own voice. It took me—I think you and I spoke about parent coaching for years—probably like two years or more until I really got to the point where I felt like I had my own voice, my own language, my own verbiage. I think that when you rely heavily on AI or somebody else’s voice, whether it’s a human voice or artificial intelligence, you’re not adopting your own. I think that keeps you stuck.
Kerri Nachlas: I agree. I also think that in this situation, in the context of this conversation, voice equals confidence. Because you also were finding the confidence in using those words and those methods and making a quick pivot in your own mind and in your own heart when you’re talking to a client and taking the outside variables, and turning it into something that you need to then spit back out an answer for. It doesn’t come easily if you haven’t practiced and if you’re not continually getting better at it.
Using your verbiage, I mean, like you said, if you don’t practice your verbiage and learn more and how to put it in context, you really have no communication style. Parents are like, I mean, there’s awkward pauses in the conversation. And it’s like, “Oh my gosh. I need AI right now.” It’s not going to be there. That’s why it’s really important that you share your heart using your own verbiage, using your own confidence.
Jayne Havens: So where’s the healthy balance? Because AI is not going away, I don’t think. I kind of would love for it too, but it’s not. It’s here to stay, I think. So where’s the healthy balance? Where should we be leaning in, and where should we be leaning out?
Kerri Nachlas: So the healthy balance is, I think, similar to everything. I think it’s no different than what we choose to eat, what we choose to do with our free time—whether we’re scrolling on our phones or reading something that’s going to add value to our lives. I think that’s the same thing. I think that the healthy balance is, what can you do? How can you use it, where it doesn’t take away from who you are or your own way of doing things? So I feel like the most important thing is making sure that you write, like you said, write the email.
Make the email sound like you put all of your wonderful self into it. Then plug it into AI and say, “Could we make this any better?” Sometimes they do, and sometimes it’s like, well, that was pretty much the same. It’s okay either way, but I really feel like that’s where the healthy balance comes.
If you don’t exercise, you lose your muscles. If you don’t use your creativity, all of a sudden, you can’t think like that. If you don’t use your own business brain, all of a sudden, you’re like, “I can’t even think myself out of a box right now when it comes to business because AI’s done it for me for so long.” I don’t want to be that person, and so I always want to make sure that my creativity—
Plus, I’m old and I’m losing those things anyway, so I don’t want to lose those to AI. So I make sure my creativity, I make sure my knowledge, everything is in place first, and then let AI hone in on it, if you want to. But really, it has to be you first. I think that’s a healthy balance.
Jayne Havens: I think that’s exactly right. This morning, I was scrolling Facebook and I saw somebody comment that ChatGPT sleep trained her baby, and she doesn’t need a sleep consultant because ChatGPT told her what to do. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think our business is AI-proof?
Kerri Nachlas: Absolutely. Good for her. I love that she had a baby, and the variables that were associated with her baby’s sleep were those that AI could address, and that she was coachable, without needing somebody to maybe address her postpartum anxiety, or her fears, or guide her in a different direction, or offer pivots. Those are the things AI can’t do. I work with enough clients now that I know that there’s no way AI could do what I do. Because my knowledge comes in first and foremost.
AI does not watch videos. AI cannot make an immediate pivot when something’s not going the way it’s supposed to and the mom is like, “I’m so finished. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to make this work.” AI is not going to talk her through. I just don’t see how AI can ever do that.
Jayne Havens: Yeah, I agree. To me, AI, asking ChatGPT how to sleep train your baby is no different than taking a book out of the library or asking a friend. Those are all legitimate ways to solve a problem, right?
Kerri Nachlas: They will work for some people.
Jayne Havens: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But I don’t think that that’s our client base, right? The person who can solve their problem by asking ChatGPT how to sleep train their baby is not the person who is paying for our help, right? The person who’s paying for our help requires emotional support, accountability. They really want us to take a look at the child’s communication, their body language, their sleep environment—all things that AI is not taking into account.
I noticed the other day I was watching the monitor of a little baby. The monitor said 82 degrees, and I’m like, “Is her room really 82 degrees?” The parents were like, “Well, it’s probably not 82, but it is warm because that room just doesn’t get good ventilation.” She was in long-sleeve PJs, and she was in a sleep sack. She was hot, right?
