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Last week, my publisher informed me she’d run my book through the AI screening software as is required by many major publishers like mine (Hachette.)

The verdict: “Congratulations. Your manuscript came back 100% Human.”

I laughed because 1. I was relieved. (I’ve heard authors recently saying even when they’d written their books, the AI screening software sometimes flagged their writing as AI.) and 2. I was fascinated.

Between writing my first book and writing my seventh, “human” had become something that needed to be verified.

Considering the current state of AI ubiquitousness, of course books- and all content- needs to be evaluated.

Have you had a moment in the last 3 months where you watched a video and wondered if the person in the video was human? Same with a photograph? An email? Did the person write this or did Claude generate this message?

Last month, I received a pitch from a coach I’d worked with a few years ago. The whole message sounded like it was written and sent, unedited, by Chat GPT. The message was inviting me to a private mastermind- a 5 figure investment. Accurate or not, I thought, “she didn’t bother to write this herself.” I deleted the invitation.

100% Human not just about books anymore. It’s about everything.

A post went viral last month saying 90% of all online content will be AI generated by the end of 2026 however fact checked studies are showing 50% as the more accurate #.

90% or 50%, many of us can feel the rareness that is becoming exponentially valuable: humanity.

I get asked almost every day, “Should I use AI to write my book?” I don’t think that’s the most helpful question. The question I like better is: “How do I use AI to assist me in content creation while still being the author- in both creativity and craft? How do I ensure what I create has a soul, maintains a human heartbeat?

My mastermind clients joked that maybe we need a seal for our work: Verified. 100% Human.

If you’re publishing a book, you need to know the requirements of your particular publisher. Major publishers usually require manuscripts to go through AI screeners such as Pangram, GPTZero, or Copyleaks. This may be required for certain bestseller lists and book awards as well- so ask your publisher for your specific requirements.

Going through the process with my book, I wondered if there will be two lists in The New York Times book review each Sunday: Books by Humans and another list for Books by AI? I hope not.

If your publisher allows AI assistance and you want to use AI to help your writing process, there are things you can do to keep the humanness of your work.

If you’d like the exact prompt we teach our authors to preserve their authentic voice while using ChatGPT or Claude as a thought partner and editor, leave a comment with the word PROMPT and I’ll send it to you.

I don’t use AI to write my books. But I use AI in many other projects. This article was created with AI assistance. I walked. I dictated. I generated a draft by speaking into Claude. I generated the whole draft while moving. Then I sat down to revise. The process was integrated into my day instead of waiting until the fumes that were left after I coached, had book launch meetings, created two presentations, filled out my son’s football forms, scheduled the dentist, and checked in on a friend who is going through a major health issue.

I collaborated with AI the same way I collaborate with a great assistant. Not to replace my voice. To expedite the time from idea to published piece. I use it when the alternative is to create this way or not create at all.

But we can always keep the humanity. Everything we create can still have a heartbeat.

Messy, creative, unique, real human is I’m after in what I create and what I consume.

What about you?

(this image created by AI, I have not yet been on stage with David)

I’ve been thinking about David Sedaris lately.

Not because I’m re-reading Naked. Not because I just heard him with Terri Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air. And not because I’m craving another bent side split, abdominal cramps induced laughing from listening to Holidays on Ice, though every December his exhausted Macy’s elf manages to restore my faith in humanity.

I’ve been thinking about him because I’m preparing to go on my next book tour.

Somewhere between partner meetings, signing venue contracts, emails with AV teams, and all the logistics that come with bringing a book into the world, I found myself asking an unexpected question.

Not, “How many cities will we do?”

But... What else can this book tour do?

David Sedaris taught me that.

Every tour, he recommends another writer’s book. Not his own backlist. Someone else’s work.

In music, famous artists have opening acts. Publishing doesn’t typically work that way. Authors go on tour and read from their work.

Which is why I think what David does is so radical. He’s giving away the one thing the author is told to protect: attention.

Gary Vee said, “attention is the new currency.” I write often about the 2.9 second attention span of the average US adult.

