At some point in our podcasting journey, we stumble upon some creative blocks that often keep us stuck from producing at our best. These blocks could happen at the beginning of your journey or in the middle. Either way, they disrupt our flow, pulling us out of that momentum, and, worse comes to worst, podfading happens. The good thing is you’re not alone in feeling these things. Tom Hazzard and Tracy Hazzard help you in this episode. Together, they discuss the top three blocks that are common among podcasters and how you can remove them so you can get your show back in the flow. They dive deep into the importance of a collaborative environment, having a system process in place, and learning to believe in yourself. Join this insightful conversation and reclaim that creative flow back into your show!

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Removing Your Podcast Creative Blocks Helps Get Your Show In The Flow

In this episode, we’re going to have some fun talking about a topic that is very important and everyone is going to experience it, at some point, in their podcasting journey. Some of them, in the beginning, upfront, and others will experience it after they’ve been podcasting for a few years at different times. Tracy, why don’t you help share with our audience what we’re going to talk about?

We’re talking about removing your podcast creative blocks to help get your show in the flow. Sometimes, in the beginning, you need to get into that flow of things, and sometimes you lose your flow. This is how pod fading happens. You can fall apart at this. Creative blocks are something we know well. We went to art school and creativity is a part of everything we do. This is funny because we were having this conversation about it.

I was evaluating our creative director from an employee standpoint. Not that I’m going to out his review here or anything like that, but some people have the belief system and better times of day, year, and processes when they’re more creative than others. They use that but they’re like, “I’m not in the mood to write. I’m not in the mood to do a podcast.” We don’t do that. We don’t have that as a part of our process. We can pretty much turn creativity on like a faucet. Would that be accurate, Tom?

That is accurate. I would tend to say it a different way. I find creativity is compulsive. I have trouble shutting it off.

That’s probably more the case. From a creativity standpoint, that’s always moving behind the scenes and happening but we can’t turn the flow on faster.

I’m not trying to say we are prolific in this way in terms of creativity. We come up with blocks too. Normally, we plan these topics for our episodes out at least a week or more in advance so our social media team can do some prep. A little bit of peek-behind-the-curtain for those of you reading is that we didn’t prepare this one very far ahead of time. We had a little bit of a block coming, like, “What are we going to talk about this week?” We didn’t have that out there. It’s funny that we’re talking about creative blocks after we had a minor one. It didn’t take very long. It was a day in terms of total time put into it. It was an hour or two of a block and that was it.

 

 

There wasn’t a block, but there was a failure in work habits. This is something that goes around everything. We’re going to talk about the three top blocks that we see pretty consistently or the most common ones. The reality is that if you don’t get your work or your personal habits aligned, or they’re not working for you, it complicates everything. I was trying to stay out of it. Normally, I push this process through for you, the team, and everything and keeps this on schedule, but I had such a busy last couple of months that I thought I was going to take a step back and see if I could get the team to take it over.

The reality is that they got themselves all behind. Part of it was that they got behind trying to get input from you as well. They don’t push you as much as I do, like, “Tom, sit down. We’re going to brainstorm the topics.” I make it happen, but maybe the team doesn’t feel as comfortable with pushing their boss. We need to get them more comfortable that they’re responsible for delivering something and that you are the holdup that they got to make it happen.

In all fairness, individuals on the team reached out to me and said, “What are you thinking of some upcoming good topics?” I’ve been so darn busy. One of the things about creative blocks and being creative in general is that we have trouble turning them off most of the time, especially when you’re a business manager managing creative people.

If you have an expectation that you’re going to sit down at your desk and be creative because you’re paying the employee, and you’re going to do it, that’s the worst thing you can do for someone with a job that’s in a creative field. You cannot turn it on like a faucet. That happened to me a little bit as I was thinking through, like, “We could talk about this and that,” but I was so busy. I was forced to sit down and come up with a topic, but like, “That didn’t work too well for me this week.”

