Hello Reader,

Each week, I share one strategic insight and one grounding practice to help you grow with AI in alignment, not overwhelm.

This is for conscious entrepreneurs who value substance over shortcuts.

AI Insight That Matters

The Mental Steps You Didn't Know You Were Taking

Something weird happened this week.

I was working on a complex client strategy, speaking my thoughts directly into AI through voice-to-text, when I had this moment of clarity: my thinking felt... different. More fluid. More connected.

At first, I thought it was just the convenience of not typing. But then I realized something much deeper was happening.

Every time we type, our brain is doing invisible work.

Think → organize → choose words → move fingers → check screen.

Each step burns mental energy that could be used for actual thinking.

Psychologist George Miller's famous research showed we can only juggle around 4-7 things mentally at once. Those extra steps? They're stealing space from your best ideas.

But speech works differently. Brain imaging studies reveal that speaking activates far more of your brain than typing, especially the parts that handle memory, creativity, and connecting ideas.

When I switched to VoiceInk this week, those mental steps vanished. Suddenly, the random connections started flowing. The "oh wait, also..." thoughts that usually get filtered out by typing were right there in my AI collaboration.

My prompts became exponentially richer, not because I was trying harder, but because I was thinking freely.

The breakthrough isn't about voice-to-text tools. It's about recognizing that we've been solving the wrong problem. We thought we needed better prompting techniques.

What we actually needed was to remove the invisible barriers between how we think and how we express.

“ Your intelligence isn't limited. It's just been squeezed through systems that don't match how your mind actually works. — Colin Scotland

AI Prompt That Works ✨

The Consciousness Mirror.

Use this to discover how much mental energy you're actually spending on translating thoughts into text.

Setup: Pick a complex topic you're working on—something that requires real thinking, not just information recall.

The Prompt:

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First: Type your thoughts about the topic for 1-2 minutes. Notice any editing, filtering, or simplifying you do.

Then: Use voice-to-text and speak about the same topic for 1-2 minutes. Don't plan what you'll say.

What to expect: You'll likely discover that your spoken thoughts are more associative, include more nuanced connections, and feel more... like how you actually think.

The AI will often reflect back patterns and insights that were present in your speech but filtered out in your typing. This is co-intelligence at work!

Grounding Practice

The Flow State Reset

This practice helps you feel the difference between constrained and natural thinking in your body.

Stand up and take three deep breaths. Let your arms hang loose at your sides.

Think about a challenge you're facing. As you hold this challenge in your mind, slowly raise your arms to shoulder height while keeping your elbows bent and hands relaxed—like you're carrying something fragile.

This is what typing feels like energetically: holding, containing, managing.

Now let your arms drop naturally to your sides. Feel the release. This is what happens when mental barriers disappear.

Next time you sit down to work, before you touch the keyboard, take a moment to feel whether you're in "holding mode" or "flowing mode."

If you're holding, try speaking your first thoughts aloud before typing anything. Notice how your body feels different when ideas can move freely rather than being managed through your fingers.

This is about recognizing when you're constraining your own intelligence and consciously choosing to remove those constraints.

Personal Note

Last Tuesday, I was on a client call trying to explain a complex strategic framework. I was struggling to find the right words, feeling like I was making it more complicated than it needed to be.

Then I realized something that stopped me cold: I was thinking in "typing mode" even while speaking.

My brain had gotten so used to filtering thoughts through the mental steps required for typing that I was doing it everywhere. In conversations. In client sessions. Even in my own internal dialogue.

I'd trained myself to think in pre-edited, sanitized chunks instead of the natural flow of consciousness.

That night, I went for a walk without my phone and just... let my mind wander. For the first time in months, I could feel the difference between my actual thinking and my "typing-ready" thinking.

My real thinking is messier, more associative, more alive. It makes connections that my filtered thinking never would. It asks questions that my editing brain would dismiss as "unprofessional."

This has nothing to do with voice-to-text or AI tools. It's about recognizing how we've unconsciously trained ourselves to think in formats that fit our systems, rather than choosing systems that fit how we actually think.

The scariest part? I'd gotten so good at it that I thought the filtered version was my real intelligence.

It wasn't. It was just my intelligence squeezed through a system that was never designed for human consciousness.

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Thanks for being here. If this resonates, could you share it with someone building something that matters?

Please reply and let me know what landed.

With love 🙏
Colin