Whenever we recommend a book, introduce two friends, forward an article, or shine a light on someone else’s work, we’re saying: “This is worth a piece of your life.”

Maybe that’s why I’ve always loved Sedaris. I love his craft, the weird humor, the brilliant observations, and the way he can make a family dinner feel like Greek mythology and a trip to Costco read like Shakespeare.

I love that he reportedly signs books until every last person who attended has gone home. I love that he spent years picking up litter along the roads near his home in England simply because someone should. I love that he named his beach house, in a Carolina community where people name their homes Ocean Spray and, The Sea Section (yes as in C /cesarean- Section.) And yes, I love that he often walks onstage wearing navy culottes that he purchased in Japan.

There’s something deeply freeing about a person who has stopped trying to become more impressive and simply became more himself. That, too, feels like generosity.

In my book tours, I don’t pick an opener book, but I do something borrowed from David.

I select a philanthropic organization that is related in some way to my book, and I donate a percentage of my author royalties as a gift.

When I published The Science of Getting Rich for Women, we supported UN Women after learning that women globally lost $800 billion in the pandemic.

When Ghost House came out, I donated to a women’s shelter to support individuals who’d experienced domestic violence.

When Bringing in Finn, the story of my husband and my 7 year fertility journey, launched we donated to an organization supporting families walking the road of infertility and pregnancy loss.

Now comes The Download.

The book is about using the intersection of science and consciousness, about creativity and innovation, about the science of miracles. You can read more here: https://amzn.to/4wQzEnF

And so I’m asking for your help. If this book tour could shine a light on one organization, one mission, one group of people quietly making the world better- who should it be?

I’ve created a form below where you can nominate an organization that matters to you and tell me why: https://forms.gle/vfdr7fZw8vaKfjCM7

(If we select your nomination, we’ll let them know YOU’re the person who introduced us!)

One of the ideas I’ve been exploring while writing The Download is that breakthroughs often arrive through collaboration.

Maybe that’s true of generosity, too. Maybe the point isn’t simply to build our own movements. Maybe it’s to make sure that whatever we’ve been given-our voice, our platform, our readers, our influence-doesn’t stop with us.

I don’t know if David Sedaris ever intended to teach that lesson. Sometimes the people who shape us never realize they’re doing it.

And perhaps that’s the quiet miracle of generosity. It echoes much farther than the person offering it could ever see.

I’d love for this book tour to become a colossal, wide reaching echo. With your help, it will!

On September 29, 2015, a television show premiered that most people missed.

It was called The Grinder, and it starred Rob Lowe and Fred Savage.

Rob Lowe plays Dean Sanderson, an actor who has become famous for playing a lawyer on a hit television drama called The Grinder. When the show is canceled, he returns to his hometown, where his younger brother Stewart, played by Fred Savage, and their father run the family law firm.

The problem? Dean is not a lawyer.

He has simply spent years pretending to be one on television

(Screen shot from the FOX tv show The Grinder)

Almost immediately, Dean begins involving himself in the firm’s cases, dispensing advice, challenging assumptions, and generally behaving as though eight seasons of television have fully qualified him to practice law.

Stewart is horrified.

I LMAO.

But what has stayed with me all these years is not the premise of the show. It’s a question Dean/The Grinder asks whenever he encounters an obstacle.

Whenever someone explains why something cannot be done. Whenever a situation appears hopeless. Whenever reality itself seems to present an immovable barrier.

Dean asks:

“But what if it could?”

With each year, I think more and more that question sits at the center of some of the most extraordinary things human beings accomplish.

There is a quote often attributed to Einstein: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

I see this imbalance in myself every day. By the age of 8, we start getting really good at logic and intellect. We learn how to analyze, how to assess risk, how to identify flaws. How to explain why something won’t work. Our brain’s negativity bias highlights threats and problems to such an extent, we start to walk back our dreams, to play super small.

Logic and reason are valuable skills. But somewhere along the way, many of us lose contact with another faculty entirely.

Imagination.

