How to Use AI as a Business Strategist

🔎 Key Insights

1. Ask Better Questions: Treat ChatGPT like a strategist. Ask, “What am I missing?” to uncover blind spots.
2. AI as a Kinesthetic Coach: Talking with AI (not just prompting) helps active learners process and grow.
3. Communication Confidence is Coachable: AI can help structure tough conversations and elevate presentation skills.
4. Discover Hidden Talents with the Johari Window: Feed your resume, LinkedIn, and bios into ChatGPT, then ask it to build your Johari Window.
5. Use AI Like a Business Strategist: Shift from “write me this” to “help me think through this.”
6. Leadership is a Skill, Not an Instinct: Coaching, even via AI, helps emerging leaders step into their roles.

📈 From Prompting to Strategy: Why AI Coaching Works

Melissa realized that she could use ChatGPT as a business brainstorming partner. By describing her scenario, goals, and challenges in conversational prompts, she turned AI into a real-time strategy coach. This shift moved her away from transactional prompts to transformational ones.

“My favorite question to ask ChatGPT is: What am I missing? That’s where the gold is.” — Melissa Entzminger

This isn’t just helpful for solo entrepreneurs or executives — Melissa recommends this technique to her coaching clients who are preparing for meetings, navigating leadership challenges, or trying to make their communication more compelling.

🤝 Coaching and the Johari Window

Melissa also shared one of her most powerful tools for self-discovery: the Johari Window. It’s a classic psychological model with four quadrants: what you know about yourself, what others know about you, what neither of you knows, and what only others see. By feeding your resume, LinkedIn, and content into ChatGPT, you can get a custom Johari Window.

This technique has already unlocked new paths for her clients — from discovering latent public speaking skills to clarifying leadership blind spots. And it’s a brilliant example of how AI and coaching can merge.

💪 AI as Your Leadership Coach

There’s a misconception that leadership is innate. Melissa calls that out. Leaders aren’t born knowing how to run meetings, present clearly, or inspire a team. They’re trained. But no one tells you that when you’re promoted.

She uses AI to help her clients:

• Craft more inclusive meeting agendas
• Build clarity and confidence in presentations
• Practice tough conversations before they happen

“You wouldn’t expect an athlete to compete without a coach. Why would you expect a leader to lead without one?”

✨ Final Thoughts

AI isn’t replacing leadership coaching — it’s becoming part of it. As Melissa shows us, tools like ChatGPT can act as strategy partners, performance mirrors, and creative collaborators.

If you’ve only been using AI to draft emails or summarize notes, you’re missing the magic. Start asking it deeper questions. Start coaching yourself.

👥 About the Guest

Thank you to our guest, Melissa Entzminger, an executive communications strategist who helps high achievers improve their leadership presence and presentation skills. She works with rising leaders to identify what’s missing from their communication toolbox and how to get to that next level.

• Website: takingyourstage.com
  
• LinkedIn: Melissa Entzminger

Full Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00] Jonathan Duarte: . Okay, everyone, we have a phenomenal guest today. I wanna introduce you to Melissa. Melissa is a communications coach for executives. Anyone who wants to get to that next level and do storytelling and really talk about their project in a way that they get buy off in.

[00:00:17] Jonathan Duarte: So Melissa, introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about how you got started. 

[00:00:22] Melissa Entzminger: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. I’m a communication strategist. I help people with their communication and leadership skills.

[00:00:30] Melissa Entzminger: I work with executives and high achievers. Anyone in leadership who wants to get to that next level of leadership, but maybe realizes as they look in their communication toolbox like something is missing that is not allowing them to get that. To that next level from a communication perspective.

[00:00:50] Melissa Entzminger: And so that’s where they work with someone like me, whether that’s in their leading a meeting, communication or how to talk to their colleagues or even how to present [00:01:00] effectively. 

[00:01:00] Jonathan Duarte: Awesome. We met two years ago, I think. 

[00:01:03] Melissa Entzminger: I think you’re right

[00:01:03] Jonathan Duarte: yeah. In a mastermind about marketing and personal branding on LinkedIn in a post I recently had on LinkedIn about Have you had, I think it was a poll, have you had an aha moment where the light switch went off about how to use, ChatGPT, you responded back.

[00:01:23] Jonathan Duarte: I’m like, okay. I gotta get Melissa on and we gotta talk about your aha moment. So go ahead and share your aha moment that you had with ChatGPT, where it was the inflection point of your use, 

[00:01:33] Melissa Entzminger: my aha moment occurred when I realized I could use ChatGPT to lean into my. learning style.

