Knowing What You Know About Me — The Personalization Prompt

The Insight

Ri Ca shared a prompting technique from marketing strategist Rich Schefren:

“Rich Schefren taught me to ask ‘knowing what you know about me…’”

This phrase — “knowing what you know about me” — is a simple but powerful framing that shifts the AI’s response mode. Instead of treating the question as a generic query, it instructs the model to contextualize its answer specifically against everything the current conversation (or ongoing relationship) has established about you: your goals, constraints, style, prior work, known biases, and current priorities.

Why It Matters

Most prompts treat the AI as a general expert. This prompt treats it as a specific advisor who has been paying attention. The difference in output quality can be dramatic — the model moves from advice that would work for anyone to advice that accounts for the specific situation of this person.

It’s particularly powerful when used in ongoing Claude projects or memory-enabled conversations where context has genuinely accumulated. The model can draw on prior discussions, known preferences, and past decisions to generate advice that would be impossible from a cold start.

The Pattern

"Knowing what you know about me, [question or request]"

Variants:

• “Knowing what you know about my business, what’s the highest-leverage action I’m not taking?”
• “Knowing what you know about how I think, what’s the blind spot in this plan?”
• “Knowing what you know about my clients, what would surprise them most about this offer?”

When It Works Best

This technique has the most impact when:

1. You’ve had an extended conversation establishing context (goals, constraints, personality)
2. You’re using Claude Projects with accumulated memory
3. You’ve shared a bio, profile, or prior work earlier in the session
4. You’re using a GEARS ontology or similar identity document

When context is thin, it still works — it signals to the model that you want a contextualized answer, which prompts it to ask clarifying questions or make its assumptions explicit.

Connection to PowerUp Themes

This connects to Insight - Your AI Conversation History Is a Knowledge Asset Worth Mining: the value of accumulated conversation history isn’t just for retrieval — it’s for personalized synthesis. The “knowing what you know about me” prompt is the interface that unlocks that accumulated context on demand.

It also supports the Insight - Metacognition in AI Opens a New Prompting Frontier direction: prompts that instruct the model about how to use its context, not just what to answer.

Application for Coaches

• Use this as the opening frame for any strategic planning conversation: “Knowing what you know about my business from our prior sessions, help me think through…”
• Teach clients to use it once they’ve built an AI relationship with context: it’s the moment the tool stops feeling like a search engine and starts feeling like a thinking partner
• In client intake workflows, it can be the bridge: “I’ve uploaded the client profile. Knowing what you know about this person, what questions should I be asking in the first session?”