In the musical Wicked, Elphaba sings, “I’m through accepting limits because someone says they’re so.”

In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we’re invited into a world of pure imagination where the impossible becomes ordinary.

The heroes of our favorite stories don’t limit themselves to “reasonable.” They start with belief. They create with possibility. Perhaps that isn’t merely philosophy. Perhaps it’s biology.

For decades, neuroscientists have studied neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to reorganize itself throughout life. One of the most fascinating studies involved participants learning a simple piano sequence. Some physically practiced. Others merely imagined practicing.

The physical practice group improved more. But researchers found that the mental practice group also demonstrated measurable changes in the motor cortex and developed skill at the piano (without touching the keys!.) The brain treates vivid imagination as something more than fantasy. Imagination, may be less like daydreaming and more like rehearsal.

The more I practice and teach Downloads, the more I think imagination is not the opposite of reality. I see what the metaphysicists and scientists like Einstein have said all along: imagination is a way reality gets created.

I experienced this firsthand several years ago when I felt an enormous calling to build our company to one million dollars in annual revenue. This goal was about many things for me. But the only one that got me to go for it was the propulsion to break unworthiness and a lack mindset off my female family line and to have a roadmap for women that came to me for coaching and mentorship to do rise finanically as well.

In July of that year, I’d made $300,000. Several mentors told me my goal wasn’t going to happen. My rational mind agreed.

But I started to ask The Grinder question:

But what if I could?

If it were possible, what would I do differently today?

That question changed my future.

I changed how I thought. I changed how I acted. I recrafted who I believed myself capable of becoming. And on December 10, I crossed the million-dollar mark for the first time.

The financial number wasn’t the important part. It was the question that allowed something to happen that should not have happened.

It started with the question; what if it could?

Years before, desperation brought me to imaginal thinking. For seven years, my husband and I tried to start a family. I had stillborn twins, miscarriages, 8 rounds of IVF. It was brutal, emotionally and financially.

I started doing what would become my Download walks. Trudging through Chicago streets, forest preserves, looping around the fertility clinic when I went to have my follicles and uterine lining measured yet again. At every step it felt like more NOs, more obstacles, more of my body not doing the thing I was begging it to do.

What I learned during those years is the profound difference between “I can’t see the way” and “there is no way.”

A way emerged and if you know that part of my story (my mother becoming our surrogate at 60 years old) you know the “WAY” my now 15 year old son came into the world could NEVER have been conceived by our left brain thinking.

The rational mind often confuses the two. When we cannot see the path, we assume the path does not exist.

But it does.

I need The Grinder’s practice again now. There’s a dream I have (I’ll share more soon) and logic and reason says “nope! Not going to happen.”

If you’ve reached a fork, a wall, an impasse, I wonder if you’d do an experiment with me?

Think about the a goal that’s eluded you. Or a big obstacle in your way.
Instead of thinking about how and why it won’t work, let’s ask the Grinder question.

Let’s see what happens if we take two weeks walk a little more in possibility? In the field of pure imagination.

I’m going to walk in the imaginal for the rest of this month. And on the week of June 29th I’ll do a live here on Substack with our Download Toolkit Insiders where we’ll do it together, in real time. (I’ll share my dream then too!)

If you want to join me live:

Subscribe now

See you in the field!

Love,

Sara

A friend’s son is in film school. Recently, his program arranged something most students only dream about: a full day at a major film studio, a tour, a seat at the table with actual executives. He came back with a lot to report.

The executives walked the students through the studio’s release slate, every film scheduled between now and 2030. My friend’s son scanned the list. Then he scanned it again.

Not a single original concept. Every title a remake, a reboot, a sequel to a sequel. Four years of production, hundreds of millions of dollars, and not one story that hadn’t been told before.

I’ve been thinking about that list ever since.

To be clear: there is nothing wrong with a great remake. Excited to “gird my loins", I went to see The Devil Wears Prada 2 opening weekend. It wasn’t the original but I’ll happily spend an afternoon with Meryl, Stanley, Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt any day. I left feeling like I’d been to Milan and was inspired to up-level my wardrobe.

