How a Traffic Jam Became a Masterclass in Expertise Extraction
- You've used AI to write drafts. Asked it for outlines. Had it "generate content."
- You've walked away underwhelmed. The output felt generic. Flat. Not quite you.
- You've wondered if there's a better way to work with AI; one that doesn't lose your voice.
I discovered a better way while I was stuck in traffic on a Tennessee highway.
The Setup
The Sunday after Thanksgiving, I was driving to Franklin, Tennessee for a business conference. What should have been a 4.5-hour drive stretched to 6.5 hours. Traffic. Construction. The usual holiday chaos.
Years ago, I became a Certified Habit Coach through coach.me. I'd studied how environment shapes behavior more than willpower does; how context triggers matter more than motivation. The week before the drive, I'd had a coaching call where something clicked. I'd been helping a client protect time for deep work, and for the first time, I articulated what would become the core of what I now call the Sanctuary Strategy™️.
The framework has three components, the Three W's:
- When: What time slot works with your energy, not against it?
- Where: What location removes friction and adds focus?
- Who: What accountability relationship keeps you honest?
Clients rarely struggle with identifying the When. They know they need to block out time on their calendars for deep thinking. But they don't always recognize the importance of the Where. In Atomic Habits, James Clear writes: "Every habit is initiated by a cue, and we are more likely to notice cues that stand out. Unfortunately, the environments where we live and work often make it easy not to do certain actions because there is no obvious cue to trigger the behavior."
I've had accountability partners and coaches for decades. And I had been teaching the When and Where cues for a while. But it wasn't until I read Gary Keller's The One Thing that I realized the importance of identifying the Who:
"An accountability partner provides frank, objective feedback on your performance, creates an ongoing expectation for productive progress, and can provide critical brainstorming or even expertise when needed. As for me, a coach or a mentor is the best choice for an accountability partner. Although a peer or a friend can absolutely help you see things you may not see, ongoing accountability is best provided by someone to whom you agree to be truly accountable. When that's the nature of the relationship, the best results occur."
Simple enough. I got in the car thinking I'd capture it as a short newsletter article.
I didn't get a newsletter article. I got something far more valuable.
Have you ever had a simple idea turn into something bigger than you expected?
The Question That Changed Everything
I'd been listening to a podcast by Max Bernstein on cognitive fingerprints and expertise extraction. During that episode, he mentioned a deceptively simple prompt. I'm paraphrasing here, but the essence was this:
"What questions would you like to ask me?"
Instead of telling AI what to write, you invite it to interview you.
I'd done enough work with this framework over a couple of years of coaching to recognize that the Sanctuary Strategy might be more than a newsletter article. Maybe an ebook. Maybe an e-course. In the past, I would have said: "Draft me an ebook outline based on this content."
Instead, I tried Max's question.
"I'm thinking about writing an ebook or e-course. I think I have enough material. What questions would you ask me to determine whether there's enough here?"
And AI started asking.
The Voice Difference
Here's what I didn't anticipate: I was driving. I couldn't type. So I used voice mode.
That changed the dynamic.
The material had originated in a coaching conversation; me talking through a framework with a client. Now I was talking through that same framework with AI. The dynamic was familiar. The voice matched the origin.
I wasn't shifting into "writer mode" at my computer, composing careful sentences. I was staying in "coach mode," answering questions the way I do when my human coaches ask me. AI became the other person in the room.
When's the last time you stayed in your natural mode (coach, teacher, leader) while working with a tool?
The first question led to a second. The second to a third. Each one went deeper than I expected.
The Question That Surfaced Everything
Somewhere around question eight or nine, AI asked something that stopped me:
"What excuses do clients give when they don't follow through on their protected time?"
I rattled off the usual suspects. Too busy. Emergency at work. Something came up.
Then AI followed up:
"What are the real reasons, do you think? Not what they say, but what might be underneath. Something unconscious or imperceptible to them, but visible to you as a coach."
I knew immediately.
After years of coaching leaders through this exact pattern, I'd seen three root causes show up again and again:
- The Selfishness Narrative: "I can't take time for myself when others need me." The belief that self-care is selfish. That disappearing, even for two hours, means abandoning people who depend on you.
- The Addiction to Urgency: The dopamine hit of constant problem-solving. Some leaders don't know who they are without a fire to fight. Stillness feels like failure.
- The Fear of the Quiet: If I slow down, I'll have to face uncomfortable things. The noise isn't just distraction; it's protection.
I'd known these patterns for years. I'd never named them out loud.
The Shift From Interview to Collaboration
Here's where the drive changed direction.
After I described those three patterns, AI didn't just acknowledge them. It proposed something:
"Would it be helpful to create a Resistance Pattern Detector? A tool clients could use to identify which pattern is operating when they skip their protected time?"
