A year ago someone asked me if I was interested in podcasting and I said, flat out: ‘Nope. Not in the least’.
I’m a writer, see?
I like having time to craft a message and edit infinitely before I put my thoughts out into the world. I’m also one of those people who doesn’t really know what they think till they’ve had a chance to write it out. (Translation: I don’t like having to think and articulate my thoughts on the fly.)
Then I proceeded to be interviewed on 10+ podcasts last year.
The first interview I did, I emailed Robert approximately 10 minutes after we got off Skype and said ‘We have to do that again. I can do better.’
He laughed at me and told me it was all fine.
The second and third interviews, I wanted to email the podcasters and say the same thing: ‘Can we do that again?’. But they weren’t people I knew well enough so I had to suck it up.
With each subsequent interview, however, my confidence grew and generally speaking, so long as I knew where the conversation was going and what the interviewer was looking for from me, I was sweet.
I even began to enjoy myself.
And I discovered something cool – you get to say a lot more in a podcast than you can in a blog post. You can go tangential in a podcast – something you never ever do in writing because you will lose the reader.
Right now (you may have noticed), I’m struggling to write anything here on the blog.
I’m doing the work/school holiday juggle, we just re-designed and relaunched our Swish Design website, and I am deep in the editing (re-writing!) of Practical Perfection. I need space in my life to form the kind of coherent thoughts and ideas I like to share here on the blog – and there is zero space right now.
But I do have space for conversation with like-minded, clever people. People who can take each other’s half formed thoughts and make them semi-coherent.
Enter the podcast.
You may know my friend Brooke McAlary. Her super-excellent The Slow Home podcast was last year named by iTunes as one of the five best new shows for 2015 (amaze). She and her husband Ben have just launched JackRabbit.fm. Brooke says:
It’s an independent podcast network, but really, it’s about people. Passionate people, funny people, curious and mind-blowingly clever people. People with stories to share and things to learn. People who make you nod your head in agreement or snort-laugh on the train.
Your people.
And I am so thrilled to be part of not one, but two shows on JackRabbit.fm!
- Let It Be: Less doing, more being. This is a weekly show where Brooke and I chat about what it means to do less and be more. Warning: may contain traces of swearing and earnestness.
- Straight and Curly: For self-improvement junkies. Also a weekly show, this is the one where Carly Jacobs (Smaggle) and I road test a different life hack each week and tell you whether it’s awesome or a total waste of time.
We’re launching both podcasts next week with five shows in the first week so that’s 10 podcasts I’ve recorded in the last month. And what all that recording has done is challenge my perfectionism massively. (I hate repeating myself for one and I’ve caught myself doing that many times over during the recordings we’ve done.) So it’s been an interesting self-development exercise!
But it’s also been hugely energising being able to share thoughts and ideas that I wouldn’t ordinarily share here on the blog because I don’t have a story to go with them, or they just don’t quite fit in with the narrative thread that runs through all my posts.
And it’s all taken a shitload less energy than the average blog post (which takes me on average 8-10 hours by the time I’ve ruminated on it, written it, edited it, edited some more, then some more, and then published it).
So even though it kind of kills me that I don’t have any great written thoughts to share with you all currently, I am so excited to have the equivalent of 10 blog posts going live next week. You can get a sneak peek of Straight and Curly here and Let it Be here. (I’ve also embedded the episodes in a player below).
Even if you don’t have time to listen at the moment, if you could head over and subscribe, that would be so amazing and will help us out immeasurably.
And the answer to the question posed in the headline of this post? It’s ‘I think so!’
But let’s talk more in a month’s time 🙂
Straight and Curly:
Let It Be:
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Image: GongTo / Shutterstock.com