But that’s one film. One. And it exists because the original gave it something to stand on. In the past 3 years we’ve seen: Beatlejuice, Freaky Friday, Fall Guy, Top Gun Maverick, and coming soon you’ll see Oceans 11, The Birdcage, Shrek, Legally Blonde, a new Meet the Parents, and many more. You’ve seen this on TV (Matlock), in books (too many to name). And we understand why: in the movie industry, reports show “66% of sequels make back their budgets and 29% double them domestically, with 92% of the sequel films earning their budget back globally. So, doing re-makes, re-boots, and sequels is the logical and “safe” thing to do.

But happens when there is no original anymore? When the entire slate, all the open AI models, artists, creators, top to bottom, pull on what has already been imagined?

Albert Einstein spoke about this, saying, "The intuitive/imaginal mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

This is the thing I keep coming back to: we have stopped using our imaginations, and our intuitive, creative faculties. Not all the way, not permanently, but in a slow and patterned erosion that has become so ordinary we barely notice it.

When faced with a blank page, a new problem, a creative challenge, the reflex now is to reach for something outside ourselves. An AI bot. A template. A search. A prompt box. A friend who’s done it before. We outsource the generative part, the part that is most essentially ours, because it feels inefficient. Because it’s hard. Because we are tired.

The research on this is not subtle: the average person makes somewhere around 35,000 conscious decisions in a single day. We are navigating economic uncertainty, fractured information environments, the particular vertigo of a moment that feels like it is changing faster than we can track. The creative impulse is still there. It hasn’t gone anywhere. But it is competing for bandwidth against an extraordinary amount of noise.

The problem is that you cannot outsource your way to an original idea. Just as you cannot send someone else to the gym and expect your own body to change, you cannot hand your creative thinking to another person, another tool, another system and expect your imagination to stay sharp. It doesn’t work that way. The imaginal brain, like any other capacity, atrophies without use. And what we lose when we stop exercising it is not just productivity or output. It is something more fundamental: the ability to bring something genuinely new into the world. The world needs that from us. Now more than ever.

What’s at stake:
In 2025, a study conducted by researchers at MIT divided 54 subjects-18 to 39 year-olds from the Boston area-into three groups, and asked them to write several SAT style essays. Group 1 used no technology support. Group 2 had the option of using Google’s search engine and Group 3 had the option of using OpenAI’s ChatGPT to write the essays. Researchers used an EEG to record the writers’ brain activity across 32 regions.

The scientists wanted to specifically explore the impacts of using AI for schoolwork. Not only did the group that wrote essays using ChatGPT (as expected) have lower cognitive function, activity, linguistic, and neural function but the writers of the AI assisted essays delivered extremely similar prose that lacked original thought, relying on the common expressions and ideas. Two English teachers who assessed the AI essays called them largely “soulless.”

It will always be easier in the immediate to consume rather than create but this is precisely what Bob Dylan warned against when he said, “People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.”

What to do
So what do we do to get ourselves into the imaginal mind, to tap our own creativity before we reach for an automation?

We Download.

Every day, I do Download practice. As hard as it is (and I’m a mom, run two businesses, am preparing for a book launch, have aging parents- all the things that many of us are responsible for) I make space for original thinking, for creative ideas, for Downloads.

I get my brain out of Beta (thinking, logic, getting s—- done) and I activate Alpha-Theta-Gamma. After seeing the unsurprising but also chilling results from the MIT study, I do this now, the same way I make time for movement and nutrition. Not as a luxury. As a commitment. Because the conditions for creative breakthroughs don’t appear on their own. They have to be made.

This week in the Gamma Group, we are focusing on generating original creative thinking through movement, and I want to offer you the same practice.

GAMMA WALK
Think of a form of movement you genuinely enjoy. Walking. Swimming. Running. Yoga. Dance. Whatever it is, pick it. Now, before you go, before the headphones go in, before you check anything or ask anyone, set an intention for the download you want. Maybe it’s an idea for a project you’ve been circling. An email you have to send but haven’t nailed. A chapter, a talk, a business problem you’ve been trying to solve.

