Every podcaster needs to sound confident because they are marketing their show using their voice. Having a “fake it till you make it” attitude can work, but only to a certain degree. Confidence Queen Chelsea Lee Rock’s solution is to find a confidence booster that will help you find the power to get your message gets across. To do this, think about the positive things that you like about yourself and build on that. Instead of saying “This is stupid,” say “This is brilliant!” Chelsea shares her experiences and insights using her voice as a career to help you build professional techniques as a podcaster.

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We’ve got someone who is a voice talent, among other things, but someone who is hired as a voice talent for audio books, commercials, advertisements and even for potential voiceovers for podcast. Chelsea Lee Rock, I met her at a Forbes Riley event. In addition to being a voice talent, she is a mindset coach and she works on overcoming barriers that are confidence-related. She is known as The Confidence Queen and she believes that confidence is sexy. I thought it was great because I believe that confidence and voice are connected. Your voice exudes confidence or it doesn’t. That is a critical factor in becoming a podcast host. You have to find that voice. It isn’t just about finding what you want to talk about and how you want to talk about it, so the mechanics of all of that, but it is also becoming who you are. It’s authentically expressing that and so a lot of that comes over. Some of this is learned, like voice talent. She’s learned to put on a persona and learned how to have a more entertaining voice and having a quality to it. I was hoping she would share some of those things with us. There’s also a place where you do want professional voices. We recommend professional intros. In her case, she highly recommends professional audible books and there’s a reason for that. I definitely want her to address that. Most of the time it’s advisable, as an author, to not be the voice reading your audio book. There are some exceptions to it and we’re going to talk about one of those. In general, it does make sense, producing the most professional product you can. This isn’t to disrespect authors who are great authors and have a great book that’s going to be a great audio book, but just because you can do it doesn’t always mean you should. That’s why we wanted to bring Chelsea Lee Rock on the show so we could talk about all things voice and confidence.

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Finding Your Confidence, Finding Your Voice with Chelsea Lee Rock

Chelsea, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me on here.

We don’t get to talk to a lot of voice talent. We have voiceover artists that we hire for a lot of our podcasters and they all do it, but it’s a skill set that people are very curious about, what makes a great voice talent and all those things. I invited you on to talk about that. You’ve got such a great story and so many more things I want to address too. Let’s get that business chunk out of the way, how did you become a voice talent?

When I was little, I used to listen to this show called Adventures in Odyssey. I don’t know if you remember. It was a ‘90s radio show. It was so fascinating to me because this woman who was a sixteen-year-old girl in the show was this woman who was 45. Here I am ten years old and I’m like, “I don’t understand how this works.” It was so fascinating. I got to go to the set and see what they did and the mechanics behind it, what went into becoming a voice talent and it fascinated me. I ended up taking my first voiceover class when I was twenty. I did an independent film right away. I started getting some work and it was great. I realized I loved it. I loved creating a character inside the booth and being as different and unique as you would like to create that voice that you’re looking for.

Obviously, we want our podcast hosts to be authentically them and we’re going to talk about how you are authentically you. That’s interesting though because at some point you want the voiceover to have a persona, to have a command or give a brand connection and that requires a character.

That’s the cool thing about voice acting versus theatrical or commercial acting, is that it’s about creating a character from what you’re seeing on paper in the sense that you have to create a voice that gives so much inflection or so much different dialect rather than playing off another actor as much as you would do in some other film or TV.

You do a lot of voiceover for books, you do Audible.com type stuff. Do they hire you straight from Audible or you just happen to be a voice talent that is on a lot of audio books?

Audible actually works with several different companies. It’s usually publishing companies that will hire you or PR companies like Random House Publishing and things like that. I work for several publishing companies and do basically an audition. I’ve done over 30 books. It’s on Audible, iTunes, Amazon and all of those. I’ve done everything from self-help books to children’s books to romance novels. It’s interesting how different of a market it is because you’re marketing yourself amongst so many other people and people have to pick you for your voice.

There’s this argument in the industry about whether or not as an author, you should be the voice talent for your book or not. Hillary Clinton’s book is the prime case of where she probably shouldn’t have done that and should have hired a voice artist. It just didn’t work as well. You wonder whether or not authors should think more clearly about this, that this is important. It’s a theatric presentation of your brand.

