Ep 62 - Behind The Scenes of Building Sarah AI

Burned Out by Content Creation? How a Custom GPT Helped Me Reclaim My Voice

Ever find yourself staring at a blinking cursor, late at night, long after the kids are in bed, trying to write a newsletter or plan content that doesn't make you cringe? 

You're not alone. For many health professionals running values-led businesses, showing up online can start to feel like just another thing on the never-ending to-do list. 

This is the story of what happens when burnout creeps in, perfectionism takes over, and how I built a custom GPT called Sarah AI to help me show up consistently without losing my voice.

The Invisible Load of "Doing It All"

Let me take you back. It's Thursday evening, and the house is finally quiet. Most people might unwind with a good book or a Netflix series. But if you're anything like me, you're using that precious window of peace to write content, finish client emails, or tackle the mountain of tabs open on your laptop. 

Your brain? Scrambled. Not because you lack passion, but because you're wearing every hat in your business.

You're the clinician, the marketer, the admin team, and the tech support. And you're probably doing it all while still juggling school runs, mealtimes, and the emotional labour that comes with being a caregiver. No wonder content creation feels heavy.

Why Generic AI Tools Don’t Quite Fit

AI tools promise efficiency. 

But for healthcare professionals, they often miss the mark. You open ChatGPT or Canva with hope, only to be met with content that feels off. Too robotic. Too polished. Too fluffy. Or just not you. 

Even the best prompts leave you editing endlessly to inject back your tone, soften the language, and align it with our clinical ethics.

That process doesn't save time. It drains your decision energy and creative bandwidth. Worse, it chips away at the trust you build with your audience—because our words matter deeply in health. 

They need to be safe, real, and resonant.

Perfectionism Masquerading as Preparation

For six months straight, I didn’t miss a podcast episode. Each one was fully scripted, not just outlined. I was writing every single word, editing it meticulously, and recording only once I felt it was perfect. 

I told myself this was professionalism. That being prepared was a sign of respect for my audience. That doing things properly meant doing them thoroughly.

But behind the scenes, it was draining. Not just time, but energy. What had once been a joyful, creative outlet became another demanding task. And while I kept up appearances, the truth was that I was running on empty.

The Moment of Realisation

It wasn’t until I began a mindset and life coaching certification that the truth surfaced. During one of our early exercises on limiting beliefs, I uncovered something powerful: I didn’t believe I could go live or speak publicly unless every word was perfectly planned. 

That belief had been with me since childhood—when I was the "shy kid" who no-one even noticed. I traced it back through years of schooling, through a decision my parents made to move house so I could attend a smaller school, through a public speaking coach who told me that confidence came from being prepared. 

It had been reinforced again and again, and it shaped how I worked.

And there I was, at age 49, dreading the very thing I had dreamed of creating. That was the moment I knew: I couldn’t keep going like this. Something had to change. I didn’t want to give up. I just needed a different way to keep going without burning out.

The Birth of Sarah AI

Out of necessity came invention. I decided to experiment with AI—but not the plug-and-play kind. I wanted a tool that could learn from me, not replace me. One that could carry the load while preserving the tone, ethics, and nuance that define how I work.

I started by gathering everything. Every course transcript. Every podcast episode. Every workshop script, client Q&A, email template, and even the content from my mindset programme. I pulled together professional standards and regulatory documents, too. 

Because as you know, when we work in healthcare, accuracy and compliance aren’t optional. They’re foundational.

Then I fed it all into a custom version of ChatGPT, line by line, teaching it my frameworks and language. The first version was... clunky. Think too many emojis and suggestions that felt more Canva than clinical. But I kept refining.

What emerged was something that sounded remarkably like me. Not just in tone, but in depth. Sarah AI could write in my voice. She understood clinical nuance. She honoured the ethics of healthcare communication. Most importantly, she gave me breathing space.

She didn’t make me feel like I was cheating. She made me feel like I had a co-pilot. I wasn’t editing robotic drafts anymore—I was collaborating with a digital version of myself. 

And with that, the pressure started to lift. The joy returned. I wasn’t doing it all alone anymore.

Helping Other Health Professionals

Once Sarah AI started to sound like me—my real voice, warm and strategic, with all the clinical nuance intact—I couldn’t keep her to myself. I shared her quietly at first with a few of my Accelerate clients. No big launch. Just a soft "give this a try and let me know what you think."