AI is not going to take a look at the monitor and say, “Oh, I’ve noticed that your monitor says it’s 82 degrees, and your baby is wearing a sleep sack and sleep pajamas.” Right? So we really, I do think, are providing a level of service, accountability, support—emotional support—that AI, or a book, or even a friend is not necessarily going to be able to put in place for them.
Kerri Nachlas: I absolutely agree. I really feel like parents don’t know what they don’t know. They think that chat can do this for them, and maybe it can. We both know people who have sleep-trained with a book or sleep-trained, obviously, with ChatGPT. But when it comes right down to it, the number of people that can’t do that, I think, is far higher than the people who do that successfully.
Jayne Havens: I was going to ask you if you can think of an example of a time where your gut caught something that AI never could have predicted. I want you to answer what I’m thinking of. I want you to tell the story about Llama Llama, if you’re willing to.
Kerri Nachlas: Oh my gosh. Okay. Yeah, I can totally do that. So I’m working with this two-year-old, and we’re working, working, working. I have a pretty cut-and-dried system for two-year-old. It works in about three or four days, and we are golden.
This little guy just wasn’t getting it. He kept saying, “I’m crying for mama,” And I was like, “Why is he saying that?” She’s like, “I have no idea.” And I said, but he’s acting like it’s something he has to do. Like it was his job to go to bed and cry for mama. And so we’re talking and I said, “Do you guys read Llama Llama Red Pajama? Because that’s what it sounds like: “I’m crying for mama.” And she’s like, “We do. We read it every night.” I was like, oh my gosh. I think he thinks he has to cry for mama, because that’s what Llama does when he’s put to bed.
And she’s like, “Oh my gosh. We read that every night. It’s his favorite book.” I said, let’s stop reading it, and let’s show him that he doesn’t have to cry for mama. Two nights later, this kid is like doing great. He’s settled. He’s not stressed. Honestly, AI would not have caught that.
Jayne Havens: Never catch that.
Kerri Nachlas: Never, never. And I know that you have caught ear infections, like, crazy. AI will never catch ear infections. They just won’t. So there’s always going to be a place for us.
Jayne Havens: Let’s talk through a situation—let’s say, a toddler nap strike. Why is a scenario like a toddler nap strike too dynamic for AI to manage effectively?
Kerri Nachlas: I think it goes back to the same thing. There are too many variables. Toddlers throw us for a loop every day. We have to really kind of step back and think in the big picture. AI does not step back and look at the big picture. They don’t look at: what was their wake window like before this nap? Were they sitting in front of a TV because mom had meetings, or were they not feeling great or energetic? Maybe it’s 105 where they are. So it was an indoor play day for the most part, and it was very low-key, so their energy wasn’t quite expended.
AI is not going to catch that if they skipped snack at preschool and then they came home and they didn’t want lunch and the mom doesn’t know that they’re going down for a nap with literally like half of their breakfast this morning. So it’s like things like that that I don’t think AI is going to follow through on. That’s the type of support people hire us for. It’s to help them with all of the variables, all of the different things that might be happening in the house.
I had one little guy who the only variable for him taking a nap was his mom had changed laundry detergent. He kept throwing his lovey out of the bed and she’s like, “I don’t know why he’s throwing this lovey out of the bed.” So then he found another lovey that he liked.
Then later that day, she asked him. She’s like, “Here’s your bear.” He’s like, “No bear. Stinky.” It’s like she had to come up with that. She came up with that on her own. She’s like, “I think he’s telling me that because I did wash his bear yesterday while he was at my mom’s house. I use a new detergent now, and he thought it was stinky.” It’s like AI is not going to tell them that. So things like that, I think, are important.
Jayne Havens: I think that’s amazing. That’s amazing actually that the mom caught that in that scenario.
Kerri Nachlas: She did. Because he kept saying it was stinky, and he would smell it. She smelled it and she’s like, “It’s not stinky.” Then she realized it was the new detergent. I mean, these little people are creatures of habit.
Jayne Havens: If there’s one thing that you want coaches or consultants to take away from our conversation today, what would it be?
