Happy New Year! It’s the perfect time of year to reflect on and celebrate your podcast! As a podcaster, it’s easy to get caught in the behind-the-scenes of your show. So, let’s make time to contemplate what worked, what didn’t, and what you want to tweak in this new year. It can really make all the difference in your growth as a podcaster.

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Podcast cover art by Emily Johnston of Artio Design Co.

Transcript with audio description:

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<< Ghosthood Featuring Sara Azriel “Let’s Go” BEGINS >>

MARY: Welcome to the Podcaster’s Guide to a Visible Voice.

<< WOMAN SINGS: Let’s go >>

MARY: Reveal and define your voice to speak your truth through the power of podcasting. And I’m your host, Mary Chan.

<< WOMAN SINGS: So so so so let’s go >>

MARY: Hey, it is the beginning of the New Year. This is episode number 54, the first for 2023.

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MARY: The Process of What’s Working, What’s Not Working, and What to Celebrate For Your Podcast. Ah, yes, the New Year. And as you know, though, I am not much of a New Year’s resolutions type of person. I always hated those long term goals when I had to do them in school and then for my career I was like, I don’t know what I’m going to do in 5 to 10 years time. Come on, live in the moment. [LAUGHS] I do like to plan, though. So this is a great time of year to reflect and to celebrate because I don’t think we do that enough. I really recognise the fact within myself as well that, you know, as a podcaster, especially if you have a weekly show, that you’re constantly on the move from one episode to the next, you don’t really stop to think about things and reflect. You’re booking guests, recording interviews, editing another interview while making sure, all at the same time, that you are promoting and making a couple of social media posts, reels or what have you. So when do you have the time to actually sit back and relax and consider what actually worked for you? Make that time to contemplate what worked, what didn’t, and what you want to tweak in this new year. It can really make all the difference in your growth as a podcaster. And I’m saying Podcaster here with a capital P, so let’s take that chance now. You’re in the moment. You’re listening to this episode. So we’ll walk alongside each other. That way I’ll share some of what I’m thinking, and maybe you can use that as well for your own show.

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So first, looking back at my episodes from 2022, so at the beginning of last year, the plan was to do some more of those beyond podcasting, one-on-one type episodes, especially in the beginning of the year, like right now, many people are wanting to start a podcast or uplevel their current show. So what would you call this like podcasting 201 versus 101-type episodes? I walked you through how to start each episode, like specifically how to get each episode going, what to say, what not to say, how to say it, and then looking for those perfect guests. How do you get guests on your show, if that’s what you’re planning on doing? Also, voice techniques. Of course, this podcast wouldn’t exist without some voice stuff. Embracing your accent was a big topic and I got a lot of feedback from that one, so thank you so much. Yeah. Embrace your accent. Everyone’s got one. You, me, the person next door. You’re the podcasting friend. Accents are only a regional thing, so embrace it. And then lastly, for that series, we talked about your audio and visual brand. How does that line up with what you’re doing? And the guests too that came along for the ride paralleled my solo episode themes. They brought their own perspective and experience to it. And so if you haven’t listened to those episodes, please do go back and listen and then ponder these questions. What would you consider a perfect guest? Does your personal brand reflect your podcast brand? Or does it even have to? What does your accent have to do with your podcast? Listen in to these episodes to dive deeper into those questions. 

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Okay, then as the year progressed from there, I had my annual summer break and man, I really, really needed it. That first half of the year was, to put it lightly, really shitty [LAUGHS]. Man, the experiences I had at… it made me contemplate my own voice and what it meant to speak with spirit. I have the sign in my studio that when you have a zoom call with me, you can see it. It says, Speak with Spirit. I’ve been embodying that and showing you how to embody that as well. So, thinking about that and honing in on my own values of doing what I like to do rather than doing what I’m “supposed to be doing.” You know, all the shoulds. I took many breaks during the day for this latter half of the year. I napped when I needed to. And I stayed away from social media. Yeah. I didn’t really speak much on social media at all. I had to turn my brain off for that one. My brain, my body. It all needed rest. After going through two significant deaths in my family in that beginning of the year. And so as I went through this restoration, I also thought about when was the right time to speak up? And when I did, what would I say? You know, like how much do you share about your personal life? I like to talk a lot, but you don’t have to share everything, right? Especially like to who? Who are you sharing this information with? So all this thinking led me to the latter half of the year with episodes solely focussed on your mental voice. When I do voice coaching, a lot of it has to do with the mental voice. Even though people come to me for their literal voice. They’re like, Oh, I want to have a different pitch, or I don’t want to sound as boring, but a lot of that starts with your mental voice. So I really wanted to focus in on this. 