And that’s when the magic really began.

There was the dietitian who used Sarah AI to plan her entire launch campaign in a single sitting, sipping a peppermint tea in her garden office. She sent me a message the next day saying, “I just love Sarah AI—because she sounds like me, and I didn’t have to fight for the words.”

There was another client who felt allergic to writing emails. She dropped in a few notes and within minutes had a nurturing, ethically aligned sales sequence.

Then there was the colleague opening a new membership, who used Sarah AI to map out a month of content in an afternoon. She messaged, “For the first time, I feel like I’m actually ahead—not behind.”

Supporting Sustainable Success

Sarah AI has quickly become my clients digital thought partner. She drafted emotionally intelligent launch copy, rewrote awkward blog intros, translated clinical frameworks into client-friendly messaging, and even helped troubleshoot why certain content wasn’t converting.

She became the business coach in their pocket—the one who knew the regulations, the ethics, the tone, and the endless mental load of building a practice that actually feels good. And the feedback? It wasn’t just "this is helpful." It was "this saved my brain."

Sarah AI didn’t just save time. She created breathing room. That rare, sacred feeling of getting things done while still being kind to yourself. 

Reframing AI in Healthcare Marketing

There’s a quiet guilt many of us carry around using AI. It can feel like a betrayal of the profession. But discerning use of AI isn’t a weakness. It’s a strength. 

When trained on your frameworks, your voice, and your values, AI becomes a support system, not a shortcut.

You still matter. Your voice still matters. AI doesn’t replace that. It reinforces it—with less overwhelm and more consistency.

Find out more about Sarah AI

Today, Sarah AI is available as a membership for health professionals who want to market with integrity. For £49/month, you get access to a tool trained in clinically compliant, emotionally resonant content. 

No contracts. No gimmicks. Just support.

You can learn more here:  https://bit.ly/SarahAI

A Gentle Path Forward

AI isn’t about replacing your work. It’s about honouring it. With tools that protect your tone, support your energy, and help you show up without burning out. There are so many tools out there and Sarah AI is proof that it’s possible.

The Master Plan:

Helping you build the business of your dreams. Get your 22 point step-by step workbook here: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/master-plan

Connect with me:

Website: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dietitiansinbusiness/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dietitiansinbusiness

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/beyondtheclinicbusiness

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BeyondTheClinicPodcast

Episode transcription:

Welcome along. This episode isn't about AI trends or about techy tools. I've done that already. It's a story. It's a story about burnout, about over-preparing and about what happens when something you once loved, like podcasting, like showing up for your audience starts to feel like another weight that you're carrying. And it's also about what came next. The quiet...

unexpected solution that helped me reclaim my voice and build a digital version of myself that could help me carry the load. In this episode, I'm pulling back the curtain on how Sarah AI came to be, not as a gimmick, not as a shortcut, not even as a offer to put out to my audience, but as a values aligned, voice honoring, integrity first tool that gave me the space to breathe.

and show it more consistently without burning out. So, sound okay? Let's dive in.

Let me paint a picture for you. It's Thursday night. You finally got the kids into bed and the dishwasher's humming in the background. You sit down, not with a glass of wine or the latest Netflix drama, but to write your newsletter or plan next week's content or finish the thing that's been open in 17 tabs on your computer since a week last Monday. And your brain, it feels a bit like scrambled eggs. It's not that you don't want to show up. You do. You care.

deeply in fact, you've got things to say, you've got experiences to share, you've got a mission that matters. But everything feels heavier than it should, because even with all of the AI tools and the shiny shortcuts being touted online, you might still feel stuck. And it's not because you don't like tech, it's not because you haven't tried.