It’s funny you mentioned that because I was listening to a book on Audible and the woman who was doing the voice, I was thinking, “She’s an interesting hire. I wouldn’t have hired her to do this book. I don’t find her to be the best.” The inflection was different and it felt like she was reading it. Then I find out that the author was the one who voiced her own book and I was like, “That makes sense,” because it’s a great book, a great author, however in my opinion, it was not the best voice read.

That’s one of those things like when you see a television commercial with the owner of the business who wants to be the face of it and maybe shouldn’t be. You see that a lot in car dealerships or mattress companies and other things. I wanted to bring you here because of that. There’s a place for you to be yourself and as a podcast host, the podcast host should be themselves. Introducing yourself, maybe doing your book, these are not necessarily the ideal places for you to be your own brand. I wanted to bring out that viewpoint on it. Have you had those discussions when people are saying, “We’re going to hire you to do our book or do a voiceover for our commercial and we want you to be this?” Do they give you good guidelines or is it you do the interpretation when you audition?

I feel it depends on who you’re speaking with. Some people, you’ll be talking with rights producers and then you’ll be talking with assistants and then some will just hire you as freelance for their book. When it’s an author, they do tend to have their own way of doing things. They want a specific thing for their book. They want it to come out in a very niched way that they see it. The only thing about that is a lot of the times, I’m like, “That’s not going to work for the audience you’re going for.” It could depend. In my opinion, if I were not a voiceover artist, I would not suggest people do their own books because it could turn someone off if they’re listening to it via Audible or something. I seriously question turning off the book because, while the content was amazing, I thought the author herself should not have read the book.

That’s so important to think about and you understand and that’s what’s so critical here. Whether you’re making a show for podcasts and podcast listeners who are binge listeners, avid podcasts, Audible is the same way. There are a lot of listeners there who are avid fans and they’re looking for certain production qualities to the books that they’re looking for and all of those things and because you’ve done so many, you have a good sense of that. It makes sense to make a professional hire.

I also have co-authored a book and I’m writing my own book. I’ll voice my own book just because I want to and I do that. I thought about it, I was like, “Who’s going to voice my own book? I guess I’ll do it myself, that makes sense.” You want to find somebody that has the ability to convey the message that you want to get across, but also to attract the audience and the listeners.

Make it entertaining. Just because you could do it yourself, doesn’t mean you should. You’re an exception because obviously you’re doing this professionally. I also think that there’s an amount of credibility and I want to talk about that a little bit. When you announce yourself at the beginning of your podcast and there’s no introduction that comes from a third party, you miss out on that formal authority passing that happens. The same thing goes in a book. You must be a better author if you can afford a voiceover talent. You must be more successful. There is an amount of that authority and credibility that happens as well.

A lot of people, it’s like their baby. They want it to be great. When you hire someone to do a film, the screenplay writer or the person who wrote the story, they have an idea of what they’re looking for, what the character is. Sometimes that happens with authors as well. They want this character to be a certain specific typecast. If that’s not what they’re looking for, then that’s not what they’re looking for.

Let’s talk a little bit about you, Chelsea. You have such an interesting background and you’re known as The Confidence Queen and I love that. Putting yourself out there and being a podcast host like we are and most of our listeners are, it takes a lot of confidence. I find that one of the big barriers when someone says, ” I want to podcast,” is their confidence. Tell me a little bit about how you found you had all this confidence.

 

The Confidence Queen is my coaching business that I’m doing. I branded myself years ago as a public figure doing social media. I had a very big presence on social media and was influencing and things like that. People started coming to me for advice. They started saying I was inspirational. I thought, “I want to use this somehow.” I would love to help women and men, but mostly women who are looking for an outlet to create their own voice or to be heard or to feel confident in something they’re doing in life, whether that’s business or love. I kept thinking like, “What can I do? How do I branch this out? How do I give this a name?” It came to me one day. I was like, “I like the word queen.” Women should stand in their power and be these strong, beautiful women and that comes from being a queen and then I thought confidence. I kept just going back and forth with girly words that I liked, like glitter and sparkle. The Confidence Queen came to me one day. I wrote it down and I really liked it. What came from that for me was I was started out as actually an autoimmune expert. I helped women who were struggling with autoimmune diseases.

Because you suffered yourself?

