99 | Stop Writing Terrible Prompts (Your AI Is Only As Smart As Your Instructions)

Is your AI tool sounding like a corporate robot with a word salad problem? It’s not broken, you’re just briefing it like an intern you secretly resent.

Let’s get one thing straight: getting great AI results isn’t magic, it’s instructions. In this founder-fire Thursday episode, Dawn Andrews reveals why most female founders are getting mediocre results from AI and what to do about it. 

She shares the exact 5-part framework that turns AI from a confusing timesuck into your most powerful business sidekick. You’ll laugh, cringe, and most importantly, learn how to stop wasting time and start getting content that actually works.

No tech degree required.

Takeaways

• Your AI is only as smart as your instructions. If you're vague, you’ll get garbage.
• Good prompts = Good delegation. The DRIVE Method (Direction, Role, Intent, Values, Execution) changes everything.
• Stop treating AI like a mind-reader. Treat it like your smartest team member—and brief it accordingly.
• Even bad prompts can get better. It’s a skill you can—and should—build.
• Mastering AI gives you time freedom. Think 10+ hours/week back for high-leverage leadership.

Resources & Links

• Free Guide: 10 Ways AI Will Make You a Better Leader
• Join the Community: AI for Founders
• Download: The Feedback Fix

Related Episodes:

• Episode 093 The Dirty Secret About AI No Female Executive Wants To Admit—And Why It’s Hurting You
  
  
• Episode 080 The Wednesday Panic Triage. How AI helped me to choose what matters in my business

Want to increase revenue and impact? Listen to “She's That Founder” for insights on business strategy and female leadership to scale your business. Each episode offers advice on effective communication, team building, and management. Learn to master routines and systems to boost productivity and prevent burnout. Our delegation tips and business consulting will advance your executive leadership skills and presence.

Transcript

She's That Founder
99 | Stop Writing Terrible Prompts (Your AI Is Only As Smart As Your Instructions)

Hey sister, if AI is giving you crappy content, it isn't broken. You're just briefing it like you'd brief an intern, you secretly resent and it shows. And before you roll your eyes and think, Dawn's being dramatic again, just hear me.

I just spent 15 minutes watching a brilliant founder, someone who runs a $3 million company, ask chat GPT to write a good email and then get frustrated when it's spit out complete corporate gibberish. Word salad. That sounded like it was written by a committee of robots. 

So here's what's happening.

You're treating AI like it's your longtime executive assistant who can read your mind and knows exactly what you need. But AI is actually more like hiring the smartest consultant you've ever met. One who can solve any problem you throw at them, but only if you brief them like you actually want results.

Hey, hey, hey. Welcome to She's That founder Thursday edition with a messy bun. These are the quick rant kick in the pants, velvet boot moments where I stand in the future, pulling you towards the clearer, stronger, more powerful leader, vision and version of yourself with AI as your co-pilot.

So yesterday I'm in a strategy session with a client. Let's call her Theresa, and she's telling me how AI doesn't work for her business. But here's the thing. Theresa's got an MBA, she's been running companies for 15 years, and she can read market trends like most people read TMZ.

She's avoiding AI, like it's gonna expose her as a fraud. "Dawn, she says, I felt ridiculous asking a computer questions. What if I'm doing it wrong? What if my team finds out I don't know what I'm doing?" And then she showed me her prompts. Friends, it was painful. Theresa, thank you for letting me share this story.

Her prompt was literally write an email to my team about the new project deadline. That's it. And, look, no shade. that is a very straightforward prompt, and I totally get why she wrote it that way. And I think most of us would probably approach things that way, or at least start our conversation with AI that way.

But the challenge is there's really no context. There's no tone, there's no specific outcome. Just write an email. And somehow she expected AI to read her mind about. Which project? What is the new deadline? Are we ahead or behind? Is it good news or bad news? What's our leadership style? What does our team need to hear right now related to this change?

And here's what gets me. Theresa, is brilliant. She's mastered her accounting software, SaaS tools, slack, Asana, project Management Systems, CRM platforms. She has mastered every tool that her business needed, and with the advent of all of the tools in the world, that's a lot of tools for somebody to learn along with operating a business.

But AI is different. 

Because everybody's acting like it's this mystical thing instead of what it actually is. The most powerful business tool that you will learn this decade, and I get it at 45 years old with a business to run a family, a team counting on you. The last thing you want is look foolish, asking a computer to help you write an email.

But on the other side of this awkwardness. You get your nights and weekends back. 

So can I just say something? If you're listening to this thinking, I should already know this. Stop. Nobody taught us this. This technology is literally younger than your last business strategy. You're not behind, you're exactly on time. I was not always good at this either. I just really decided to dig in and go for it. 

Back in 2021, I started when I first started using a tool called Jarvis. That's what it was called before, it became Jasper after Marvel did what Marvel does. My prompts were embarrassing. I would literally type marketing copy. Into the box. That's it. Two words. Like I was sending a telegram, then I graduated to asking it yes or no questions. Is this a good blog post? As if AI was some kind of magic approval machine that could divine quality from thin air, but here's the wild part, even with those terrible uninformed prompts. I still got reasonable outputs, which actually made it because I thought I was doing it right and the content was turning out wrong. 

So I started blaming the tool. I was like someone who thinks they can cook because they can make decent scrambled eggs. But meanwhile, I'm actually leaving Michelin Star meals on the table.

