PODCASTS AS A FORM OF JOURNALING - Tyler relates how he approached making a podcast, and how it helped him increase his emotional intelligence. Interested in starting your own? He shares some tips in this episode... You can find more episodes of THIS podcast on: Spofity - bit.ly/Spotify_5-Star Apple Podcasts - bit.ly/Apple_5-Star Google Podcasts - bit.ly/Google_5-Star Simplecast (browser) - bit.ly/podcast_5-Star
with Tyler Small
I'm Tyler Small. And this is Hacking Emotional Intelligence.
I'm going to share something with you during this episode. And it is the concept of journaling. And in my programs, I teach people how to do this special technique of micro-journaling. It's like a one to two minute activity per day. And, and that's a different thing; it's a very efficient, expedited version of journaling.
I want to talk about a different kind of journaling. And that's a reflective approach to how things go throughout the day. And it basically takes the things that you experience emotionally, socially, you know, it could be physically, financially, whatever... And it helps you to go through and say, how did I do? And to figure out, okay, what could I have done better? And how could I have met the needs of the other individuals involved better. How did they receive my actions and so on? So journaling is I think one way that can be helpful for a lot of people to hack their emotional intelligence.
Now, one kind of journaling is creating a podcast. It's basically an audio journal. You're just talking and you're reflecting on things you've learned and things that you've overcome. Stories. And so podcasting can be a great way to hack your own emotional intelligence.
And several people have asked me since I, since I told them, Hey, yeah, I made a podcast. They're like you made a podcast! What?! And I'm like, yeah, I made a podcast. Uh, they're excited to listen to it. A few people have told me, I've wanted to make a podcast. How do you do it?
And so in the interest of hacking emotional intelligence, I wanted to just explain a little bit how I created this podcast and the process of what I do to create it.
If you're interested in doing some journaling in this form and in sharing your thoughts, um, you know, consider whether you would like to do a YouTube series... Right now podcasting is so much easier than a YouTube-ing. Especially if you don't have a beautiful set.
Like, I've got five kids. And so if I was to like, show, you know, the background of my house, you'd see a bunch of like toys and like, you know, kids' stuff in the background, like bowls of cereal everywhere - or whatever. So it's not like this brilliant, pleasing background in my house. And in order for me to create these episodes regularly, I'd love to be like out in the mountains. But, um, it's just not, not super convenient. I can't get as many done if I do that. So I'd rather go for a greater number of quality episodes than, you know, creating this amazing location. And I'll get to more of that in a second.
There are other ways of course of reflecting and sharing your thoughts and doing that reflecting, which can boost emotional intelligence. You can do that in Instagram. You can do it on Facebook, you can do it on Tik Tok - whatever forms of social media that you prefer. Those are all options, um, to do some reflecting and how might I have been perceived and what did I learn from this and so on.
And I would add, as a learning professional, as a learning expert or a student of studenting as a student of learning. Um, I would say that just the act of saying, Oh, I think I learned something. What did I learn? I'm going to write down a few bullet points and then I'm going to describe it. And I'm going to explain it. I'm going to talk about it. That will help you learn more, in several ways. Not only are you clarifying what you learned, but you're also putting yourself on the lookout. Your brain is then thinking, Oh, I'm going to learn more stuff. Cause I'm going to share more stuff. What am I going to learn today? What am I learning now? And so it enhances your learning ability just to be going through those reflection cycles. It's very powerful. There's a lot of awesome research behind it.
Now. How do I do a podcast? What's the process? The setup was not hard. I'm going to reveal some enormous vulnerabilities here. I think that this is probably very poor practice. Because the more that I say, Oh, yes, podcast, it's so difficult. It's so complex. There's a high barrier to entry, and you have to be very special and very important to do a podcast... You know, then you might think, Oh yes, this is, this is more valuable. Um, and I hope you don't think it's any less valuable than it is, but, um.. Seriously, it's not that hard to do. And I believe that anybody can do it.
I kind of get bogged down in the editing step. I've done a ton. I dunno, I've spent months of my life editing audio files, editing video files. So it's much easier than editing video files and, um, it just sometimes just I can get into it, but sometimes it kind of sucks me in and I kind of get bogged down with it.
So in order to create more episodes for you. I've hired a wonderful editor and producer to put these out. A lot of times what people will think, Oh my goodness. That's the hardest part. And it, and it is, it takes a lot of hard work to do that. You have to kind of have an ear and you have to be able to cut out when I, you know, when I say, um, um, um, yo you know -- cut out a lot of that stuff. So I end up sounding more intelligent and thoughtful and articulate than I would otherwise. Um, there's Tyler's vulnerability there.
So the editing really helps it sound better. And that's part of the process, is figuring out, do I have the bandwidth to edit? Now I've been doing a multiple of these per day just to get, just to get started and accelerate the process of my experience and getting these out to you. So editing multiple of these a day it's a lot of work. But if you just do one a week... I would say a great deal of podcasts are just put out once a week. And that's a far more manageable process, especially if you have a day job that you're working on. Doing a once a week podcast is not that hard.
It can be five, it could be 10 minutes. It can be 12 minutes, you know, it doesn't have to be 20 minutes, half an hour. Um, and then that's less material to edit. So think about that as you're setting up and you're making a plan. If you're interested in doing a podcast, you know, consider those things.
Here are the steps. There are fancy podcasting platforms - I'll probably have to adopt one soon. There's one called Anchor that's been recommended to me - I think I've heard of other people using it before where it records it and it catches a nice high-quality recording from multiple people. I use one called Descript and that makes the editing process much faster and easier. And it makes it a little bit easier to record, I think when I need to like, Oh, I need to record a little bit more in the end or whatever.