I did, yes. I had Hashimoto’s disease. That was such an interesting journey for me because I learned so many things. I have a background in personal training and nutrition. I was a former fitness model and I had no problems getting in shape. Then all of a sudden, I get this disease and I have no idea how to lose weight anymore because my body is attacking itself. I started out helping women with that and became an expert in that field. Then I realized, “What does autoimmune stem from?” Some of it is genetic and most of it is stress and environment. Then I started working with stress and disorders that come from stressful things. Then I branched out into, “How do I help overall women to not even feel distress?” It just kept going farther and deeper into like, “How does this stem into what it becomes?” What it comes from is not feeling like you are worth something, not feeling like you’re confident enough to move forward. People often get stuck and feel these barriers in their lives and they think, “This is just the way I am. There’s no way I can move past this.”

I see this lot on the internet and other places, whether it’s with coaches and with Facebook posts and all of these things. There’s this dichotomy between being authentic and having real confidence and having this fake front, this faux front of, “I’m acting confident because if I act it, maybe I’ll believe it.” How do you address that in your coaching for people? I do hear that a lot. It’s like, “If I keep saying it, I’m going to believe it,” but deep down inside, they don’t and it does come across.

One of the big things is people think they pick a certain word. It’s like an affirmation, like, “I am beautiful.” If it doesn’t resonate with you, then it’s not going to work for you. That’s what people do is they have this fake it until you make it attitude, which is fine on some levels but what ends up happening is you get into this thought of like, “Somebody else said they’re beautiful. They’re confident. I look up to them. They’re inspirational, so I’m going to say I’m beautiful too and it’s going to work for me.” What ends up happening is that that word may not mean anything to you deep down in your subconscious. I would think of a polarity word. For example, if a limiting belief you may have is that you’re stupid or that I’m stupid, then a polarity might be, I’m brilliant or I’m intelligent or intellectual. Everybody has different words that trigger them. You could have a word that triggers you that doesn’t trigger me. When people use the same word in affirmations, thinking that they’ll exude this confidence, it has to be something that resonates with them. It can’t be something that goes along with the crowd or with what everyone’s doing because that’s not going to work for you because that’s not who you are authentically, who you are feeling inside.

I’m a lot farther along in my career than most people and I always keep saying this, like, “We’ve been doing this a lot longer than I look,” and you sit back and you go, “No matter how much education or experience or all of those things, some of us are always newbies at something.” You get into this place where you can have your confidence shaken at any point. If you look at it from that deep perspective of it’s the same thing repeating over and over and over again for me, it is the same confidence shaker, it’s just in a different format now. When you can dial that in and then find that way to counteract it, to rebuild it, to sit in front of the microphone and say, “I’m a voice of value,” might be your particular resident mantra, affirmation, or whatever you want to call it, when you do that, it negates all those other things. That creates this place at which you become a confidence queen for yourself.

A lot of people think that they have to pick something that goes along with the crowd. For example, if you’re saying like, “I don’t feel good enough,” and then you say something that you think will combat that like, “I am good enough and I should think about how I feel and know that I am accepting and I can do this and I can do that,” that’s all going to come from more negative because it’s not relating to anything.

You can’t have a qualified positive comment about yourself.

It has to be a polarity. If it’s, “If I’m not good enough,” then it’s, “I’m good enough now,” or, “I didn’t feel good enough yesterday, but today I feel good enough and I’m good enough now.”

Other things from your website and the things that I’ve reviewed is you have discovered little ways to find confidence every day, which is critically important. Do you want to talk a little bit about how you do that and how you help your clients do that?

The biggest thing for me is that every single day you’re being thrown a million things. You’ve got so many different influences no matter what you do, family, relationships. What we often do is we feel confident in one area, but we lack confidence in another area. My best suggestion and what I tell a lot of my clients is, think about all the things and all the positive things that you like about yourself and continue to build upon those. For example, if I’m organized, but maybe I’m a little disconnected or scattered somewhere else, then I would focus on, “I’m organized, so how can I make this so I’m organized in the area that I feel scattered?” or, “If I feel confident in my business but I don’t feel confident in a relationship with a man or with a woman, then how do I combine those two?” There are a lot of correlations to business and romantic relationships. Figure out what that missing link is and then allow yourself to even set your alarm. This is a great tool that I’ll share with you and your audience is setting your alarm anytime from let’s say you get up at 7:30, so set an alarm at 8 AM and then set another alarm at 10 AM and then just keep going and set an alarm maybe every two or three hours and have that be some affirmation or mantra. “I am very happy with the way this day is going. I feel confident. I feel strong,” or it could be something that happened that day or something that’s going to happen. It could be anything that could change your whole perspective right there.