I also think that part of it is that if you get yourself into this place where you’re not collaborating and it’s all on you, that can be harder. We have the benefit of having each other. When one isn’t quite as creative or engaged at the moment, the idea is that the other can spur that on. Creativity works well when you have that collaborative environment and brainstorming to think about it. For those of you who have a team and expect your team to do all the hard work and that you are not involved in the process, this can be a recipe for failure.

What happens when your team member gets sick? This is how you also get behind. You do have to participate in the process. That’s critically important. That’s what happened to us. Your work and personal habits have to work together to make this happen. That means that you might need to put in a routine, a system, and maybe you also need to build, for some of you, spontaneity into the process. Honestly, as a creative person, I don’t like spontaneity. I need a schedule because so many of our systems around it rely on that schedule of it.

 

 

While I do want to have spontaneity brainstorming, that time for spontaneity is scheduled in our program. I know that sounds counterintuitive to some of you, but some of you require that structure. If you do require it, make it happen. If you don’t, you’ve got to leave open space. That’s what doesn’t happen. Tom doesn’t have enough open space in his schedule where his brain can be free to think, which can be counterproductive to the creative process, brainstorming topic ideas, or whatever that might be. You’re not leaving space for that. You may need to schedule an open space in order to allow spontaneity to occur.

I experienced this with our creative director who I needed to come up with copy for a webpage, and I needed to give him the time and space to do it. When he came back with it, it was fantastic. You can’t force that. You got to give it time and foster it.

You also have to stay engaged and involved in it. If he couldn’t have enough of your time to have conversations, he’s not going to be able to do the job he needs to do to come up with the idea. It also has to do with the fact that you can’t drop this on someone’s lap and say, “Go ahead and come up with the ideas,” and not allow them to have access to you and in conversation to be able to make sure that those ideas are aligned with your business, goals, and those things. When those things happen, then all the flow happens back and forth throughout the company. The other thing that I want to mention here is the system, process, and the things that you might be doing in the case.

Tom is a night person and I’m a morning person so we had to structure. There’s a reason why this call is in the middle of the day. We had to come up with a space that worked for both of us to be able to participate in it at our best. That has to happen for you as well. If you’re not a night person and you’re finally getting to your podcast on your list to record it and it’s at night, it’s not going to happen. This is why we didn’t end up with a show that was pre-recorded for last week.

It was because we got so busy and our days got so packed that the only time left was at the very end of the day, and I could not make an episode at that time. I could have sat down and almost did it, but I had some stuff in the oven. I was baking pumpkin cheesecake for Thanksgiving and it took an hour to cook. I could have sat down at this computer and banged out the episode alone but it wouldn’t have worked because that’s not the right spirit of the episode we wanted to record.

Was that the one we intended to pre-record and livestream? Is that what you’re saying?

 

 

Yes.

We intended to do it but we couldn’t find the right time of day for us both to do it. That experiment never happened. We ended up just going live that day.

We still got it and knew what we were going to record but we couldn’t make it happen because the only time that was allowing us to record, because of our busy schedules, was a time when Tom was not conducive to the creativity necessary to do a good episode, be engaged, and be in the moment of it. Don’t make that as like, “I’m going to put it out the bottom of my list and I’ll get to it when I get to it,” then have that only time that you have free to do it. Be something where you are not going to be in your element or be good with podcasting. That doesn’t work for you. When you’re solo, co-hosting, or doing interviews, those can also be hard because solo is a little easier if you schedule for yourself.

Because you’re not holding yourself accountable for it or co-hosts have issues getting schedules together, you let it slip, so that can be a problem. This is where a system process makes it function. We will show up live for all of you. I know there’s no way Tom will miss an appointment. He might cancel on me as the co-host, but he won’t cancel on you. That’s critically important. Make sure that you force yourself into a system that can make it work for you and force that to happen. This is something that you do need to think of. This is why I highly recommend interviews for those of you starting out because you’re not going to allow the creative blocks to get in your way if you have to show up for someone else.