It took me months to realize that I was speaking to ai, like it was 1997 and I was typing commands into a DOS program. Everything was so formal, so computery. I'd write things like generate professional business correspondence when what I actually meant was write an email. That sounds like me talking to a client I've known for three years. 

The breakthrough. It happened when I finally started to talk to ai. Like I was briefing my smartest team member, natural, conversational, specific. That was the game changer. 

So if you're feeling awkward about this, welcome to the club, here we are. I was the founding member. 

So now let's fix your prompts. First, let me give you a mindset shift that changes everything. Good prompting is just good delegation. Think about it. When you delegate to your best team member, you don't just say handle the client thing, you give them context. You give them desired outcome, and your decision making framework even, or at least I hope you do, and AI is the same, the better your instructions, the better your results, and to make this easier. I created a method for you. 

This is my prompting method. It's called DRIVE. Because you need to drive your AI tool. Not hope it figures things out. Okay, so let me break down What drive stands for. D for direction, R for role, I for intent, V for values and E for execution. 

So D for Direction, what is the situation or context that AI needs to know to do good work for you. R for Role, what is the hat that your AI tool is wearing? What role is it playing? I for intent, what's the specific outcome that you want? V for values, what standards or constraints do you want it to meet? And then E for Execution, what format or structure do you need when it's all said and done? 

So think of it this way, direction is your GPS coordinates. Role would be who's driving the car? Intent is your destination. Values are your driving rules, like no speeding, stay in your lane and execution, that's whether you want the scenic route or the highway. 

So now I'm gonna show you how this transforms everything using Theresa's email. So her original prompt before was write an email to my team about the new project deadline. After using this drive prompting format, we're three weeks behind on the rebrand project and the team's getting anxious about whether we'll hit our Q4 launch. 

Do you see how I'm already just talking to the tool, like I'm talking to a well-trained assistant? So that's the direction, the role you are my communication strategist who knows how to be direct, but encouraging. Think straight talk, wrapped in optimism. Intent, write an email that acknowledges the delay. Honestly reassures the team. This is manageable and outlines our new realistic timeline. Values, keep it under 150 words. Maintain an optimistic but realistic tone. No corporate jargon. Include specific next steps so people know exactly what to do by Monday morning. And then execution professional email format with a clear subject line and bullet points for action items. When Gina saw the output, she went quiet for a second. And then she said, oh, it's not magic, it's just instructions. 

Exactly. You already know how to give instructions. You just forgot you were talking to a tool, not a mind reader. 

Now, instead of getting generic corporate speak, you get an email that sounds like you addresses the real situation and moves your team forward. The difference is night and day. So you might be thinking, okay, Dawn, we just broke down the the DRIVE, D-R-I-V-E of this, and coming up with each of those sections, each of those areas of instruction seems like I could have written the email in that amount of time, perhaps, and if you can go for it.

But what I'd recommend is that you give it a shot. Because once you get this format and technique down, you'll write all your emails so much faster and so much clearer. You also will have designed a format that you can potentially pass on to someone else to be able to help draft communication for you.

Draft, not do it all for you, but draft it. So it's worth taking the time to figure these things out to practice these things. So here's what you need to remember first, learning to prompt your AI tool isn't admitting weakness. One more thing I wanna add is that even if you don't, complete the D-R-I-V-E of the prompting framework perfectly, you'll get a better output than what you did with the initial prompt.

It will be improved. And as you get better at prompting, the outputs will get better, and you'll learn from the outputs to get better at the prompting. It's an upward spiral for you in using ai. 

So here's what you need to remember. First learning to prompt your AI tool is not admitting weakness. It is claiming your competitive advantage, but you know what is weakness? Spending three hours on a task that AI could handle in three minutes because you're too proud to learn how to ask for help, that's not protecting your leadership that is protecting your ego. 

Second, Use the drive method. Just make it simple. Direction, role intent, values, execution. It's just delegation for AI. You've been doing it with humans for years, now you're doing it with technology. 

And third, and this is the most important and most fun one. The learning curve is so much shorter than you think. You're not chasing the latest shiny social platform where the algorithm changes every Tuesday, you're mastering a tool that will give you back 10 hours or more a week. It will give you expert level analysis on demand and strategic thinking capacity that you can tap into at 3:00 AM when you're waking up and worried about your business, that is a big difference. 

So the drive method that you just learned, that's just one framework. I've got so many others that my executive clients use every single day for everything from strategic planning to difficult conversations, to market analysis, and sharing a few of those in my in.

I'm sharing a few of those in my 10 ways AI will make you a better leader guide. It's got specific prompts ready to copy and paste, including templates for delegation, decision making, strategic planning that my clients pay me to teach them. No tech speak, no complicated setups, no prompt engineering degree required.

Just proven prompts that work for founders who have actual businesses to run. You can find it at hellodawn.live/10ways. 

So next time you're about to ask AI for help, remember, you've already mastered harder things than this. Use the drive framework and stop letting bad prompts keep you stuck in work.

That should take minutes, not hours. The founder who figures this stuff out first, that becomes your competitive edge right there.

I hope this gives you a little bit more confidence in driving your AI tool and until next time, go be that founder. You've got this and I can't wait until we connect again. 

Talk soon, Lovey.