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And the beautiful thing about podcasting is that we get to share our stories of anything we want, especially the more vulnerable things. Wrestling with challenges, whether from serious incidents or even from our day-to-day lives. And our upbringing as well, how we were brought up. When we go through life, it leaves an imprint on you along the way. All the things you’ve learned either deliberately learned, like you took classes for, or subconsciously, you’re absorbing all this information all the time. It could be the relationship that you have with your parents as a young child or the choices you made with your mental health as a young adult. These connections impact your voice today. You might not have thought of it that way, but it does. So in my solo episodes from that part of the year, I shared why you need to challenge what a powerful voice sounds like. Question what you really need to think about when you’re behind the mic and to defy what you believe you should, again, in quotes, “should do.” My guests shared their personal struggles with their voice through their natural stuttering, overcoming stigma in society and speaking on stage, or even climbing out of what your past experiences with school and teachers may have etched on to you. So again, if you have not gone back to all of those episodes, I highly recommend it because it can really shift your mindset and how you speak up behind the mic. 

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So then reviewing on what worked, what didn’t work on other things, aside from the episode themselves, technical wise, I’m such a stickler for sound quality, and so I love the fact that my guests’ audio quality was and as always, a really high quality. I believe this is because in my process I send them a very detailed email and reminders about how to have the best sound quality possible. I lay down the framework right away. I send these automatically through an email confirmation after they booked the conversation. So like they’ve picked a time on my schedule. They get the confirmation email and in it not only is confirmation, but the rundown of tips for them to act on to have the best sound possible, because I know they want to sound good as well. And then, of course, I send a reminder email 24 hours before we record to remind them, especially if some of these interviews were booked months in advance. And so in that reminder email, I also have the sound quality guidelines that I include yet again. So I really, really love that aspect of my show. Sound quality, top notch [LAUGHS]  if I don’t say so myself.

[MUSIC ENDS]

Format wise, reviewing that oh, so many things are still working for me. The rotating of a guest in a solo episode works so well for my show and me in what I do. It satisfies, one, my curious need to talk with others, and then, two, also exploring my own thoughts and messages and how I want to present myself. I never like monotony, so this alternation provides me with curiosity to ask questions, to be able to find intriguing guests, and to lay out what stories I want to explore myself and to speak more clearly about. And also, this works with my capacity. So what I can do in my day-to-day and have a podcast as well, because you know, it’s a lot of work. So I love having a bi-weekly publishing schedule. So I publish an episode every other week and then I have a break in the winter and the summer. That is my schedule and it works really, really well for me. This gives me the freedom to create yet still run my podcasting business and helping people like you to launch or edit your show because my life is multi-passionated. Is that a word? Multi-passionated [LAUGHS]. Multiple passions. I have multiple hyphenates in my life, so I thrive in multiple and varied projects. And so this really, really works for me. The rotating of a guest and a solo episode.

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Though, when you look at what didn’t really work, leaving things to the last minute, I think this one just comes up all the time because I do love succeeding under pressure. It elevates my creativity. There is probably some research there where creative people need to have a deadline and have that pressure to build upon the brain to think and flow. And so as a creative person, I tend to leave things last minute. I know, but one of my objectives for the year was to get my podcast episodes done before the end of the week so I wouldn’t have to do scheduling on the weekend. So I wouldn’t say it totally didn’t work and I failed on that, but I did fail on that goal for a couple of episodes, so not too shabby all in all. There was one night I was already in my pyjamas. I think I was going to bed early that day anyway, but either way I was in my pyjamas on a Sunday night realizing, Oh my gosh, it’s Monday tomorrow. I publish my episodes on Monday mornings. So, I booted up my laptop because I ended up watching a lot of TV during the weekend instead of doing my work. So I scheduled my podcast episode on a Sunday night. [LAUGHS]  It happens, right? You know what I mean? And one of the reasons why I, I oh, I was going to say procrastinate, I mean it’s not really procrastinate because when I outline my episodes they are constantly there. Like, I have my Trello board, that’s how I manage my episodes. And I’m always jotting down notes or adding things. So it’s not like I’m coming up with a new episode on the fly all the time. But one of the reasons that I do take more time, that’s a good reframe. One of the reasons why I take more time is that the solo episodes, especially, they can be a heavy lift. In solo episodes, you’re coming up with all the content yourself, you’re outlining the points you want to make and massaging how you want to get in and out of ideas and how you’re going to culminate the entire episode. It’s kind of like writing a story, right? You’ve got a beginning, middle and end. Where is your story arc? How is it all going to play out in the end? And you are coming up with all of that versus an interview where you come up with the guest and then the questions. But the guest really is doing most of the work of the content of the actual episode. So one of the things I’ll tweak for this year is probably adding into my calendar more lead time for solo episodes. So making sure that my Fridays leading up to a Monday publishing day are blocked off for post-production podcasting tasks like scheduling that episode. So that way I’m not leaving it during the weekend again. Plus, I know my daughter doesn’t like it when I work, so I was trying to sneak in work when she’s, like, doing her bedtime routine or something like that, or she’s out playing then I can just stay home. And, you know, it’s a fine line with parenting and podcasting. 