You will remove that barrier because you have an obligation you’re willing to keep if these blocks are getting in the way. Putting in a system like that or a process of interviews into it, even if you’re going to take them away and you’re not going to do all interview episodes, that’s okay. In the beginning, if that’s what it takes to get you started, put a system and schedule in place to make that happen. Routine versus freedom may be what’s necessary to get rid of a blocker. That’s just it.

To your point, Tracy, the routine is important. I have an episode that I did for a couple of years with someone else as a co-host, not you. We’re both morning people, so we would always have our schedule at 6:00 in the morning. Before we got into the monotony of our days and things got in the way, we would record from 6:00 to 7:00 usually. I’ll tell you that the routine was important to get us together to do it.

 

We always would spend the first fifteen minutes going through creatively what we were inspired by and going to talk about. Sometimes we would plan it ahead or we would do it right then. Sometimes we spend the whole hour working through it and not recording an episode because we’re working through the creativity of what we are going to talk about but we would tear ourselves up with that topic for the next time then.

We have a lot of dissension in the podcasting industry about the importance of using a podcast space or an environment like going out and recording in a space. There’s a reason we abandon that. I don’t criticize studios. Studios have great sound and you’ve got supporters. Maybe you need that or that’s the thing that will give you the appointment that will make it happen but for the most part, what we found is that more people use that as an excuse to not record. That’s why we built the whole system of, “We’re sending you a microphone. All you got to do is plug it in. Your environment is ready to go.” You’re ready to podcast when the moment strikes or when you need to be on.

We did that because we found more people would use that as an excuse that they couldn’t get to their space than they would use it as, “This is a requirement for me, so I will podcast.” There are different personalities. Use the one that makes you work. If you need a space and that’s going to make it happen for you, then go to the space. If you find that that’s not working for you, then plug the darn mic in and get started. Anyway, let’s get to our blockers, Tom.

We have three creative blockers that we see happen again and again. A mental block is the first one that stops you. Usually, it’s overthinking and overanalyzing. Perfectionism gets into this mental block area. It has an emotional component as well, but the mental side is that it must be perfect. I have a mental block on publishing.

Do you think it’s a mental block?

I’m positive it’s a mental one and not an emotional one. I looked this through. I’ve had a lot of publication therapy with my friend, Juliet Clark, one of the best publishers ever. Part of it is that there tends to be a lot of overthinking for those of you who are hefty podcast listeners because your listeners want the perfect experience. You want to create a podcast like somebody else’s. You overthink the pieces and parts that you want. This is where it can happen most often. If this is your issue, recognize it. That’s the first part. It’s like, “I have got a mental block here. What am I going to do to remove that mental block?”

Creativity works really well when you have that collaborative environment. Click To Tweet

My mental block on publishing a book is not the fact that I’m a gigantic reader and I want to put out this amazing book because I read so much that I do know what a good book looks, sounds, and reads like. The issue for me is that the book world isn’t fast enough to keep up with my podcasting information. I can’t publish fast enough to keep up with that. That’s a mental block that I have to get over. I have to get over it and publish the darn thing. There is an update process, even though it’s quite slow in the publication world, but you can’t update your book.

Your concern is that it’s going to age out of freshness or relevance. That’s why you think you have a mental block against the book, whereas in a podcast, if something changes, you get on the mic, talk about it, and publish it within a week or two.

For me, by the time I get the book assembled into pieces and it goes through the editing process, it’s already out of date. When I do my pass through it, I make too many edits again because it’s already out of date for me. That’s an issue. Part of it is that there are ways around it. Remember, we said that there are systems, routines, and processes that you can do to change the way that this works for you to remove this mental block. First off, if it’s like, “What if I went live instead?’ If I’m overthinking the editing of this, what if I just pushed myself into a livestream situation and then allowed editing to happen at a more comfortable pace afterward because I already put it out there? Now maybe I’m not over-editing and overthinking that process.