Kerri Nachlas: I really want to encourage coaches and consultants, regardless of where you are in your business, to really tap into your authentic self before you tap into AI. Because people are not paying you for AI. They truly are paying you for your personality. They’re paying you for your knowledge base. They’re paying you for your ability to help them pivot, to offload some of the stress.
People hire us because they’re overwhelmed with the comparison, the information overload, and the judgment online. They’re like, “I don’t even know where to start. There’s so much information out there. I don’t know how to drill it all down. I don’t know what’s going to work best for us.” That’s why they hire us. So be that person.
Show up authentically. I think that’s the most important part. And if AI can help you—help you, but not do it for you—I think that’s the key. I really feel like people need to realize that AI has a place in your business, but it’s a very small piece of your business. It certainly is not where you’re going to find your voice.
Jayne Havens: You know, there’s that saying—I don’t know what the quote is exactly—nothing ever grows in your comfort zone or something like that. Right?
Kerri Nachlas: Yeah.
Jayne Havens: I think that it’s so important for business people to, look, you cannot be successful in business or entrepreneurship if you’re not pushing yourself. When we stop challenging ourselves and we start leaning heavily on AI and other convenient resources, I think we lose—as you said in the beginning of this conversation, you lose the muscle.
We have to show up with strength and with confidence ourselves first before we lean on any sort of technology to support us in our business. We cannot grow as coaches and consultants if we don’t have the foundation to communicate effectively, to show up confidently. If we don’t have the expertise, AI is not going to do a good job covering for us. It’s just going to look like AI covered for us. I really do believe that.
Kerri Nachlas: I agree with you. I also feel like, you know, if somebody texts you a challenge or a question, yes, you could hop over to AI, get that answer, get back to them, and you would still look professional and sound great.
But honestly, that’s not the majority of your business. That’s not the majority of how you’re going to show up. So relying on that is, first of all, time consuming. But secondly, it’s not your authentic self. It’s not your voice, and it’s not always going to be available in that capacity. Because if you presented a challenge or needed a pivot right now, would I have to go look it up on AI because I have not exercised my own verbiage and my own coaching voice enough? That’s not how I want to show up on my business. Maybe it’s because I grew my business before AI became a thing, I don’t know. But I just know now that it’s not the way you want to do it.
Jayne Havens: I also would worry, you know, if somebody texted me a question and I asked the question to AI, and then I texted them the response, I would be worried that they would also ask AI and they’d get the same response. It’s sort of like cheating in high school and getting caught, right? I would be worried about that.
Kerri Nachlas: Well, I think that’s a valid point because I feel like that can happen. I think that when we give them AI answers, who’s to say — I mean, people are AI-savvy. Not just us. This is across the board.
People are AI-savvy. And if they put it into their own AI—”Give me a sleep plan, including methods, blah, blah, blah, for a three-year-old”—and they get out a plan, but then they’re like, “Well, I don’t know if I can really do this. Maybe I do need some support,” and then they ask you and you give them almost the identical same sleep plan—how ridiculous is that? How embarrassing, and what a slap to our profession? It’s just not the way you want to show up in your business.
Jayne Havens: Yeah, let’s be better than that, right?
Kerri Nachlas: Absolutely.
Jayne Havens: That’s our message to listeners today. Let’s be better than that, right? We are all smarter. We are hardworking. We are intuitive. We can do better than leaning on AI to do the work for us. Let’s do better. Let’s use our brains. Let’s show up with integrity and authenticity and our own creative ideas. Oh, I should tell the story about the song that we wrote for my niece about her paci.
Kerri Nachlas: That was amazing.
Jayne Havens: Before we wrap up, I want to share one more idea for using AI effectively. I think this is a great way to use AI.
Kerri Nachlas: Totally.
Jayne Havens: My niece, who’s 15 months old, was throwing her pacifiers out of her crib. She was doing that because she wanted my brother or sister-in-law to come in and give them back. It had become a game. They said to me, “What do we do? Do we just have to take away the pacis?” I was like, “Well, you can take away the pacis. But also, she’s 15 months and she understands a lot. And if you don’t feel like now is the right time to take away the pacis, I actually would just communicate with her to stop throwing them.”