[00:01:43] Melissa Entzminger: I’m a kinesthetic learner, so I learn by doing. Even when I was a kid studying for a test, I would learn by doing I’d find someone who would learn the same way I did and we would explain the answers to each other. That was how we would study for the test. As I was [00:02:00] working on my business, I found myself thinking through some business problems and wishing I had someone that I could talk through the answers with. Someone who is an expert in the field. I opened ChatGPT one day, started talking to it like it was a business strategist and it responded, I was able to talk out loud and brainstorm, and it was able to bring its expertise from various industries 

[00:02:27] Jonathan Duarte: wow. And we had talked about this a little bit before, so I would say before that you were doing like the normal basics and you see a little white box and you just type in help with a email, blah, blah, blah. And then you did, I think, what they now call the millennial use of ChatGPT

[00:02:45] Jonathan Duarte: And you now have a strategist in that little white box. 

[00:02:48] Melissa Entzminger: Yeah, absolutely. I started seeing it as here’s the situation, here’s what I wanna get out of it, here’s what I’m thinking.

[00:02:56] Melissa Entzminger: What are your thoughts? And then it’ll ~spit back and ~answer ~to ~me, and then we can [00:03:00] chat back and forth. My favorite question to ask ChatGPT is what am I missing? Often it’ll give you things that it wasn’t initially giving you in those answers. So that’s a great tip I found.

[00:03:12] Jonathan Duarte: Yeah, I found that coming back to it after all the people I’ve interviewed about their aha moments, I think that is the actual biggest key. And nobody talks about ~it. It’s like you can read it and somebody might say ~it. When I was doing something on market research, I did the same thing and I’ve done it on some coding examples I’ve said, okay, how do I make this better?

[00:03:31] Jonathan Duarte: That was the last line in my prompt I spend a half hour prompting through something then I came back and said, can you summarize this so next time I use it I could do it better? What am I missing? It already knows the prompt. So it can come back and train you?

[00:03:46] Melissa Entzminger: That’s the key that I found and a little bit frustrating ’cause it’s like we have just had this very long exchange. Why was it not in the exchange? 

[00:03:54] Jonathan Duarte: Exactly. 

[00:03:54] Melissa Entzminger: I found that when you ask better questions, you get better answers and that must fall in that [00:04:00] category.

[00:04:00] Jonathan Duarte: Yeah, I think that’s so true because it’s all about the questions you ask, right? I ~almost ~should put a sticky on my computer, although I know I’ll go blind to it after a while, which is, did I ask ChatGPT the right question or ask it?

[00:04:13] Jonathan Duarte: Did I ask you, after you’ve gone through all this stuff and I got to the answer, did I ask the right question? Or is there another way to ask this question did I miss something? 

[00:04:22] Melissa Entzminger: ~Yeah, ~that’s another great way to ask it. 

[00:04:24] Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. And maybe it’s also, I almost got look back to college, like going to office hours to a professor and saying what am I missing?

[00:04:31] Jonathan Duarte: ~What did I not get? ~Very interesting. And ~so how do, ~how have you used it in your work with clients so far? 

[00:04:36] Melissa Entzminger: So I have encouraged clients to think about using it as ~maybe ~they have to have a conversation with their boss and they’re not sure how to frame that. Use it as their own little guide and cheerleader in their pocket.

[00:04:51] Melissa Entzminger: Describe the situation. Say, here’s what I’m gonna say. How might you say this better? If you start thinking of it as your [00:05:00] own advisor as opposed to, write me a generic email, then you’ll start getting better responses and you’ll start seeing, okay, this is actually a great tool that’s just been hanging out on my computer and I didn’t even realize all the power that it could have.

[00:05:16] Melissa Entzminger: So that’s one thing that I do encourage my clients to use it for. 

[00:05:20] Jonathan Duarte: I had heard people using it as their. Advisor before, I’ve got a lot of content out on the web and I’ve created a single document with links to all my content so it understands I can just put it into any model and quickly understand, anything I wanna write about.

[00:05:34] Jonathan Duarte: But I had never really told about me personally what are my struggles? What are my weaknesses? ~What are ~my strengths? I think it’s in the new, settings, in the config now. I don’t think it was there before, but I’m like, I’ve heard people talk about like they really use it as a coach.

[00:05:49] Jonathan Duarte: How do they know about ’em? I have a friend who ~actually ~just goes in, Hey, what should I be looking at today? Because it already has access to their calendar. I’m like, wow, this is getting way beyond even what I thought ~it was getting to. So ~I [00:06:00] think if you use it. That way, it’ll be interesting to see how it might evolve and help me get through, my way of thinking to evolve my thought process

[00:06:10] Jonathan Duarte: so again, I don’t have those blind spots as much as I might normally. 