[MUSIC ENDS]

Let’s move on to gear. Review of my gear this year. Oh, I like shiny new things and I don’t know, as a podcaster you might too [LAUGHS]. So when you think of gear and podcasting, you might think of microphones. That’s usually a given. I love my mics that I have, but I did buy a new microphone this year. It was late, late in the year, I would say late November, early December is when I bought the Shure MV88 Video Kit. So it comes with a great little mic that is adjustable based on your needs on an app for your phone but it also is a video kit. So there is a phone clamp, phone holder, and you can take it around with you. It’s small, it’s compact. I have plans for this. One of the reasons I decided to buy it was I wanted to create more videos. I was thinking over the past year that I wanted to speak more on video, yet I didn’t record very many. Maybe one? Ugh. And it was because I have high standards and sound. We just talked about that. My standards are a little high and so when it came to, like, ease of use, it would just be go in selfie mode, start recording and start talking. But I hated the way that the phone would pick up the recording of my voice because the phone is so far away and it’s not a great microphone on your phone when it’s that far away to pick up your voice fully. So I thought, is this my sticking point to recording videos and reels or what have you? So then I thought, okay, I don’t have to buy a mic. I can just use my regular mic that I use on my zoom calls. The Shure MV7, I can connect it to my phone. It’s got a connector for that, for my android. But it’s a little cumbersome because it’s bigger, it’s on a stand. And what if I wanted to record outside? The MV7 is just too clunky for that. So MV88, that’s the one I decided to buy. It’s small, it’s compact. It was going to be my answer! Yeah, funny enough, it’s still just sitting there [LAUGHS]. I gave it a couple of test runs in the house, but I’m still trying to figure out how to use it in selfie portrait mode. Because the phone holder, it only is big enough to hold it in landscape mode, but the microphone has portrait selfie mode, so I’m trying to figure out how those two things play. And I think I figured it out, but I got to do some more testing. Anyway, I have plans to use it as part of my travel gear. I’m going to do some travelling this year. First time since the pandemic, like real travelling, like on a plane travelling [LAUGHS]. So I thought, why not? It’s lightweight. This could be fun to take with me.

So this purchase from this year is not really a not working, but it doesn’t really fit into the working column either. It’s probably more of a “we shall wait and see column” approach since I haven’t had the chance to really test it out so we’ll see about that one. Though gear, the other piece that I bought this year, total game changer for me. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner. [LAUGHS] Like, I use this every day. And when you think about podcasting, though, you might not think of this because it’s so universal. People use it all the time, but for audio editing, you might want to take this into consideration. I upgraded my computer monitors. Yeah, I had really old 19-inch screens that were handed down to me and I realized my eyes were not working efficiently with these things [LAUGHS]. So upgraded to a larger 24-inch real estate for my displays. And displays, yes, I have two of them. And I started with two, so it’s not like that changes. But as an audio editor and someone recovering from a concussion with vision challenges, I hadn’t realized how much upgrading to a larger display with better technology to make my eyes work not as hard. It was totally what I needed. It is so much easier to edit sound more precisely and efficiently on a larger display. Before the screen was small, so it took slightly more time to zoom in, make an edit or undo that edit because when I played it back, it wasn’t exactly what I needed. There was still a little bit of a glitch. And so you would have to undo and redo. Not really a dealbreaker since I’ve been editing on a 19-inch display for years, even in my radio days. So it’s not like I couldn’t do it, but it was more finicky and the more and more it happened, I started complaining and it wasn’t until I was telling my friend about this and she said to me, Just go buy them. It’s not like you can’t afford it. And I’m not usually one to buy new things. What I have currently works, right? It works. I’ve been editing like this for years, but she gave me that permission that I needed, especially for my eyes, my health, the fatigue from the concussion symptoms. So yeah, I needed that upgrade and that permission from her. So now with the larger monitors, editing is much more productive. I don’t ever edit on my laptop because I need a separate keyboard and mouse to edit very efficiently and I have a vertical mouse so it’s better on my hands and wrist. So I have my monitors separate, my keyboard separate and mouse separate for optimal efficiency in audio editing. I mean, you don’t have to do that, obviously, but like if you’re really into sound editing, I’d highly recommend it.

Oh, and if you do a lot of audio editing, I mean, this could really work for other things too. If you want a two screen setup and one screen you use for a lot of word docs and things like that. My second monitor, I actually turned sideways, so it’s kind of like in portrait display so that I can see more script or words on a screen. So just imagine this. Your main screen that you’re looking ahead at, here’s your regular monitor. It’s in landscape mode. And then to the right is the portrait view of the second monitor for endless content with less scrolling, because the monitor is sitting sideways with so much real estate, especially with the 24-inch monitor that I have now. Anyway, that is a quick gear tip for you if you want it, two monitors and one rotated sideways. 