He looked at me like I was crazy. And I was like, “No, no, no, 15-month-olds, they have really strong receptive language abilities. They understand.” I gave them the idea. This was on the fly.
Kerri Nachlas: Right.
Jayne Havens: I was like, type into ChatGPT, “Please write me a song about not throwing your pacifiers and holding them tight in your crib to the tune of Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Literally, a minute later, my sister-in-law, Jess, texts me with a screenshot of this song. They started singing it to her, and she stopped throwing her pacifiers. Right? So the idea was mine: to sing her a song about not throwing her pacis. But I didn’t want to take the time to actually write the song. That didn’t feel necessary, right?
Kerri Nachlas: Right.
Jayne Havens: So it was my idea to communicate with her in this way, but I used ChatGPT to make it more streamlined and more effective for the 15-month-old.
Kerri Nachlas: I think that’s the way you do it.
Jayne Havens: And that’s the way you do it. That’s the way you do it, right? I shared this in our community of sleep consultants and everybody was like, “That’s such a great idea.” Well, it wasn’t ChatGPT’s idea. It was my idea.
Kerri Nachlas: Right, right.
Jayne Havens: That’s what makes my business special, and that’s what makes me valuable to my clients. It’s that I can come up with these ideas, and then I can have ChatGPT help me execute them. I think that’s really like the secret sauce to all of this, is that you don’t want to give up on your own creativity and your own ideas. Let AI help you refine those ideas and put them into place more seamlessly.
Kerri Nachlas: Absolutely. I agree with all of that. Somebody in the group was talking about having ChatGPT write a book for their clients. That was fantastic. She emails it to them, and then they print it out. It’s a book about a healthy bedtime.
Jayne Havens: And it has details. They’re prompting ChatGPT with specific—
Kerri Nachlas: Right. She loads in — I’m 100% sure it was Lauren Kalb. She loads in their name and their age and some of the variables of the challenges that they’re having, and then ChatGPT gives her this fantastic book.
Jayne Havens: Like a social story.
Kerri Nachlas: Exactly. And it’s been so well-received by her clients. It’s such added value, and it’s another tool for success. So it’s a win-win for everybody. So the songs, the stories, that’s the way ChatGPT shows up in your business and makes you look better. But ChatGPT is not you. And so I love what you said about, “I didn’t have time. I didn’t have the desire to write that song. But ChatGPT can do that for you.”
Jayne Havens: I didn’t need to write the song—
Kerri Nachlas: You came up with the idea.
Jayne Havens: —but it was my idea to communicate with my 15-month-old niece in an appropriate way, right?
Kerri Nachlas: Yep, I love it.
Jayne Havens: And that’s what Lauren is doing with the social stories written by ChatGPT. She knows how valuable that social story would be for her little three-year-old, four-year-old clients, but she doesn’t need to actually write the story in order for that to be effective.
Kerri Nachlas: She does have to use her knowledge, her expectation of bedtime, to load into ChatGPT to get the right story out. So that’s where you want to use ChatGPT.
Jayne Havens: Yeah, love that. All right. Let’s wrap up there.
Kerri Nachlas: Okay.
Jayne Havens: I think this was super valuable and it’s ever-evolving, right? This is an emerging technology. We don’t even know what it’s going to look like six months or six years down the road. So we might have to do a part two at some point.
Kerri Nachlas: Absolutely. Because it is definitely ever-evolving, and technology is on a turbo train. I mean, it’s incredible.
Jayne Havens: And you and I are on the caboose in the back.
Kerri Nachlas: We are.
Jayne Havens: Thanks, as always, Kerri.
Kerri Nachlas: Have a great day.
Outro: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Becoming a Sleep Consultant Podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode, it would mean so much to me if you would rate, review, and subscribe. When you rate, review, and subscribe, this helps the podcast reach a greater audience. I am so grateful for your support.
If you would like to learn more about how you can become a certified sleep consultant, head over to my Facebook Group, Becoming a Sleep Consultant or to my website thecpsm.com. Thanks so much, and I hope you will tune in for the next episode.