[00:06:15] Jonathan Duarte: ~Yeah. ~

[00:06:15] Melissa Entzminger: ~Yeah, no, ~that’s a great way to go about it. It can ~also ~help you uncover your hidden zones of genius. ~Like ~we all have things that we don’t realize maybe that we’re good at, that maybe other people realize around us. And so if you feed it information like your resume ~and ~things ~that ~you’ve written ~and your, like ~your LinkedIn profile and whatever digital footprint that you have.

[00:06:36] Melissa Entzminger: There’s this principal called a Johari Window. 

[00:06:39] Jonathan Duarte: I’ve heard of it. Tell me about it because I am enthralled to ~actually ~do this when we get off the call I’ve got all the stuff out there, but I’ve never asked that same question. 

[00:06:47] Melissa Entzminger: As your Johari Window is a psychology principle.

[00:06:50] Melissa Entzminger: It’s the name from the two co-founders names put together, it’s four quadrants. What’s known to you and known to others? [00:07:00] What’s. Unknown to you, but known to others. What do people know about you that you don’t know about yourself? What’s unknown to you and unknown to others?

[00:07:09] Melissa Entzminger: ~I’m forgetting the fourth one off the top of my head. But basically ~you feed ChatGPT, all this information, your resume, like your LinkedIn profile, any sort of things that you’ve written that you wanted to know. ~And ~then you say, show me my Johari Window, and it will pull up your Johari Window. And what’s really fun is the quadrant that’s

[00:07:26] Melissa Entzminger: The whole point of this window is that it shows you what your hidden zone of genius is that you didn’t even realize was a skillset. You can start exploring what that skillset is and utilizing that to your advantage.

[00:07:38] Jonathan Duarte: As a leader, you’re not trying to duplicate others, but ~you’re ~using your internal strengths to move things forward. 

[00:07:44] Melissa Entzminger: Yeah. 

[00:07:44] Jonathan Duarte: And play to your strengths. That’s how you’re, most people are successful about playing to their strengths, but also building up their weaknesses.

[00:07:50] Jonathan Duarte: You still have to play to your strengths because everyone could be normalized, but you don’t stand out. 

[00:07:56] Melissa Entzminger: Yeah, absolutely. ~So ~I did this with a client recently and one of the [00:08:00] things that popped up ~on her window ~was that she would be a really good public speaker, she hadn’t really thought about it, but she just took over an organization and it’s a great way to get word out about the organization.

[00:08:11] Melissa Entzminger: ~And ~so she’s now gonna explore doing ~some ~more public speaking, which wasn’t even something that she had considered ~being on her dance card. And ~it’s a fun way to realize okay, I didn’t realize that I had this hidden talent. Let me start exploring that. 

[00:08:23] Jonathan Duarte: Wow, I’m almost getting chills about this because I am 56 and I’m still trying to figure out what I’m gonna do in my life.

[00:08:29] Jonathan Duarte: But everyone is right. It doesn’t change if you’re 15 or 23. You’re still wondering. But it helps to know what your strengths are. We can only look at ourselves and we only have a mirror that looks back at the questions we’re asking at the moment.

[00:08:42] Jonathan Duarte: If we looked at our history, the same questions we asked when we were 18, if it was documented, we’d be able to see through that window, 

[00:08:48] Melissa Entzminger: it’s funny because when you’re younger, nobody wants to stand out. Everybody wants to be part of the crowd.

[00:08:54] Melissa Entzminger: But when you get older, your differentiating factor and the things that make you unique are the [00:09:00] things that set you ahead and help you be successful. And this Johari Window helps you see what those things are so you can use those. 

[00:09:07] Jonathan Duarte: Yeah, that’s an interesting point because when I think I was 16. This kind of goes into ~like ~leadership, my persona, if you will.

[00:09:14] Jonathan Duarte: ~But I was, I think I was 16. ~I was racing sailboats a lot. And I was training on and performed. , My high school team, won the national championships. ~I, at one point, like ~all my friends in summer, ~like they ~were going to the beach, doing all this stuff and I ~just ~had to say, i’m doing something that I’m really good at, I’m passionate about, and I’m gonna be really good at it. And the fact that I can’t go to the beach with you doesn’t matter.

[00:09:36] Melissa Entzminger: Yeah. 

[00:09:37] Jonathan Duarte: And I just had to shut those things down. So I learned early at 16, ~like ~if you were gonna be an Olympic athlete you can’t go out and party with your friends.

[00:09:48] Jonathan Duarte: The gymnasts that are 13, and 12 ~that are ~doing this is phenomenal that they learn that early in life. 

