How I Found My Own Teaching Structure Using NotebookLM

Amy Westlake
Jul 28
3 min read

Situation

I've made enough demo videos of AI use cases that I should have had a script format by now. I didn't. Every time I sat down to create a new video, I just started talking rather than writing a script. That meant each video was unique and a blank slate. No template. No starting point. Just whatever felt right that day. I had a suspicion there was a pattern underneath all of it, in how I explain things, but I couldn't have told you what it was if you'd asked me directly.

The AI Move

I had fifteen of these demo videos already. I transcribed all fifteen and loaded them into NotebookLM. I don't have the exact prompt anymore, but it was something close to this:

Attached are transcripts of AI use case videos I've previously created. I'd like to see if if there is any kind of consistent structure or process I follow that could be used to create additional videos and a standard video script template. Can you look across these and suggest a reusable script template I can use for future videos?

I genuinely didn't know if there was anything in there. I wasn't even sure I'd taught the same way twice.

The Shift

It came back with six parts.

Open with the friction, not the tool.
Give a quick orientation to what the viewer's about to see.
Show the actual work happening live, the messy parts included.
Drop one honest aside when the moment earns it, not on a schedule.
Translate the specific example into the viewer's version of the same problem.
Then stop. No summary, no explaining what they just watched.

I read that list and thought, oh my gosh, that is actually what I do. I had never written any of it down. I had never sat down and decided to teach that way on purpose. It was just how I did it, every time, without noticing I was doing it the same way twice.

The Pattern

You already have a method. You just haven't seen it from outside yourself. I couldn't have described my own structure if you'd asked me straight out, because I was always standing inside it while I used it. It took feeding fifteen examples of my own behavior into something that had no attachment to how I thought I taught, no memory of what I'd told myself about my own style, to see it plainly.

The Implication

If you've done something more than a handful of times, even something small, there's a decent chance there's a pattern in there you haven't named. Transcribe a few instances of it. Load them somewhere that can read across all of them at once. Ask what's consistent. The answer might already be sitting in how you work. You've just never had it handed back to you.

What I'm Testing Next

I use the six-part structure now for all videos. That it resonates with other people is its own kind of proof I wasn't imagining it. What I'm still testing is whether the shape holds up in other kinds of presentations such as a program update. It probably has its own version of live and honest, the part where you say what actually happened instead of what was supposed to happen. I don't know yet if that translates. I'm going to try it on the next one and see.