My mental block is starting to be removed. By bringing in a new perspective on something and a what if this were how it worked, what if this were the way it was, we can help sometimes remove the mental block. This is something that Juliet and I are working on. We’re trying to figure out what if I did it in a different way than put the whole book together, had it go through an editor, come back to me a month later, and then I look at it again, and it’s out of date for me because of the speed of information. What if we had a different process? That’s one of the things we’re looking for. What if there were a different process for you that would help remove this mental block? That’s the perspective you might need.

To that point, Tracy, if what you’re doing isn’t working, it’s time to change what you’re doing and seek another path and process. Change things up when you think about it. If you’re stuck, staying there isn’t going to make it any better.

This is a mindset shift and a new perspective shift. What do you do to shift your mindset? What do you do about this? If you’re in that mental block situation, finding that mindset shift is critically important here. Do you need to meditate? Do you need to get a coach in? When we see someone with a mental block in the setup process not getting started, that’s when they send me or Tom in. They send one of us in to kick butt to basically move you forward and get you out of that block. It’s a whole lot easier to move you out of a mindset or mental block than it is an emotional block, which is the second one that we’re going to talk about because an emotional block has deep roots.

 

Mental blocks are something you can easily move out of. Help yourself get into a new perspective or mindset and get someone to help you with that, whether it helps you figure out a system or a coach that helps you move past whatever is blocking you at this moment in time. Emotional blocks are a lot harder and they’re going to require a lot more shifting.

I agree. What I was going to add to what you did say to an extent is that you can get outside help to move you past a mental block. It could be a sibling, a parent, a friend, or a colleague. Probably, in some ways, any of those would work to some extent. We are here for you. It’s easier for us because we have each other. As you said, if one of us is off, we go talk to the other and get past whatever that mental block is more easily.

In keeping with our episode from last time, our harmony is that when one is up, one is down. You can do that. Get some help in this way. Show up on our coaching calls here every single week or in the live stream. Ask questions and get yourself unstuck from this. This is where we love to put people in the hot seat and help you move through some mental block on something. This is an easier one.

Let’s talk about emotional block because that one is very hard. People get to points in their lives when there are things that emotionally get in the way. I don’t think it’s as easy to get past that.

There’s fear and confidence, and embodiment tends to be procrastination. What I hear a lot is that one side of it is procrastination. Another side of it can be lashing out and anger. We see a lot of that happen. The last version of it is a total retreat. When we see someone go from slowing down to procrastinating, there’s usually an underlying emotional barrier that’s affecting things. Now, sometimes people get busy. That’s number three.

We’ll talk about overwhelm and busyness and things like that. When it’s emotional, that procrastination eventually leads to a total shutdown where they retreat. They don’t want to talk about it because they don’t want to face the emotional barrier that’s blocking them from doing without outing a client. We had a client who was dealing with a whole lot of emotions that had bubbled up for her from various things that were happening in her personal life that caused the emotional barrier to her questioning whether or not she had a right to have her voice heard.

If you have to show up for someone else, you will remove that barrier because you have an obligation you're willing to keep. Click To Tweet

That is a combination of fear and confidence that pulls together here. That’s why I say fear and confidence are probably the most likely underlying ones. It’s not the emotion that’s happening, but it’s part of what’s causing the barrier. It’s like, “I feel a lack of confidence. I feel fearful.” What is causing those are totally different for every person. It can be a lifetime of lack of confidence in the fact that your voice deserves to be heard. We hear that a lot. John Livesay did a great episode with us early on in the show, talking about fear blockers, starting a podcast, getting going, being interviewed, and having your voice heard.

I would think the emotional blockers that probably lead to the pod fading more often than anything else. I don’t know how you feel about that, but to me, it’s more than to overwhelm because we can do things with our routines and get overwhelmed. We can do things in our routines to break that or try to give us a safe space where there is not overwhelming, but the emotional part, most often, is what stops people.