[00:09:55] Melissa Entzminger: Yeah. ~That’s so incredible. It sounds ~Simon Sinek teaches about the why and learning what your why is. It sounds like at [00:10:00] 16 you knew what your why is and that was a motivating factor for you, which is really impressive.

[00:10:06] Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. There’s good things and bads about it too, because, you’re trying to lead everything all the time, right? It’s oh, I’m gonna go do this ’cause I know how to do it. No, you do what you’re really good at, not the other stuff. All right. So what are the ways that, in your business have you helped and where’s your focus on clients and where you know, you’re having the best results that you’ve seen from them. 

[00:10:28] Melissa Entzminger: So I enjoy working with clients on their presentation skills. Oftentimes, they end up having to. Get put in a position where they need to start presenting and that’s not something that they feel confident at. ~And ~so I work with them on confidence as well as what a good presentation looks like.

[00:10:50] Melissa Entzminger: I also help with their leadership skills. It’s fascinating to me that it’s. Completely normal in society for us to go through, four years of [00:11:00] college and maybe advanced degrees, you’re doing a great job and you get promoted to leadership and all of a sudden you’re just expected to wake up one day knowing how to be a leader.

[00:11:09] Melissa Entzminger: That’s not the case often people often get promoted to a level and now they’re leading their peers and this feels uncomfortable. How do I incorporate everybody’s idea in a meeting and make everybody’s ideas feel heard. And so I help leaders feel more comfortable with their leadership skills and help them get to that next level of leadership ~as well.~

[00:11:29] Melissa Entzminger: ~Because ~for some reason in society it’s more taboo to say, I want help with my leadership skills, but ~it’s something that ~the best leaders know they need to get coaching on to be the best that they could be. 

[00:11:41] Jonathan Duarte: I always go back to this ~too, and I think you’ve probably seen it too, is when you realize ~if you’re an athlete, you had a coach they may not have been good at sport, but they get you in the right mindset

[00:11:49] Jonathan Duarte: That’s why you need a leadership coach. They don’t know anything about your business, nor do they care. But guess what? Business is pretty much similar. It’s been the same way for decades, [00:12:00] centuries. Find your customer, lead, the team, the charge. But there’s 360 degrees you can go and you probably have to go in that 5% yet.

[00:12:10] Melissa Entzminger: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I’ve seen this quote on a lot of social media that people don’t leave companies, they leave leaders. Being a good leader is all about retention and helping your employees to be the best that they can be, so that at the end of the day, that reflects on you as a leader.

[00:12:31] Melissa Entzminger: I was watching the ending of Game of Thrones not too long ago. Have you seen that show? 

[00:12:37] Jonathan Duarte: Yeah, 

[00:12:37] Melissa Entzminger: ~yeah. And so at the very end of it, ~Khaleesi is just the most perfect example of a bad leader. ~Like ~she really wanted to be, queen of everything, but she, in her trying to command that leadership in the end ended up losing it because she didn’t know how to effortlessly lead and, 

[00:12:58] Jonathan Duarte: yeah.

[00:12:58] Melissa Entzminger: I forgot the [00:13:00] guy’s name who the king of the north, ~his name is Escape Me at the moment, but Oh yeah.~ 

[00:13:02] Jonathan Duarte: Yep. 

[00:13:02] Melissa Entzminger: But he had that quality where people just were gravitating to him and they wanted to follow him. And I helped my clients , make it look effortless, that people want to follow you. And you have that quality that makes people feel seen and heard, and that’s a skill that can be learned.

[00:13:22] Jonathan Duarte: Wow. That’s awesome. That’s a great ending spot there. I’m so excited about doing the Johari Window. I’m tempted to actually do my prompt and publish. Whether I share my details, I don’t know, but I might do that. Melissa, what’s the best way to reach you?

[00:13:38] Jonathan Duarte: I’ll put all the info in the LinkedIn notes as well.

[00:13:41] Melissa Entzminger: If you wanna learn more about me, you can visit my website takingyourstage.com. That’s T-A-K-I-N-G, takingyourstage.com. Or you can shoot me an email. I’d be happy to talk to you about it.

[00:13:58] Jonathan Duarte: Awesome. Thank you so [00:14:00] much that, that’s been amazing and I look forward to, hearing more 

[00:14:08] Melissa Entzminger: Sounds good. Alright. Thanks so much for having me. 

[00:14:10] Jonathan Duarte: You’re welcome.

[00:14:11] Jonathan Duarte: Thanks for spending your time here with GoHire Talks and listen to our guest. My intention has always been to create incredible content to help you in your career in recruiting and marketing, business and leadership. We appreciate all of the insights and feedback you provide. If you’ve got guests you’d like us to have on the show, please let us know.

[00:14:31] Jonathan Duarte: Again, thank you for all your support.