[MUSIC IN]

Now that we’ve talked about gear and workflow and formats, planning for this year, I am really honing in on more aspects of your voice. I’m going to go mental voice, literal voice, all of it. And there’s a really big guest that I’m going to have when I’m back in March. I’ll share with you how I landed that conversation as well in my solo episode. So lots of good things coming from that for tips for you. And with this exploration of more voice work, it is also because I have a workshop coming up and it’s in person. Oh my gosh. My first real people in real life workshop since the pandemic? Little nervous, got to be honest, but I know it’ll be all good. This is kind of like the good nerves where, you know, something exciting is coming up. So if you are in Denver, April 12th through 14th, I’d love to meet up. That’s where I’m going. If you want, you can actually join me in my workshop, especially if you work in the not-for-profit space. My workshop on Reclaiming Your Voice will be at the NTEN conference, so let me know if you are in Denver and we can get to know each other better. This could be fun, like a little podcasting meetup. And I hope to have more in-person things. I’m just not quite sure where yet or how that’s all going to play out but there’ll be a couple of things because I’ve done a lot of virtual stuff. I’m sure you have as well, but I’d love to do more in-person speaking, so I’m going to plan for that. 

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And of course, a New Year brings more podcast launches. This is a great time of year when people are thinking about, I need to start a podcast this year. And so there are so many moving parts to launching a podcast, and if you need a streamlined approach to help you create a sustainable show based on your own capacity and needs, I’ve got you, especially if you are running your own business or you work in the not for profit space. Having that support to create your podcast is going to be a world of difference for your own mental space. I have a programme we can work through. It could be a long term one or a quick launch as well. And I love that these spots are open year round actually, because when people want to start a podcast, they want to start a podcast right away and people don’t want to wait. But I’ve made extra time for the beginning of the year to have extra spots open just because I know this is a high time of year for people wanting to launch their show. So if you want to work together, launching your show is going to be fun. I don’t do anything that’s not fun. So we’ll figure out your tech together because not one microphone is going to work for every single person and some microphones are better for certain voices or certain rooms so we’ll go through that and make sure you buy something that works with your computer, okay? And then all the accessories that may or may not need to be added along with the certain mic that you buy. Like there’s just a lot of parts. And then we’ll also produce a trailer to promote your show and create a workflow that works for your situation. Like I said, creating a podcast is a lot of work and so you want to create a workflow that helps facilitate making episodes each and every time so it doesn’t feel like work. It’s going to be fun [LAUGHS]. So with that workflow, we’re going to make sure we have at least 3 to 5 episodes in the bank. They’re planned out in advance so they can get you going. Even though you already have your podcast and your first episode launched. So no more thinking or taking endless notes about what to do to start a podcast. Let’s work together and let’s do this and collaborate for your show.

Or you know what? If you already have a show and you want to offload the work it takes to produce your podcast after you’ve done the recording. Honestly, the recording part is the most fun bit of everything, right? So let’s chat about what your dreamiest of dreams can look like for your podcast. There’s a complimentary 30-minute strategy session linked in the show notes, so let’s have that chat and bring on some big things for you in 2023.

Let me know what your podcasting plans are for this year. What’s your biggest challenge right now that is stopping you from doing what you dream of? What is that dream? And send me your feedback. I have the Send Voicemail purple button or, of course, an email is always lovely as well, visiblevoicepodcast@gmail.com. And hey, if this really, really helped you and these past episodes have been helpful as well, I would love it if you leave a review and reviews can be wherever you hang. So if you’re an Apple Podcast listener, that’s where people usually go. Spotify now has star reviews. You can rate on that as well. Or social media. Just give me some love. Send me a note there, tag me and I’d love to share it out. So thank you, thank you. Thank you in advance.

And so with that, like I said at the beginning of the episode, I’ll be on my usual break for the New Year, prioritizing rest and of course for me celebrating Chinese New Year, which falls on January 22nd this year. It is the year of the rabbit, if you’re interested. I’ll be back on March 6th. I wish you much rest as well and growth, of course, for your podcast in the New Year. Until then, have a lovely start to your 2023 and speak with spirit.

[MUSIC ENDS // PAUSE A BEAT // OUTRO – SHOW CLOSE]

<< Ghosthood Featuring Sara Azriel “Let’s Go” BEGINS >>

MARY: Thank you so much for listening to the Podcaster’s Guide to a Visible Voice. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d love it if you shared it with a podcasting friend. And to reveal more voicing and podcasting tips, click on over to visiblevoicepodcast.com.

<< WOMAN SINGS: Let’s go >>

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