One of the things that I was struggling with was feeling too busy for awhile. You have too much going on and you have too many things and you wake up in the morning and you’re like, “There’s no way I can do all this today.” You feel this overwhelm with time. I spent a week where I set out each morning and I said, “I have plenty of time to do everything that I need to do, everything that I want to do,” but I discovered quickly that you have to periodically check in with yourself and say it again. It doesn’t work first thing in the morning because then things happen and it derails you. That’s such a great tip, using an alarm.

It’s feeding into your subconscious. Whether you think about it or not, it’s feeding into, “I heard it once, I’ve heard it twice. Now, I’ve heard it eight times. Now, it’s finally hitting me.” A lot of times, when we have to hear something, six to eight times just for it to register.

When you have confidence, when you’re starting to feel all of that and you authentically believe in yourself and have that confidence level, it shows up differently in your voice. When you’re hesitant about something, it comes through definitely on air. Have you helped other people with voice talent, making sure that they feel confident in how they’re going to speak and how they’re going to talk?

I’ve actually been thinking about creating a course on that for a long time. I have not yet and it’s in the works. That’s something that I feel is powerful and you can apply that to anything. You don’t even have to apply it to voiceover acting. You can apply it to a Toastmasters, public speaking. You can apply it to doing a podcast or emceeing. There are so many little tiny tips and secret little sauces or something that you can figure out, but what it comes down to is, when I was younger and I struggled with that, I used to tell myself, “I have the floor. People want to hear what I have to say and I’m going to project that.” When you say that, it’s like when you go into a room and they tell you in high school or whatever that you’re supposed to envision people in their underwear or whatever that analogy is. It’s like that but in a mental way of, “I have the floor. I’m going to do this and this is going to be great.” If you keep telling yourself that, you’re automatically going to walk out with more confidence than if you were just to go, “I’m not sure about this. I’m nervous but we’re just going to see what happens.”

Most of our listeners are podcasters or aspiring podcasters and they all have very busy lives. They have day jobs or their core business and podcasting is not that for them, it’s a tool they use either as a part of their business or on the side of their business. There are all these distractions and when they have to sit down to podcast, there may be all sorts of distractions and things drawing their attention away. What would you recommend they do in terms of being present in that moment and being able to focus on the podcasting task at hand?

The biggest thing to do is be present in the moment. I know it sounds cheesy and cliché but most people have a hard time doing that. We’re on our phones or we’re distracted by something or we’re thinking, “In twenty minutes, I’ve got to have this call.” We rush through things and you can sense that or feel that through the conversation you’re having. I would say to be very present in that moment and to care and listen to what the other person is saying. When we’re distracted, we miss those little things. We miss those little cues and then that comes off whatever you may be doing, whether that’s as an interviewer or interviewee. It’s important to stay very present and to keep that energy up, to keep that energy strong. It’s like an actor in acting. We always say actors play off other actors, actors react. It’s similar in a sense of I’m reacting to what you’re saying and I’m going to react a different way than if you were giving me a different energy. Give the energy that you want to show up with so that you can get that back.

That energy comes through the microphone right into your ear buds to whoever is listening. I talk with my hands. I move them around because that’s who I am and that energy comes through. It means I occasionally make that nasty sound of hitting the microphone, but it’s who I am and that energy gets expressed. That’s my way of showing up. I definitely think energy and that all makes a huge difference and it does come through, but it’s something that a lot of people struggle with quite honestly. It’s that be there, be in the moment and be attentive and engage with that guest or in our case, we record episodes just the two of us and are co-hosts, we do play off each other. It’s got to be a difficult concept especially for a lot of new podcasters to be authentically you, which we know that podcast listeners definitely want you to be real, but at the same time, be real but maybe you shouldn’t be podcasting if you’re having a bad day. That’s going to come across. I appreciate all the work that you’re doing, helping people get out of their own way. That’s one of the things that happens too often is like we get in our own way. We get in our own spinning minds about what we aren’t. In order to become you and be authentically you, be that confidence queen or that confident woman or man that you want to be, it’s all on you to do that. Don’t you agree?