I hadn't thought of that.
My normal writing process is content first, reflection tools later. I develop the ideas and examples, then add application questions at the end.
AI suggested the tool early. Before the content was fully formed.
And then I realized the irony: AI was being more faithful to my own Hidden Architecture of Transformation™️ than my habitual writing process was.
I teach that content alone doesn't transform. Curated Content is the first pillar, but without Consistent Contemplation (the reflective space where insight deepens into formation) transformation rarely occurs.
AI applied my philosophy back to me faster than I was applying it to myself.
Building in Parallel
That pattern continued with every additional question.
Question → My answer → Proposed tool.
Question → My answer → Proposed tool.
Question → My answer → Proposed tool.
Nineteen times.
AI wasn't just interviewing me. It was building things in parallel. As fast as I could answer questions, it was proposing structures, frameworks, and client-ready tools based on what I said.
By the time I pulled into Franklin six and a half hours later, I didn't just have validation that I had enough material for an ecourse.
I had the architecture of the e-course, and the consistent contemplation layer was already sketched in.
What would it mean to walk away from a single conversation with a dozen usable assets?
To-Do Lists and Tools
Here's the aha that's crystallized over the ten days since that drive.
I've been coached for decades. (We tell Edens View clients never to hire a coach who doesn't have a coach. That's how you tell whether someone really believes in coaching.) I've had the same human coach for most of those 30 years and added another last year.
Human coaching gives me awareness. It surfaces what I couldn't see. And I walk away with a to-do list; actions for me to take later.
That Thanksgiving drive produced something different.
AI surfaced awareness and took action immediately. I didn't walk away with homework. I walked away with tools: branded, fillable PDFs with page numbers and copyright details. Ready to use with clients.
More than a dozen assets by the time I arrived.
Now, there's still a to-do list. I still need to build the e-course in CoachAccountable, record the video modules, pilot with my current coaching clients. The tools don't eliminate the work.
I used to walk away from coaching with awareness and a list of things to build later.
Now I walk away with the things already built.
Content Collaboration, Not Content Generation
The phrase "content generation" doesn't describe what happened on that drive.
"Content generation" implies AI is producing something from its own resources. What happened was the opposite: AI was excavating my resources and proposing structures for them faster than I could have done alone.
A better phrase is content collaboration.
These were my ideas, developed over years of reading, thinking, and coaching. The client call the week before Thanksgiving was the first time I'd spoken the Sanctuary Strategy™️ framework out loud.
Everything after that was literally co-laboring. My ideas; AI's questions; my ideas contained in answers; AI's proposed tools; my refinement of those tools.
We have a phrase in coaching: "You hire a teacher when you know that you don't know. You hire a coach when you don't know that you know."
AI, approached with Max's question, functioned like a coach. Not a teacher. It didn't tell me new things. It surfaced what I already knew but hadn't articulated.
And then it built from what it surfaced.
The Methodology Determines the Outcome
Would this have happened if I'd approached AI the old way?
If I'd said "Write me an ebook outline on the Sanctuary Strategy™️," I would have gotten an outline. Generic sections. Placeholder content. A to-do list in disguise: edit this, approve that, implement later.
Max's question changed the dynamic.
"What questions would you like to ask me?" invites AI into a different role. Not generator. Not transcriber. Collaborator.
The methodology determines the outcome.
What This Means for You
If you've been using AI for "content generation" and feeling underwhelmed, you're not doing it wrong. You're doing it incomplete.
The Four Buckets model I've been developing distinguishes between:
- Bucket 1: Research (AI synthesizes information from hundreds of sources)
- Bucket 2: Process Efficiency (AI automates what you already do)
- Bucket 3: Content Generation (AI creates drafts in your voice)
- Bucket 4: Expertise Extraction (AI surfaces what you know but haven't articulated)
Which bucket have you spent the most time in?
Bucket 4 is where the leverage lives.
The question isn't "Can AI write for me?" The question is "Can AI think with me and build from what emerges?"
The answer, I discovered on a traffic-jammed Tennessee highway, is yes.
But only if you ask the right question first.
What tacit expertise are you sitting on that you've never articulated? What would happen if you invited AI to interview you, voice, not typing, about the thing you know cold but have never packaged?
The tools might already be there, waiting for the right questions to surface them. Sometimes you just need to get stuck long enough to find them.
David
P.S. The Sanctuary Strategy™️ e-course that emerged from that drive is currently being developed. The resistance patterns that surfaced in traffic are already helping leaders identify why they keep breaking commitments to themselves. Sometimes the best breakthroughs happen when you're stuck and can't escape.