And then it goes to a platform called Simplecast. That's a distribution platform that puts it out to iTunes and Google; and Simplecast has its own platform; and then Spotify. So it pushes it all - you put it in once and it pushes it to all four of those.
So planning out each episode usually takes a little bit. I end up thinking about it when I'm driving or I'm not doing anything else. Sometimes if I'm just like eating and staring at the wall and I can't talk and like, nobody's talking to me, I'm just thinking about what I'm going to put in the next podcast. And then I think about what my bullet points are. I usually write, write down a few notes before I start.
And then I sit down, I have a microphone - I recommend the Yeti series. I have the blue Yeti. It might've been, it's probably phased out by now. It's a few years old. It's a professional quality microphone. It's like a hundred bucks. Um, and they make them under a hundred bucks. It just plugs right into your computer. You don't have to have a fancy soundboard.
Some people will tell you that you have to have a studio and everything like that. But right now I'm recording in a pretty low end sound environment. I've taken classes in acoustics and things like that in college as part of my degree and, um, this is a lower quality sound environment. But it's not terrible, right? The echo isn't overwhelming. If I wanted to do a super high-quality studio environment, then instead of doing 10 podcasts, I could do one, you know, that's, that's kind of the difference there. So I'd rather create 10 for you so that you have more to listen to and just focus on the quality of the content, than the production quality, this point. That's a choice that I'd made.
And so if you have a bunch of money that you want to put into a podcast, you can go down to a studio or you can build your own studio in your home. You can get really fancy with that kind of thing. Um, some shared workspaces, like We Work and Kiln have a recording studio. So, you know, if you see the egg crate foam walls, you know, that might be a great place to record. Um, closets are great places to record. This is just my little office here. It's not, you know, the best place to record, but...
What I'm saying is that you don't have to have a professional studio in order to start your journey podcasting. At some point, yeah, I'd love to put some foam on the walls and make it, you know, a better studio for recording, but that's not my priority at this point. My priority is creating great content for you.
I would say that it takes about one to two hours for somebody to edit 10 to 20 minutes of podcast at a reasonable quality. You can get music from a place called free play music.com.
I've gotten a ton of free music from them. And I believe that's the one I've used most recently and you just, you get free little music clips. I wouldn't spend forever on things like picking your music. You know, you, you want a happy little tone at the beginning and the end and, and then it's, it's good.
And then you can have the same little intro and outro on the beginning and end. It doesn't have to be super fancy. If you've got great content, then you can just, you know, you can start with what you got.
I would say I'd pay somewhere around 50 bucks a month for the services between Descript and Simplecast and, um, and then just making a post, a social media post for each episode, as it comes out on your favorite platforms. And that's really it. You might want to tag, tag people...
Oh, one more thing. Um, the, the guests, right? The guests are what makes it more exciting, right? So you don't have to have guests, but occasional guests are great. And frequent guests, you know, are even better. So I'm, I'm just working on getting more guests. It takes a lot more time to get guests and they have to prepare. And, and so, you know, I'm, I record with guests, once or twice a week - meaning like one out of every 10 or so episodes has a guest. But guests make it really fun and they take the pressure off of you, especially if you're, if you're brand new, to have to come up with all the content cause your guests typically don't want to talk about your stuff the whole time, right? They want to talk about their thing. You want to ask them about their world as you interview them.
One guest in particular, he said, Hey, you know, um, I'm really interested in, you know, more of this type of interview. 'Cause I said, what, what do you want me to ask you? He said, well, I'm interested in this particular type of interview style. If you can do that, here's a couple of podcasts that I really like. So if you'll watch those, Tyler, and then think of some questions that you can ask me along those lines, I'd really prefer to do that. And I said, great. So I watched those and I was like, Oh, these people are really good. And that, that was helpful for me to learn a style.
So how to make a podcast... Notice the title of this episode is not how to make a premium podcast or how to make a hundred thousand dollars in a month making a podcast or how to become a millionaire. You know, this is not that. Um, there's plenty of those resources out there. This is just how to, how to get started making podcasts. If you've got a passion and you feel a calling like I do to get something out there, then, you know, I highly recommend just getting started and that's what's been recommended me by some of my mentors is just, just to get started and, and start putting content out.
And then you can see over time which types of content that you're putting out... So you want to be within a niche - it's not just, Oh, here's warm and fuzzy stories. I guess that could be a niche. That's the Chicken Soup for the Soul. But that gets generally like, Oh, your Chicken Soup for the Soul for Kids, Chicken Soup for the Teenage soul or whatever. Chicken Soup for Grandma's Soul or whatever it is. You know, they have a bajillion of those books now, but it shows, like, there, there are these niche audiences. You want to pick your audience, people that you relate to, maybe a person that's going through something that you've gone through, that can conquer something that you've conquered; in an area that you are really passionate about that you want to learn more about and have people on it to talk about.
I will say one more thing that was a surprise to me: If you're going to do a podcast and you want to learn about your content, especially if you want to use it for improving your emotional intelligence, then invite your competitors to be on your podcast - because your competitors can be your best friends in terms of learning from them, and growing from each other. It's a big ocean out there, and you're not necessarily going to be robbing their market or they're not going to necessarily be robbing your market. But you're going to be able to grow from each other and you're going to be able to serve each other's audiences well, if you're serving the same type of audience, if you're serving the same type of need, then mixing up those audiences can be really great. You can learn a lot from the people who you compete with.
So I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Hacking Emotional Intelligence. I'm Tyler Small, and this has been all about how to make a podcast. Have a great day, and I'll see you next time.