 

I completely agree. It comes down to finding a word or something that connects with you and then saying it daily. If the word is, “I’m a powerful, strong man or a powerful, strong woman,” then use those words. If they don’t work or click for you, then don’t use them because then it’s like going to the gym and you’re quickly doing a bicep curl that’s a three-pound weight and you’re going quickly through the motion but you’re not actually building any muscle. It’s the same concept with your mind. It’s like bringing exercise into the mind in that way. If you keep telling yourself like, “I’m so beautiful,” but if you don’t feel it, it’s not going to be a word that works for you.

The hardest exercise my life coach ever gave me was mirror affirmation, that point of where you have to look in the mirror and say something nice about yourself every time. At some point I was like, “I’m just going to avoid the freaking mirror,” because I didn’t want to do it anymore. By that being hard and pushing through that, taught me so much about finding what that thing was that was bugging me because it certainly wasn’t staring into my own eyes.

When you do something like that, when you’re in front of the mirror, you have to see your own facial expressions and your own reactions. If you say, “I’m beautiful,” and you feel disgusting, then you’re going to feel disgusting through the mirror. That’s going to show.

You can’t lie to yourself. You think you can, but you really can’t. Thank you so much, Chelsea, for coming on the show and sharing all of your wisdom around confidence and about voice talent as well. Those two things are so tied together and I appreciate you sharing with us.

You are so welcome. Thank you so much for having me on. This was so fun.

Finding Your Confidence, Finding Your Voice – Final Thoughts

That was an interesting interview for me and different than I’m sure it was for you. I’m going to get real with our audience because I’m always trying to be real. We learned early on in podcasting when we were trying to be a little more formulaic or have more of a specific energy or persona at the beginning of our first podcast, it did feel a little contrived. We got some counseling that said, “You need to be more real.” We changed it up and ever since have been more real. I love the dynamic between us being co-hosts because we’re having a conversation with each other and we don’t script this. We outline it or note basically what we want to talk about. One of the things that people don’t understand is that it gives you the opportunity for, one, to do more listening and, one, to be worried about mechanics. Are things recording? Are things happening like this? Did we miss the outro? Do we have the URL down right? There are taking notes. It gives us the opportunity to bounce back and forth and over the time that we’ve been doing this, we have come to this operational process that we use that allows us to bounce back and do that for each other.

When one or the other of us is not available to be recording at the same time, obviously, I’ll record a solo episode, you’ll record a solo episode. It happens quite a bit. Maybe it hasn’t happened as much on Feed Your Brand as it has on our other podcasts, but then you have to do it all. It’s a little more intense. It’s challenging and so we have each other which is a comfort because it means that someone is always listening at all times. As Chelsea pointed out, it’s when you’re caring and you’re listening and you’re not missing cues because you’re distracted, that’s extremely important. That’s one of the things why building your confidence by doing a lot of episodes is important.

I want to talk about confidence because I’m one of these people who may be blissfully ignorant, but I am one of these people that has a lot of confidence. I have no problem getting up on stage. I’m not saying you’re any different, but I have no problem getting up on stage and talking in front of hundreds of people. I have no issue getting on the microphone and start recording. I feel like I am 95% of the time authentically me.

This is one of the things that happened in that conversation is that because we’re doing this, because we have a dynamic between us, when you said, “I’m just one of these really confident people,” and you said with a little aside, “Not that you’re not one,” because you saw the glare across the table. You didn’t hear that but I guarantee you, you felt it.

It’s not that I was taking a cue from you, I wanted you to know that by saying something about myself, I wasn’t trying to, in a backhanded way, say something about you in that moment. I was talking about me. I’m just saying that that’s the kind of thing where you get that dynamic that’s going on that’s working, that has the confidence in how we treat each other and how we treat our guests. All of that bodes well because you feel confident in who you are to begin with. The reason I wanted to say that is I wanted to use this as an example for our audience. If this were a time when you were sick and had laryngitis or something, I don’t know that I would’ve wanted to do this particular interview by myself. I’m not one of these people that ever say affirmations to myself at times like that. It’s not something I do and it’s not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m not saying it doesn’t benefit a whole lot of people, but to me, with this interview, for a bit of it, I was back being a fly on the wall because I don’t relate to some of the things that were discussed with Chelsea as much as perhaps you do.