It stops people from getting started to begin with. We see a lot of this at the very beginning before someone gets their podcast off the ground. It can then continue on in the fact that you’re not getting the positive feedback that you need and require from an emotional standpoint. That’s what causes the pod fade for you. We have it happen. It happens a lot more to women than the male podcasters. We have it in our system, but we get a lot of trolls, especially YouTubers that are a part of the episode. If you’ve got a video component to your podcast, we tend to get a lot of trolls over there who start to hit and say nasty things about how you should be seen and not heard or other things like that happen.

We’ve done a whole episode on that, but it does occur over there. It can cause an emotional hit that causes a shutdown. We need to be watching when we’re tapping into these fear points. This is something that you might need more support on. If you’ve got a life coach, an executive coach, or someone and you’re starting to see these elements of fear and lack of confidence happen for you, you should work towards getting to move through this because podcasting might be the one thing that removes that emotional barrier from everything that you do. It might be the thing that fixes it for you, shows you that you are capable of doing this and that your voice has value.

The biggest shift in an emotional barrier could be something like this happening to you. For those of you who maybe are not as woo-woo as others, when you hit something that is stopping you from doing it and you push through that, you might never have to face this in the universe again. Somebody gave me some advice when we started to get criticism from some trolls and they were only targeting me on our 3D Print show, saying that I should shut up and let Tom talk about the tech stuff.

When I moved through that and said, “That person’s attack on me is not personal to me because the value that I bring to our show and the perspective that I bring to making sure that people aren’t tech talk too, and it’s over their head is tremendously valuable and is what’s unique about our show.” When I moved through that, I never got another troll message again. It never happened again to us. No one ever sent nasty mail to us again because I moved through that emotionally and didn’t let it happen. Before that, it was happening on a monthly basis.

 

That’s a whole another subject on how to deal with trolls.

Here are a couple of things that can help you. First off, get some support because if this is an emotional barrier and it’s an ongoing thing, it’s affecting more than your ability to podcast. It’s affecting more in your business and your life. Get some assistance to move through anything that is fearful, confidence-based or anything like that. Here’s something that if you find yourself procrastinating, there’s something underlying here. Examine it but here’s also something else. This is a self-limiting barrier. This is not an outside barrier putting in, so you are the only one who can fix this. You can get assistance and help with it.

That can happen, but an emotional barrier is a self-limiting barrier. It is stopping your voice from being heard and stopping your message from getting out into the world. Maybe what you need to do is get mad at yourself. We mentioned that we have people go completely quiet. That’s what procrastination leads to, but I also see a lot of anger. Usually, they lash out at us and say it’s our fault. We’re not helping them and not making this happen. When we see anger like that, it is anger at yourself. We are not going to tell you that but we know it. That’s what we try to help our employees see. They’re not angry at you, but they’re angry at something that’s going on in their own lives and themselves.

How can we make sure that we don’t take this personally is something that we have to work on to assist our staff because we tend to take our anger out on others when it is anger at ourselves. Get angry at yourself for holding your voice back. Maybe if you start to look at it from that perspective, you’ll be able to snap yourself out of fear.

One of the best ways to get through fear is to get mad and move through something. Thinking about utilizing that as a superpower to help you move through this barrier could be an interesting tactic. Rather than get angry at your team, those around you, or your support system, get angry at yourself and say, “I’m going to stop letting this block me from getting my voice out there and my message out there.” That’s a way to look at it from a new perspective.

I relate to that, Tracy. I tend to get angry with myself more often than I want to know.