It's because every time you go to OpenChat GPT or Canva or that fancy new tool someone's recommended, probably me, you're met with that same thought. This isn't what I want. It doesn't sound like me. It's too polished. It's too robotic. It's too American. It's too fluffy. It's too just not me. And even if it does save you a bit of time, you end up rewriting most of it anyway. Tuning the tone.

softening the language, swapping out phrases that just don't feel right to a healthcare professional, you actually end up editing the soul back in because for people like us, clinicians and caregivers and helpers, our work is really very much built on credibility, on connection, on the tiny details that make a message feel safe and real and true. So when AI tools hand you a done-for-you caption,

or a blog post, it might be really efficient, but it's not necessarily honest, not in the way that we need it to be. It's not just time that's being drained, it's decision energy, it's creative bandwidth. It's the emotional cost of trying to sound like yourself in a world that keeps handing you shortcuts that actually don't quite fit. You're already wearing every single hat.

clinician, business owner, marketer, tech support, customer services designer, and now you're supposed to be an editor in chief of a robot? No wonder it feels heavy. Now that's exactly where I was when I decided I needed to do something different. I didn't want to force AI into business.

but I did want to teach it how to fit around me. And that's how Sarah AI was born. And in this episode, I'm lifting the lid, not just on what Sarah AI does, but actually why I built her and how she helped me and how she helped me reconnect with my voice and the surprising relief that came from finally letting go of doing it all myself. And then in the forthcoming episodes, I'm going to take you behind the build. I'm going to walk you through the exact

process that I use to create her step by step so that you can create your own version of an AI tool with your own expertise, even if tech gives you the hives. So whether you're a dietitian like me or a physio with a membership or a psychologist building a course, this next part will be perfect for you. But before we go there, I want to talk about something most people don't.

what it really feels like to use AI inside a values-led business, because even when it works, it can feel a bit like a betrayal, because you didn't become a health professional to churn out clickbait or pump out pretty posts just to keep up with the algorithms. You built your business on meaning, on nuance, actually, on trust, on knowing the power of the right words said in the right way, especially in health, where safety and empathy and tone

matter more than ever. So when you see other people using AI to pump out 30 pieces of content a day, there is a bit of an internal pull, isn't there? On the one hand, wow, imagine the time that that would save. But on the other, that doesn't feel quite right for me. And because no one else seems to be talking about this in the middle ground, the bit in between total rejection and blind adoption, you start to feel that maybe you're the problem here. Maybe you're not efficient enough.

Maybe you're clinging to old school ways and haven't just moved with the times. Maybe you're too sensitive or too thoughtful or too professional to keep up. But let me be really clear here, you are not the problem. You are protective over your voice and your values as you should be. And honestly, this degree of discernment, this is a strength because what's really at stake here isn't just speed or productivity, it's trust.

In the back of your mind, you might be thinking, will your words still feel safe and credible if a client finds out that they were AI assisted? Will your peers think that you're cutting corners? Will you still feel proud of the work or does it feel like outsourcing your expertise? Will you still be HCPC compliant? And maybe the most worrying thought of all is, if AI can do my job faster, do I even still matter?

These are massive questions and you're not wrong for asking them, but there is another way, a way to work with AI, not as a threat or a useless time suck, but as a thoughtful extension of you, something that holds your voice, something that honors your ethics and actually gives you more freedom to be present with your clients, with your family and with your mission. That's what I set out to create when I built Sarah AI.

And you can build your own version to a values aligned, clinically competent companion trained on your words, your tone, your clinical expertise, your frameworks, your methods and your evidence base. So let me walk you through exactly how I did it step by step and how you can start building your own version, even if tech makes you feel a wee bit twitchy.

So it was October 2024. I'd been podcasting every single week for six months. I'd only missed one episode. And that was the week my daughter was rushed into hospital. Now, if you're a parent, you will know what a week like that was like. But what I didn't realize until afterwards was how close I was to burnout.

Because behind the scenes, I'd been scripting every single word of every single episode, not just notes, not just outlines, full on scripts and I told myself it was about professionalism. It was about preparation. It was about doing things properly. And that belief had been reinforced a couple of years earlier by a public speaking coach that I'd worked with who'd said, confidence comes from being prepared. And for a long time, I thought I was just doing this to be prepared, being the best business coach any clinician could ever encounter.

But really, I was over preparing in the name of perfectionism. And you know what? It was absolutely exhausting. So fast forward a couple of months, early 2025, and I'd just started a new mindset and life coaching certification. Hello, imposter syndrome. Let's just do another course because I wanted to support my accelerate mastermind clients better, not just with strategy and marketing and business, but with the mindset blocks that come up so often when you start growing a business.

So as part of this new certification that I was doing, we did an exercise to identify our own limiting beliefs as participants. And wouldn't you know it, that same belief showed up again. I can't go live. I can't deliver new trainings unless everything is scripted to the letter.