That’s the challenge as a podcast host. I do this because I consider myself a professional interviewer. I feel like that is the number one job title I have or the number one thing in my job description. I agree with that 100%. You definitely are a professional interviewer, not just because of the podcast, but your Inc. column, you do this a lot. You have a lot more interviews under your belt than I do. I probably do about 30 interviews a month on average. That’s how I feel about it and that’s how I act. Sometimes it’s just interviewing potential clients. There’s a process in that intake, but it is always an interview process whether they realize it or not. It’s not a sales call. It’s an interview on my end. I always look at that as that is my role, is being a professional interviewer. In that process, it’s to get to the essence of what they need, what they can share, what the value is, and then find a way to share that with someone else, to share that with the audience or to share that and execute something, an article or a product. I always look at it as that role. In that professional interview mindset, I have tremendous amount of confidence in what I’ve done because it’s proven itself again and again. It doesn’t mean you always feel that from day one. I have interviewed celebrities where my hands were just shaking like, “Oh my god,” you get a little star-struck. I interviewed Walter O’Brien, with this incredibly high IQ, it was a little intimidating.

It doesn’t mean that your confidence doesn’t get shaken on at times for whatever it is that you might be doing, but you do have to dive deep into it. Whether or not you’re manifesting it, as Chelsea was saying in terms of an affirmation, you do dig deep. It is part of the exercises we learn when we go to speaking school. You learn to stand in your power and hold that confidence in your level. Whether you grip your fist and you stand in a power position, whatever it is that you have to do to psych yourself up to doing something is important. I find that it’s also important as a transition to be able to do that and reset into the mindset that you need to, to be present when you’re doing an interview. How do you put out all that noise that’s going on, the dings from your phone and the interruptions that are happening and how do you not look at your computer because you are recording? How do you not see all the little notifications that pop up? These things happen and they do come across when you’re interviewing. They do come across to your listeners. In our case, we’ve had it happen where we literally have an argument right before we go on the air and how do you shift out of that? It requires you to have some mechanism to support that. For me, that has always been like a “wipe the slate clean and reset yourself.” That’s how I have always looked at it and it is important. People need that. You have to clear that because it distracts the confidence in the message that you’re sending.

I wholeheartedly agree that your confidence, your enthusiasm, your grasp of what you want to talk about in the particular interview, that all comes across. I always look at it as three-fold. It’s one thing to have a nice mechanism and a way at which you remind yourself of how you’re confident, and how you need to be present in this moment and do that. It can be a deep breath. Lots of people take deep breaths. Some people do vocal exercises before they go on their radio show. I’ve seen people do that. Whatever that thing is that you need to do, you should find it. It’s important to shift your mind into that place that you need to be. That’s going to give you confidence right there. The second thing is I always feel confident in my preparation. Even if I didn’t have a ton of time to read everyone’s book, I wish I did, I wish I could read everyone’s book, but sometimes I get an interview and I have only got a day and there’s no way I can do it. I can’t fit it into my schedule. I had this great interview that I did and I couldn’t get his book on Kindle. I would have literally read it that weekend but you had to order the hard copy. I couldn’t get it in time to read it.

You have those things that happen but we have a preparation process. It’s all in our calendar. All the details we need are there. Whether you have a VA that preps you, whatever that is, that makes you feel confident, you have all the information you need right at your fingertips. If you don’t, that’s a first thing we do when we start the interview. Before we start hitting the record button, we confirm the things that are missing. What’s the right URL? Do I have this bio right? Do you want me to call you by this name? You do those things. Check that list off. The third thing is that I feel strongly on a checklist if you need it. We used to have a checklist because you forget to hit record sometimes in the early days. These things happen. That checklist exists for any Brandcasting You client. If for some reason you don’t have that, and everybody should have been provided that checklist, it has evolved over time and changed a little bit, but there is a current one that is in our help resources section if you need that. If they’re not a client, you can have it. We can provide that to anybody. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have this. It’s not a laundry list, but for those that aren’t as techie, sometimes it helps to have that little list and go, “Yeah, I did that. Yeah, I checked that.” Then eventually, you won’t need it anymore. Professional pilots have a checklist. They hardly need it but they still do it. It is based on our recommended procedures and process for recording a podcast interview. Other people do it a little differently and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that but the fundamentals are there and it would be helpful for you. You can reset it for yourself. When you have those mechanisms in place, they help give you that good foundation for the confidence and then the more you do it, the more confident you will be.