An emotional barrier is a self-limiting barrier. It is stopping your voice from being heard. It is stopping your message from getting out into the world. Click To Tweet

For those of you who get angry at yourself and shut yourself down, that’s not obviously the best tactic for you. Think about it as Twelve Step Program. Anger has to be in there somewhere. Those are parts of grief. Anger is in there for a reason. Using it to your advantage can move you through something. Asking for help is also one of those. If that’s something you don’t normally do and you do everything yourself, this point of asking for help can make a big difference for you. I do think that podcasting might be the one thing that changes this perspective on the world. This removes this barrier for you all time but you got to believe that yourself too. Help yourself through that.

The last one that I have on my list is overwhelm. For a lot of people, personal things get in the way. Families have illnesses and death and you have things to deal with. Businesses have busy times of the year and it has things that come up for you. Often, the result I see is to start to say no. I have a different strategy for overwhelm for myself that I’m going to throw out there for you. When you have too many commitments and ideas and this is a pattern for you, my recommendation is to finish something. What I found is that when I do something and I finish it, I’ve shifted everything and the level of overwhelm drops.

Even though I only took one thing off my plate, it dropped tenfold. I have a significant drop in overwhelmed feelings. It’s like you stack one thing, and then you tip over that tipping point to where you feel that overwhelm. When you remove something, it drops as dramatically as it did when you were loading stuff on. That could shift you in a tremendous way. By letting go of some of that perfectionist or all the things that needed to be perfect to make this happen and moving through it to get it going, that execution of something can make a tremendous difference.

By starting something, I now can assign it to someone. If that is one thing that I need to do or do now, I can hand it off to a team. I can have assistant support. I can take a lot more off my plate than I can by moving something through rather than saying no because I find that sometimes saying no isn’t removing it off your list. You put it on that second page of the list where you’re like, “I’ll get to it later.” Mentally, you still got it there and it’s still overwhelming you.

You tripped into a tactic of trying to get it out of overwhelm. Everybody has their own way that they need to get out of overwhelm. Not everybody works the same way. I am a list maker and there are different kinds of list makers. There are some people that put force rank and all the things on their list by numbers 1 through 20 or however big your overwhelm is. I’m not one of those people. I make bullets and I don’t put them in a particular order.

I agree with you, Tracy. Sometimes, when you have overwhelm, putting those things down on a list and then being able to focus and concentrate on one thing at a time and cross it off the list can do a whole lot to get that weight off your shoulders and out of your head. One of those things on the list can be, “I’m going to record a show.” You can do that and cross that off your list.

 

I also look at examining things for people. A lot of times, when I have a coaching call with someone or a private one-on-one strategy with them, I get them to take a look at this. They say, “Podcasting is just another thing to add to my list.” I say, “What if my interview with someone was sales, marketing, networking, and content production all in one single hour spent of my time, does that change your perspective on what you’ve accomplished instead of I added one thing to my list, but I removed four others that I had to do separately?”

Now I can think about it differently. This is where, again, systems, strategies, and thinking things through. What’s holding you back? What’s overwhelming you with getting your podcast going? Maybe it’s that mental block of perfectionism. What if I take that one away, get this thing going, and now I have taken four things off my plate that I don’t have to do in separate execution? Now I can say no to some networking events, some of these other things that might be taking up extraordinary amounts of my time, or something different that is overwhelming me in a bigger magnitude.

These are just some thoughts that we have about barriers to getting your podcast going, getting in the flow, and moving creative blocks as well. When we are overwhelmed, there’s no way creativity can flow. It can’t happen. The brain is too busy. Creativity doesn’t happen in the busy mind. Creativity happens and flows when there’s space and rest. What we hear from creative techniques people is go on a drive, take a shower, and all of a sudden, the answer flows in.

It’s not because the shower made creativity happen. It’s because the shower forced your brain to not thinking as much as it normally is. If you’re driving on a long straightaway, you’re zoning out of all the other things that are going on around you. You cannot do them. When you don’t do them, the brain has an opportunity to process the things you’ve been thinking about and turn them into a creative solution.

That’s very helpful even for me. As we’re recording this, this is one of those days when I am overloaded with things to do. I have enjoyed taking this break to record this episode.

