Welcome to lesson 2 of the How to Partner with AI to Define & Reach Your Goals free course.
I’m Dave Waring, the co-creator of BrainDrive.ai and your instructor for this course.
Last lesson you saw the difference between asking AI questions and partnering with it. If you tried the two-line prompt, you felt it: the AI stopped lecturing and started listening.
This lesson gives you the whole method. By the end of it, you’ll have a real plan for a real goal, built with your AI, that actually fits your life. A plan built around your situation, your constraints, and what’s gone wrong before.
The method has three steps. None of them require any technical skill. All of them work in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or whatever AI you already use.
Step 1. The Interview: let AI figure out what you actually want
The first step towards reaching your goals is the exact same whether you use AI or not: make sure you have defined what success actually looks like.
Most of us are surprisingly bad at defining what it is that we actually want out of life.
We say “I want to get in shape” when the real goal is “I want to keep up with my kids without getting winded.” We say “I need to fix my finances” when the real issue is “I have no idea where my money goes, and it stresses me out every night.”
This is the first thing that an expert coach does for you. They work with you to define what you actually want, what success looks like, and the things that are standing in the way of you getting there.
Part of why that works is simple: you can’t really interview yourself. You already know your own answers, or you think you do. It takes someone else asking, and following up on what you say, to surface the things you’ve never quite put into words.
To get AI’s help reaching your goals, you have to give it your context. And you have to make sure that context is an accurate reflection of your situation and what you actually want.
The interview gives you exactly that, on demand. And it works with anything, whether that’s a goal in your personal life like getting in better shape, or a goal in your professional life like getting a promotion.
Open your AI and paste this:
I want your help with a goal: [describe it in one sentence]. Before you give me any advice, interview me about it. Ask me one question at a time. Cover: why this matters to me right now, what I’ve already tried, what got in the way before, what my real constraints are (time, money, energy), and what success would actually look like in my day-to-day life. Keep going until you genuinely understand my situation. Then summarize what you heard in a short “here’s what I’m hearing” playback, and ask me if you got it right.
Then just answer honestly, one question at a time.
Two things will happen. First, somewhere in the middle, the AI will ask you something you hadn’t asked yourself. That question is usually where the real goal is hiding. Second, at the end you’ll get the playback: your own situation, reflected back at you, clearer than you’ve ever said it out loud.
Don’t skip correcting the playback. If it got something wrong, say so. A partner that starts with the wrong picture builds the wrong plan, same as a human advisor would.
Step 2. The Plan: turn what it heard into something you’ll actually do
Once the playback is right, paste this:
Good, you’ve got it. Now turn this into a plan I’ll actually follow. I want: (1) the goal restated in one sentence, in my words; (2) the single most important first action I can take this week, and why that one; (3) a simple weekly rhythm I can sustain, given the constraints I told you about; (4) how we’ll know it’s working within a month; and (5) what’s most likely to knock me off track, based on what I told you, and what we’ll do when it happens. Keep it short enough that I’ll actually read it again.
Look at what comes back and notice what’s different from every generic plan you’ve ever downloaded. It knows what got in your way last time, because you told it. It fits your actual week, because it asked. And it has a “when things go wrong” section built from your own history.
That last part matters more than people expect. Plans don’t fail because they’re wrong. They fail because week two happens. A partner who already knows your failure pattern plans for it.
Push back on anything that doesn’t fit. “I can’t do mornings.” “That budget line is unrealistic.” Every correction makes the plan more yours and the partnership stronger.
Step 3. The Check-in: where goals actually get reached
Here’s the step almost everyone skips, and it’s the one that separates people who reach their goals from people who just write them down.
Goals aren’t reached at planning time. They’re reached in the boring weeks after, when something worked, something didn’t, and the plan needs to adjust. That’s what a real partner is for.
So once a week (or whenever something meaningful happens), come back and use the check-in line:
Check-in on my goal: here’s what happened since last time: [what you did, what worked, what didn’t, what surprised you]. Update your picture of my situation, tell me what you’d adjust in the plan, and give me this week’s most important action.
That’s it. Interview once. Plan once. Check in weekly. You now have the thing that used to cost hundreds of dollars an hour: an expert who knows your situation, builds around your life, and adjusts as you go.
The catch
Try to run this method for a few weeks in a regular chat tool and you’ll hit a wall. It’s not that the method stops working. It’s a detail that’s easy to miss at first: the AI doesn’t remember any of it.
That brilliant interview? Gone when the conversation ends. The plan with your constraints baked in? Scrolled away somewhere in your chat history. Come back for your week-three check-in and you’re introducing yourself again, or hunting for the old thread, or pasting summaries around like sticky notes.
You can work around it for a while. People do. But notice what’s happening: the most valuable thing the partnership produces (an AI that genuinely knows you, getting more useful every single week) keeps evaporating, and you keep rebuilding it by hand.
Which raises the question the next lesson answers: if that accumulated understanding of you is where all the value lives… where should it live, and who should own it?
Next: Lesson 3 — Own Your AI: Make the Benefits Compound for You.
— Dave
Part of the free course How to Partner with AI to Define & Reach Your Goals. Questions about this lesson? Reply below — I answer.