Tell it about your practice

Your agent starts every single run knowing nothing whatsoever. It has no memory of yesterday, no idea who you are, and no idea who you work with. Whatever it knows, it knows because you wrote it down somewhere it can read.

Skip this lesson and you will still get an agent working in lesson 6. It will hand you competent, generic work for a competent, generic practice, and you will rewrite every line before you can use any of it, until the morning you stop opening it at all.

The thing that makes this worth thirty minutes

An assistant who has never met you produces work for somebody else's business. That has nothing to do with AI. It is equally true of a human assistant on their first morning, and the fix is the same one it has always been, which is to brief them properly, once.

The difference is that this assistant is on its first morning every single time it runs. Nothing carries over, so every run starts from zero.

Which leaves you two options. Write your practice down once, in one place, or explain it again inside every agent you ever build. The second one holds up fine until there are four agents, each carrying a slightly different version of your business, and you raise your prices and have to go find all four.

What goes in it

The file is already in your folder with five headings and an example under each one. Your job is to fill in what you know today.

Section 2 is where the time goes, and it is the one worth being uncomfortably specific in. "Women in midlife" describes about forty million people and hands an agent nothing to work with. "People in perimenopause who have been told their labs are normal and still feel awful, most of whom found me after a year of trying to figure it out on their own" gives it somebody to write to.

How to write it so it is worth having

Ordinary language beats professional language here, every time. Write it the way you would say it to a colleague over coffee, and leave the asides in. The parts where you sound most like yourself are the parts that make your agent's output sound like you, and a polished paragraph of positioning copy gives an agent almost nothing to work with. (If you catch yourself typing "empowering people to reclaim their vitality," put the keyboard down and say the sentence out loud instead.)

Half-filled beats blank, and it always will. A file with two good sections and three empty ones is already better than nothing, and it gets sharper every time you touch it.

Write what is true today, rather than what you are hoping for. The group program you have been circling for months belongs in section 4, as something you are building. List it in section 3 as an offer and your agent will start pointing clients at something that does not exist yet.

Come back to it. Prices change, offers get retired, the season moves. This is the file you edit when that happens, and editing in one place is the entire reason it exists.

When two places disagree, say which one wins

The same fact lives in more than one place in your practice, and the places do not always

agree. A price sits on your website, in the PDF you send out, and in the sentence you say on

a call. Somebody's email address is in your booking system, on your newsletter list, and at

the bottom of the thread where they told you it had changed. How many sessions somebody has

left is in Practice Better and also in the spreadsheet you actually look at.

Most days this costs you nothing, because you know which one to believe. You know the

spreadsheet is current and the website has been nine months out of date since the spring.

Your agent has no way of knowing any of that, and it will never think to ask. Give it two

answers and it picks one, on grounds you will never see. The first client quoted last year's

price is how most people find out.

So write the ruling down, one line per kind of fact.

Then the instruction that matters more than the list itself. **When two places disagree, it

tells you and it stops.** Two answers usually means something changed and only got written

down once, which is the exact thing you want to hear about. An agent that settles it on its own,

in favor of whichever file it happened to open first, has made a decision you had no idea was

being made, and you find out weeks later, from a client, in a message that starts "I thought

you said".

⚠️ What must never go in it

This file gets pasted into an AI's instructions, and later it gets stored inside your agents. Assume it leaves your laptop, because it does.

• No client names, and no client health information. None at all, and that includes initials and "my client with the thyroid thing." This file describes your practice, and never a person in it.
• No passwords, keys, or logins. Those live in the password manager from lesson 4 and nowhere else. A key sitting in a context file is a key sitting inside every agent you build.
• Nothing you would be uncomfortable having read back to you. That is a reasonable rule of thumb for anything that leaves your machine.

None of that is a reason to be cagey about your own business. Your practice details are exactly what makes this file useful. It is specifically other people's information that stays out.

If you would rather be interviewed than stare at five blank headings

Five empty sections is the slow way to do this, and a blank page is where people put this off for a week.

There is another way, which is to open a chat with Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to interview you about your practice, one question at a time, then write the file up at the end. Reacting to a question is faster than inventing an answer from nothing.

Open the interview prompt and it does exactly that. It follows the same rules as the one in lesson 6, which are worth stating out loud, because they are what make it useful instead of exhausting.

• One question at a time, never a list of eight
• It guesses where it reasonably can and lets you correct it, because reacting is faster than producing
• It pushes back when an answer is too vague to be worth anything, particularly in section 2
• It stops when it has enough, instead of working through a form

And it must never invent a detail about your practice. When it does not know, it asks you or it leaves the line blank. A confidently invented price is worse than an empty section, because an empty section is obvious and an invented one reads exactly like the truth.

Where this file goes from here

Lesson 6 is where it gets used for the first time. Every agent's job description has a section reading what it needs to know about my practice, and the answer is a slice of this file.

A slice of it, deliberately. Your follow-up agent needs to know who you serve and what you offer. It has no use for your pricing philosophy or what you are building this season. Every agent gets the part of this file its own job actually touches, which keeps its output narrow and keeps each run cheap.

Handing it to Claude or ChatGPT

The file works with both, and you hand it over yourself in either one. Two ways, and the second one is worth the extra two minutes.

• Quick version. Paste the contents of the file at the top of a chat, before your question. Works immediately, and you redo it in every new chat.
• The one that sticks. Create a Project. In Claude, add CLAUDE.md to the project's files. In ChatGPT, paste the file into the project's instructions. Every chat inside that Project then starts knowing your practice, without you pasting anything.

If you use both, or neither. Keep the file exactly as it is. Nothing in this course depends on which chat you prefer, because your agents get the slice of it you paste into their job description, and they could not care less where else it has been.

✅ You now have

• A written description of your practice, in your own words, in one place
• Sections 1 through 4 filled in well enough to brief an agent
• One file to edit when something about the business changes, instead of four agents to hunt down
• Ready for lesson 4, which sets up somewhere safe for the keys that start arriving in lesson 5
• Told me how this lesson went in the VIP chat, especially if any part of it was confusing. That is the only way it gets fixed

If you get stuck

If yours does not look like any of that, drop it in the chat and I will answer you there.