What I would like to add to that is, you, thank goodness, are a hyper-organized person and our systems are set up, so we are well-prepared for all our interviews. If I were doing this alone and have never met you, I would probably not be near as organized. What I’m trying to get to is there’s something that’s very good about that. When you have a guest and they have certain topics that they’re known for and are experts in, we actually always ask for potential topics of discussion from their perspective. Obviously, we research our own and have our own. We ask them to provide from their perspective, what some good topics of discussion would be based on their experience or based on what will help their business the most. They’re on the show for a reason. They want to get publicity or they have something they’re promoting or whatever. In Chelsea’s case, she’s doing these virtual summits which are fantastic. There are ways to get in touch with those kinds of things but it’s important to ask them.

 

Here’s what I like about podcast interviewing. This is what gets me charged and what excites me about doing it all the time. It’s not that preparation isn’t important, it is. Some podcast guests have been guests on dozens of podcasts and if everybody’s talking about the same thing, every one of those, you could have a bunch of your listeners say, “I’ve heard that person before. I know that’s pretty much going to be the same thing.” I like the experience of having that discussion with the guest and learning things and then asking the question that I could never have prepared for that’s in the moment, digs a little deeper or gets that some other more interesting facet, something I read into it on the fly. It is winging it to an extent, but it’s like in informed I would think more intelligent winging it that isn’t meant to be off the cuff. “I don’t need to prepare, I don’t need to rehearse, I’m good at this, I’m just going to wing it.” That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about something that you can’t possibly prepare for and being able to recognize that and go with it and get something unique out of this guest that maybe not every other interviewer does. That’s what I have found. That’s the most important part of it and I want to be clear with people that the organization, the way that we use this, it is not time-consuming. The guest does all of that work. They enter all their information. They do the majority of it. You have to click on it and look at it. It doesn’t take a tremendous amount of time on your end. If you want to go deeper, you do. I make it a habit of 24 hours ahead of time or sometimes I’ll do it a week ahead of time. It depends on who it is that we’re interviewing. At least 24 hours, I click the links and double-check everything, make sure I’ve got it and spend ten to fifteen minutes thinking about the angle of the show, what she or he has put as their topics, and thinking about making sure what I want the listeners to get the most out of it.

When I sit in that place of what do I want you to hear, what do I want to make sure we get to, what do I want to make sure that we share? I’ve been on shows and stuff goes all over the place. It deviates and they’re like tangent after tangent after tangent and while they cover lots of great things and there’s inspiration in there and/or there are the ones that just takes you off question after question after question that are all like, “What’s your origin and what’s your inspirational story?” and all of those things, interesting but not always as great as a listener. The shows that have longevity are always thinking about what’s in it for the listener. That’s where I put my job as an interviewer. My number one role is to make sure that I get to those questions that you wished you had asked that provide value and that serve. In that confidence of doing that, you are always sitting in there and saying, “I am providing value,” right before I sit down to the mic because I know I put that work in beforehand. That’s my way of giving my own confidence to those questions and to how I treat my guests. I want everybody to be clear though, that it’s not more work and it certainly doesn’t need to be. Some people like to do a whole lot more research and preparation and if you have the time to do that and the interest, by all means do that. It doesn’t have to be that way for you to provide that value and serve.

I invite you all to connect with Chelsea Lee Rock and hear what she has to say and explore what The Confidence Queen has to offer on her website. We will also connect with you on Facebook @FeedYourBrand. I hope you all enjoyed that. We will be back next time. This has been Tom and Tracy on Feed Your Brand.

Important Links

• Chelsea Lee Rock
• Audible.com
• Chelsea’s coaching business
• Tracy’s Inc. column

About Chelsea Lee Rock

Chelsea Lee Rock is a mindset coach specializing in helping women overcome the barriers in their lives through tools that provide you a different experience than you’ve had before.

She has also created a program that helps women find their confidence, get healthy and gain their life back in her “Confidence is SEXY course”

Professionally, she has been in film and tv for 6 years and in voice acting for 4 years. She has been featured in magazines such as Magic Image Hollywood Magazine, American Fitness, FINE magazine, and many more.

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