Leading with Clarity in the Age of AI

Most leaders wait until the meeting to talk out their thoughts. Not out of laziness, but because life is a blur of back-to-back calls. The cost? Unclear speech.

The first step towards clarity, as I wrote in Clarity of Thought in the Age of AI, is naming the fogs of unclear speech: over-explaining, over-simplifying, and over-dressing ideas with jargon.

The second step, from Distance Creates Clarity & Presence in Work Meetings, is stepping back to map the terrain, using AI to analyze transcripts for communication patterns. Watch out for those blindspots!

The third step is the hardest: moving from clarity of thought to clarity of speech.

That was Manuel’s challenge. A smart, ambitious tech leader, he spoke up often, but his comments did not inspire action in his org. Feedback rolled in: his frustration was leaking into his tone, and people felt stress working with him.

In our coaching sessions, I showed him how to walk the road to clarity. The road to clarity is stepping back to see how you truly think, placing your ideas in the larger context, and turning them into words that move people forward.

Manuel and I built a simple routine he could use every day: prepping for meetings, testing his ideas with AI, and tightening them until they sounded like him at his best. The change was not just sharper speech. It was stronger leadership. The kind that inspires action.

Walking with AI

Neuroscience shows that three regions of the brain light up when we communicate:

• Ideas: prefrontal cortex, where raw thoughts form

• Structure: Broca’s area, where those ideas get organized

• Speech: motor cortex, where they turn into words

Each time you rehearse what you want to say, you strengthen these pathways. Research shows repetition and refinement deepen the loop, reinforcing clarity in both thought and speech (Stephens et al., 2010; Hickok & Poeppel, 2007).

AI is not a brain, but it is built on brain-like patterns of connection. That is why it feels natural to bring AI into this process: reflecting your thoughts back, reorganized and sharper, so you can refine them faster. Think of AI as a mirror for your mind, helping you see your thinking more clearly than you could on your own.

As I tell my clients: The road to clarity starts with you. Your ideas and your voice set the pace. But you don’t have to walk it alone.

• As your coach, I walk beside you, giving feedback to help you iterate faster.

• And now AI can walk on the other side, available around the clock, reflecting your thoughts back, reorganized and sharper, so you can iterate even faster.

In my coaching session with Manuel, I asked him to open an AI chatbot and speak his unfiltered thoughts. His vision was rambling and unfocused, the kind of communication that fails in meetings. We dropped in a prompt with his transcript.

The AI’s first draft wasn’t perfect. But when Manuel read it out loud, he could finally hear his own ideas. He refined the phrasing, practiced again, and by the third round his message was crisp: one clear point that connected vision to execution. Soon it became a habit he could do on his own.

You can see the same shift with Gaurang, another leader I have coached.

In the first video, he speaks off the cuff. His ideas scatter and the fog remains. 

In the second, after recording his thoughts, running them through AI, and rehearsing, everything clicks. His ideas flow, his words land, and the room leans in.

That is the power of clarity. Your words match your thoughts. Your thoughts match your words. And this inspires others to do the same.

Try It Yourself

Here’s a quick video tutorial I made. (Like and subscribe while you’re at it!)

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Here are the steps:

Step 1: Record your messy thoughts: Click the microphone in GPT-5 and talk out loud for up to 10 minutes. Stream-of-consciousness. Don’t edit. Don’t judge. Just get it out.

Step 2: Drop them into AI with my few-shot prompt below:

You are my communication coach.  
Take my messy, unstructured thoughts and turn them into a clear, inspiring message using the WHY / HOW / WOW framework.  

Format:  
WHY: [The big reason or vision]  
HOW: [The tactical way to solve or address this problem]  
WOW: [The clear action or inspiring outcome]  

Example  
Messy thoughts: "Meetings drag, leaders aren’t clear, people leave confused."  
Output:  
WHY: I have an idea to help our company avoid the hidden costs of unclear communication through leadership coaching.  
HOW: We can train leaders to rehearse with AI before key meetings, building the muscle of turning messy thoughts into clear, confident speech.  
WOW: With InStride’s AI-native communication programs, leaders turn clarity of thought into clarity of speech, inspiring faster alignment and stronger confidence across teams.  

---  

Messy thoughts: [Paste yours here]  

Step 3: Rehearse until it sounds like you: Don’t stop at the first draft. Go back-and-forth with the AI until the words match your voice.

I use this myself. Before a recent conversation with the head of people development at a dream client company, I ran my raw thoughts through this exact process. If I’m going to help leaders find clarity of thought, I’d better model clarity of speech in my own talking points.

Why This Matters

We have all been swayed by confident words that sounded convincing but left us empty. Real leadership is not just about sounding good. It is about helping people think better, own decisions, and move forward together.

AI gives you a new practice ground to sharpen your thinking and test your voice before you walk into the room. Used well, it elevates not only your clarity, but your team’s. This is the future of leadership communication: presence and clarity that scale.

Leaders who embrace this practice will not only communicate more effectively. They will build cultures of sharper thinking, deeper trust, and faster alignment.

References:

• Stephens, Silbert, & Hasson (2010). Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication. PNAS.

• Hickok & Poeppel (2007). The cortical organization of speech processing. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.