Hold that intention. Then move. And listen.

Stanford researchers have found that this kind of intentional movement can increase creative and original thinking by 60 to 80 percent. What it creates, neurologically, is what researchers have named a state of soft fascination: a quality of open, receptive attention that is the precise opposite of the overstimulated, input-saturated mental state most of us are living in by 9 a.m. Soft fascination is not zoning out. It is tuning in at a frequency that the noise of ordinary life drowns out.

The ideas are already there. That is the thing I most want you to hear. They are not missing. They are not gone. They are present, circling, looking for a way through. What they need is not more input. They need white space. They need you to go quiet enough to hear them.

Ten minutes. Movement. No stimuli. An intention held lightly at the front of your mind.

That is the Creativity Gym. Let’s workout together. Let’s bring in something the world will never forget!

PS: If you want to Download LIVE and learn all the creative brain science based activators with me in June, join the Gamma Group here: https://saraconnellthedownload.substack.com/subscribe

And PPS. . . you can pre-order The Download book here! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GS7J8V2Q

In 1997, I was recruited out of Northwestern University to a top advertising agency in Chicago. It was listed as “one of the US Top Places for Women to Work” in a national poll. Inside, it was a sexually abusive, toxic environment, where young women were prey. I was single, supporting myself for the first time and (while not true) felt I was trapped. In response, I spiraled into a serious eating disorder and a mental health crisis.

Every morning when I walked through the revolving doors into that large, beautiful, dark art deco building on Wacker Drive, I felt like I was dying.

About two years in, I was sent to Boston to present to a client. As I checked in at American Airlines, I felt dread. I did not want to get on the plane.

What I really wanted was to be a writer. But I’d believed my teachers and my parents and the world and my own fears that said I could never support myself that way. So here I was.

But books were still my friends. My guides. My teachers. My escape.

I walked slowly down the corridor, the smell of pretzel yeast and Cinnebon clung to my hair. I saw an bookstore, next to the shoe shine station. I could hear my flight being called on the PA, but I darted in. I “randomly” grabbed a book. It was Holy Hunger by Margaret Bullit-Jonas. I didn’t have time to read the back cover. I had never heard of the author. But I read the whole book on the plane. I read it in the taxi. I stayed up reading.

By the end of that book, I was not the same.

Margaret had a different story than I did. But she shared trauma she had experienced. She shared the eating disorder that followed. And most importantly, she shared how she got well.

I realized that no matter what happened, even if I ended up on the street, I was going to leave that job. I was going to get well too.

And I vowed that one day I would pay that gift forward by writing my own books.

Years later, when that first book I wrote took me to Oprah and the New York Times and all the places I had once only dreamed about, I made a deeper commitment. I dedicated my life to making sure that other women who feel the call, who have a methodology, a framework, a story that could change someone’s life, get their work into the hands and the hearts and the arms of the people who need it on their darkest day.

Margaret Bullitt-Jonas could have chosen not to write that book. She could have thought she was too old, or that she did not know what she was doing, or that it was too hard, or that she did not have time, or that no one would read it.

But she wrote it anyway.

The book was a download. And she actioned that download.

Because of that, I am still here.

It was a download for Margaret to write the book. It was a download for me to pick it up. It was a download for me to write my book and pay the gift forward. It was a download to start coaching thought leaders and help women lead movements through their books.

This is how powerful books are.

Books can change lives. They can give new insight. They can even save a life.

In celebration of World Book Day on April 23rd, I want to ask you:

What is a book that changed the trajectory of your life?

And if you can, find that author. Send a message. Write a note. Post on their social feed. Thank them.

Because you are not reading this by accident.

Maybe there is a book you have been looking for. A book you wish you had found in an airport bookstore.

Toni Morrison said, if you cannot find the book you are looking for, it is because you are meant to write it.

So I want to know.

What book changed your life?

And are you now being called to write one of your own?