This is one of my favorite things.

When we are overwhelmed, there's no way creativity can flow. Click To Tweet

It is one of my favorite things too. For anybody reading, you have the notes and you took the lead with this topic. I am your sidekick more than anything. I’m contributing as I can, but I didn’t have the time to prepare for this one. That’s unfortunate. Still, I enjoy showing up and participating and I feel pretty good after doing it. It’s maybe a good example.

It frees your mind and refreshes you. It can get you back into the excitement of something or the groove of things.

I love doing it and being prepared. There are some days when you’re not here and I’m doing it alone and vice versa. I’m better prepared for those. That’s probably a little more enjoyable when I’m more prepared or when I record one at 6:00 in the morning when it’s really my time of day. I’m excited and energetic. I know you don’t understand that, but that’s okay.

I get this question all the time. How do I manage to accomplish as much as I manage to do in a week or a day? I’ve got kids and I work with my husband. I’ve got all this stuff going on. I’m running a company. We have 108 staff members around the world. How do you do all of that? To be honest with you, it’s because I treat obligations extremely seriously. If I’ve got a phone call scheduled or I’m scheduled to show up here to coach you, there are very few things that will take me out of my ability to show up on that. It also forces me to make the time to prepare because I don’t show up to something unprepared. It’s not who I am.

We did our advanced social media workshop and I didn’t have a ton of time to prepare as much as I wanted to, but I did take an hour and a half earlier in the day to prepare all the slides and make sure it was everything that I wanted to. It didn’t mean I hadn’t been thinking about it. I was able to assemble that and knock that out quickly because I was going to show up on that call and make sure it was done.

That’s a difference. I force myself into a live situation and an appointment to do these things because then I will execute. It will be off my plate and we will have what we need as a company from a content, marketing and information standpoint. I will also have, in a sense, processed through and thought about how I am going to help all of you get past this setup stage.

How am I going to get you to get your show started? What do I need to bring to you to make that happen? Now I have a formula. I was forced to think this through and now I have a map I can give my team to help them. I have sound bites that they can pull from here to share and inspire someone. We got what we need to also continue to do more with that because I took the time to make that happen. This is what works for me, but hopefully, you’ll find something that works for you.

I remember you said you were not as prepared as you usually are ahead of time in terms of preparing everything. I’ll tell you you pulled it off. You showed up and did a great job because I’ve already gotten feedback from some of the people that attended, saying, “That was valuable and useful.” They appreciated it. Obviously, it wasn’t me. It was you, but in communicating with me. The customers that showed up and were part of it were like, “That was fantastic.” We’re talking about whatever else we need to talk about.

That right there is really freeing. It’s not like I don’t care to have good feedback, but it’s not a necessity for me from an emotional standpoint. I don’t require immediate feedback or gratification for anything. It’s just my personality. I’m lucky to have had that as a core part of who I am, and it’s not required for me to feel good about what I did. I’m comfortable in putting it out there.

I know it’s going to have the ripples that it needs eventually. I’m confident in that. When it does come back and I hear it, it’s good. It did what I thought it was supposed to do. Now I’ll do more of that. It’s a positive reinforcement that’s needed, but because I don’t expect it or need it immediately, I won’t overreact to the fact that 5 people showed up on a call and not 50.

It will never bother me because I know the 50 people will eventually get it. It just takes time. Podcasting is like that, and that’s part of the problem for some of the people who an immediate gratification. They’re like, “I need to see my stats spike. I need to see everybody love my podcast and rave about it. I need to hit the top of the charts.” Those vanity metrics are not the best indicator of a good podcast, and that’s where it can fall apart. We see a lot more pod faders because of that.

That’s a great place to wrap the episode. You said it so well there, and it’s wonderful. Everyone, thank you for reading. We hope you got some great value out of this episode. We’ll be back next time with another great topic.

 

Important Links

• John Livesay – Previous Episode