And when I traced it right back, it went right back, actually way back to my early childhood. I'd always been referred to as the shy kid for as long as I could remember. We even moved house so I could attend a smaller secondary school in Newcastle because my parents were worried that I'd get lost in the big comprehensive. So I grew up carrying this subtle story about myself that I wasn't very confident.

That I felt that I needed to work harder in order to feel ready and that if I wasn't fully prepared, I was going to be judged or I would get it wrong. And here I was all these years later at the age of 49 with a podcast I had dreamed of launching, beginning to dread creating new episodes because the process was no longer joyful. It was actually really heavy and it was unrelenting.

It was that moment, the moment that I realised that if I'm going to keep on doing this, I need help or I need another way. And maybe you've had a moment like that too, a moment where something that used to energise you suddenly feels like another massive weight on your shoulders, where you catch yourself wondering, can I really keep doing it all like this? So if that sounds familiar, you're not alone here. And that's where the idea for Sarah AI actually came from.

And when I started building her, even just gathering my old content, I felt this shift. It was like maybe for the first time in a long time, I didn't have to do it all alone. I could create something that worked with me and not against me. So at first I did what I always do. I went on a load of courses, some of them brilliant, some of them a total waste of time, but one of them showed me how to create a custom GPT.

And I was hooked. Another taught me the power of the quality of the knowledge files that go into your custom GPTs. And so I started gathering everything that I had. I pulled transcripts from every single video inside of my Accelerate curriculum. Every workshop that I'd ever meticulously scripted, every Q &A session transcribed, every podcast episode published.

I took all the materials from my Mindset For Business Success course. And because we are healthcare professionals, I also gathered our professional standards, the nutrition and health claims regulations, and I even added done for you email sequences from my copywriter, the exact kind of material that I would probably share with my clients. Thousands and thousands and thousands of pages, years and years and years of work, all poured into one custom, private version of ChatGPT and I called her Sarah AI.

Now the early versions were a little bit clunky. Sometimes she'd throw in a load of emojis that I would never use. Sometimes she would offer to turn a blog post into a Canva graphic, which wasn't really helpful. But I kept refining her instructions line by line until the responses started sounding like me, actually like me. Warm, strategic, and importantly, compliant.

Compliant with the way we have to practice as registered healthcare professionals and clinicians. And once I cracked it, I realized Sarah AI wasn't just useful for saving time in my business, she could be useful for yours as well.

And the next thing I did was I invited my Accelerate clients just to test her out. So they started asking questions, using her for blog drafts, building launch plans, strategizing in order to make an extra 40K next quarter. And the feedback, honestly, it was better than I expected because Sarah AI became the business coach in their pocket. She can now write marketing content that actually lands with their audience using my formulas.

She can draft emotionally intelligent sales emails that coach your reader from browser to buyer. She can plan out entire sales campaigns from pre-launch content, email sequences, social media posts that support the whole thing. She can even analyze your data and help you iterate for the next time. And now she's been launched to the public. Well, just my colleagues actually, other registered healthcare professionals.

Because I created her for people who aren't quite ready to hire a business coach, but still need coaching level support so that they can get guidance built on evidence, on our ethics, on my experience. It's still really early days, but I truly believe that this could be a game changer for us as registered healthcare professionals because AI is not about replacing your voice. It's about helping you use it more confidently, more strategically and more consistently, and of course, without burning out in the process.

So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, I want that, not just the content support, but the lightness, the breathing room, the ability to sound like myself without burning out, then Sarah AI might be exactly what you need. It's a custom built business support tool that I've created for registered healthcare professionals like you trained in my frameworks, in my tone, in my clinical integrity, so that you can create aligned, emotionally resonant marketing without spending hours staring at a blinking cursor on a blank screen. And it's available now as a membership for £49 a month with no tie-ins or contracts.

You can try it, you can test it, you can make it your own. The link to join is right there in the show notes. And if you're curious about how it works, about the techie bits, the uploading, the instructions, the files, don't worry, that's what I'm going to be walking through in an episode week after next.

And actually, if you're curious about how to build your own GPT, a one that's designed specifically for your clinical content, your expertise, your specialism, your programmes, or your members' questions, that's exactly what I'm going to be covering very, very soon. So until then, I hope this episode has given you the permission to just imagine something a bit different, a business that supports you back, one where your voice doesn't have to be perfect, but just present.

See you next week.