This is how we lead in the new era. By being the real deal. By sharing our HI (human intelligence). By saying yes to the call. By actioning the download.

Let’s do this.

For six years I participated in intensive group therapy. I entered the group to help me heal from a series of childhood and young adult sexual assaults. Thanks to the power of the love in that room and the skill of the therapist, the therapy worked. We met frequently and because we could only focus on childhood trauma for so many hours at a time, we brought other things into the work. We talked about our health, our marriages, parenting and found that the same internal shifts we needed to liberate ourselves from the pain of our past, were useful to apply to life as it was unfolding in the present.

On many occasions, a member of the group would say something like:

“My husband doesn’t support me.”

Or:

“My boss thinks I’m not good enough for a promotion.”

Or:

“My family doesn’t believe in me.”

Every time, our therapist would ask the same question:

“Who doesn’t support you?”

The question was irritating.

We had just named the unsupportive people.

But our therapist was pointing to something deeper.

He suggested that often, the lack of support we experience in the world, mirrors our own lack of self-belief.

We want someone to say: “You can do this.”

We want someone to believe before we do.

But sometimes even the closest people in our lives give us something else.

Judgement.

Doubt.

Criticism.

I completed in the therapy group ten years ago, but I thought of it last week when a mentor of mine, someone I value, trust, and admire, told me a business project I’ve been developing wasn’t going to work well- at least not at first.

This person is intuitive, kind, and cares for me so my response was to feel disappointed, embarrassed, and dejected.

Have you experienced this? Ever, or recently?

Without self-examination, I jumped to accepting his “prediction.”

What he shared might be accurate. I will keep honing, researching, and improving my concept.

But the image of my therapist’s face kept planting itself in my mind.

I imagined I was back in the therapy room.

Me: this mentor doesn’t believe in my idea.

Therapist: Who doesn’t believe in my idea?

The second question reveals the gift.

When someone doesn’t believe in our vision, something important happens.

We have to decide if we believe in it.

People often tell us what’s not possible.

“You can’t do that.”

“That won’t work.”

“That’s unrealistic.”

Sometimes they’re correct but other times people are revealing the limits of their own imagination, or their past experiences, or their societal conditioning.

It’s not their job to validate our dreams- or give us permission.

Annoyingly sometimes, only we can discern if something is worth pursuing.

Years ago, I felt a strong pull to get a master’s degree in writing.

And a lot of people told me it didn’t make sense.

I already had a book published. I was already working as a writer.

Several colleagues staged what felt like an intervention. Two of them had pursued the same degree and regretted it. They wanted to help me make good financial decisions. The degree would be irresponsible, they said, unnecessary, and a waste of money.

I understood their position. On paper, they were accurate. Masters degrees are expensive. I’d already managed to get a book published without one.

But something inside me wanted it.

Not for prestige. For mastery.

I wanted to deepen my craft. I wanted to become a better writer.

Doing that degree led to friendships that shaped my life, a deeper relationship with my work, and skill development that eventually helped me build Thought Leader Academy — which grew into a multi-seven-figure company.

None of that would have happened if I had listened to the voices telling me it didn’t make sense.

When we hear doubt, we either succomb… or stand for the vision anyway.

Not out of rebellion, but out of alignment with what we feel called to do.

When I look back at my life, many of the defining moments were not the ones where everyone believed in me immediately.

And I did the thing anyway.

The gift of my mentor not believing in my idea is that it forced me to summon my own conviction.

Conviction is powerful.

Conviction is contagious.

Your conviction in your vision will draw everyone that will support and needs the thing you are doing to you.

And here was the unexpected phenomenon I witnessed in the therapy group.

When a member of the group stopped waiting for support and started taking action on their dream . .

not always, but often, spouses became supportive. Bosses became encouraging. Friends became believers.

And we would come back amazed.

“My husband has changed so much.”

“My boss finally supports me.”

“My family believes in me now.”

And our therapist would smile and ask again: “Who changed?”

If there is an idea, a project, a dream, a goal that’s been calling you, it’s YOURS.

Share it with me here- I want to hear about it!

Sara