Episode 45: So You Want to Start a Podcast
Hello, and welcome back to Weirdos in the Workplace. I'm your host, Erin Patchell. Today isn't just another episode. It's a special one. It is our season finale. It is January 31, and it has been, I think, ten months since we started this podcast and 45 episodes. So today we're going to have a little reflection on the incredible journey of growth, discovery, and stepping out of my comfort zone that happened as we went through season one.
When I started this podcast, I literally had no idea what I was doing. And I still feel like I don't know what I'm doing. But we're figuring it out, and I'm glad that you're on this journey with me. So stay tuned.
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Have you ever wanted to start a podcast or build something that gets your voice out there, or allows somebody else to get their voice out there in the universe and build a platform where people can say what they think and what they want and their dreams and help people and serve. Or maybe you're just looking for a creative outlet for yourself. So this episode is going to be all about the different lessons that I learned along the way when I started the podcast, and then through the last almost year. And I'll talk a little bit about the future of the podcast as well, or future of podcasts in terms of what is the strategies that I've learned that we can implement in order to grow the podcast. So if you're really interested in podcasting, or you're just curious about it, this is definitely the episode for you.
So everyone asks me why I started the podcast, and I don't know if I have a very good reason, to be honest, it was just sort of a whim. One day I knew that I wanted to have some kind of media platform for positivist group, for my company, something where clients, interesting people, our consultants, we could all have a voice on that platform. And I thought I would just test out podcasting as a media. And honestly, the first time that I recorded, when I first recorded my first episode on being the dumbest person in the room, literally had no idea. I have a Mac, and with the Mac comes garageband, and I'm still recording on Garageband to this day. So I literally just recorded the audio straight into garageband. I not an audio technician, I have no idea what I'm doing. I literally stream of consciousness just started talking into the microphone, kind of pausing when I got kind of stalled when my words weren't flowing correctly, kind of editing as I went.
And then by the end of it, I had, I think like an eight minute podcast episode and I listened to it, and I was like, you know, I don't hate that. It's not terrible. It's kind of like, authentic. I kind of dig it. It's whatever, right? Kind of shows my personality. And it's not perfect, but I don't know if I need it to be perfect. That's not me. I am not someone who is cursed with perfectionism.
I will say that. And I'm also not somebody who's cursed with impostor syndrome. I pretty much feel like I'm comfortable in almost any situation at this point, at least if I've decided to be there. If I have agency in the situation and I have chosen to become a part of something, I will own it. Like, I don't feel uncomfortable now. If I'm forced into a situation, that's a totally different story. I am incredibly uncomfortable in situations that are forced. But as long as I've chosen to do something, I go all in.
I just put all my cards on the table. So whether I do it well or poorly doesn't really matter to me, because I know that I'm going to learn something through the process. And by the way, that mindset wasn't something that I was born with. That's something that I have learned over the last 40 years of my life. And so I think it's actually a good thing. When I talk to people about that kind of mindset, the way that I think about things, I'm told that it's very healthy. So, yeah, it's a process. You learn by doing, you learn by failing, and you figure out that the only person who control your own emotions is you.
So all that to say, I didn't really care if my first episodes or even my 45th episode was shit. I figured that I would learn, and from feedback. The only way that I feel like I can learn is from feedback. Like, for example, the other day, I threw some TikToks up on the first TikToks that I ever made, which I have no idea what I'm doing, like I said. And of course, my 16 year old daughter's like, mom, those were so embarrassing and cringy. And now she's demanding to be my social media manager for TikTok. So we'll see. Maybe I'll have a 16 year old social media manager.
I think there's good things happening on TikTok for Positivist Group in the future. And that's the thing. You need to get feedback, even if it's absolutely brutal. The more brutal, almost the better. In some ways, because if it's wishy washy, then I might not take it as seriously. But if it's brutal feedback, well, yeah, I got to pay attention to that. In terms of the podcast, though, we've gotten really good feedback. We've had some pretty awesome guests on the podcast this year, and people even seem to be enjoying the solo podcasts that I'm putting out as well.
And I'm really trying to be thoughtful about them. So if you have been enjoying them, that's awesome. I'd love to hear from you. And if you also have feedback from me, I would love to hear that as well. To me, this is a community project. I'm trying to bring as many people onto the podcast as I can, who are interesting people, who have interesting things to say. And season two is going to be that much better because we have a whole strategy for season two that I'll share.
So, yeah, I think that it's been a really interesting ride, and it's just the consistency. So that's the most important thing, I think, when it comes to any project like this is consistency. Making sure that you are releasing at approximately the same time every week or whatever your time frame is. We're posting every week. Our episodes aren't overly long. We're not posting two hour long episodes. They're 35 minutes or less, and often quite a bit less. My solo episodes range from eight minutes to about 18 minutes, and then the episodes with guests range from usually 20 to 35 minutes, kind of more towards the 35 minutes side of things. So that means that I can put them out generally every week, and I have for the last 45 weeks.
So having a consistent kind of brand message. What's the purpose of the podcast? Obviously, the title of the podcast, I feel, speaks for itself. Weirdos. In the workplace, we are trying to build cultures where everyone can feel at home and even heal. So authenticity, transparency, passion, and purpose, as someone who always felt like an outsider, those are the four values that really were like the North Star in terms of building cultures, of inclusion, at least from my perspective. And so bringing everyone on the podcast, anyone who's on the podcast, really aligning with those values, but then helping to figure out what's a building block.
So whether it was executive presence with Eleanor Eves, whether it was improv with, you know, whether it was the impact of empathy with Maxine Buddh, being a neurodivergent creative with Stephanie Demontini, learning about our sleep patterns, particularly insomnia, which I think a lot of us struggle with, with Erin Arkin. Talking about revolutionary leadership with Ange McCabe. Reshaping e learning, the next generation of e learning with Hanye Koshku. Bringing Eleanor back on the podcast to talk about why women at work are more ambitious than know, talking about being a disruptive creator with Robert Smith, building corporate wellness into a cultural practice with Kelly Ryan, and digging deep into personal development and leadership with Garen Jemian.
I'm now proud to call these guests my friends, even if we were just acquaintances before they came on the podcast, some of them were beginning to do some work together as well. So it's just a great community building, networking opportunity. And also, the whole point is to serve people. I'm a strong believer in servant leadership. We did an episode on servant leadership way back in the beginning of the podcast, and my whole life is designed, I've designed my life to serve people, to serve the biggest possible audience, and to make the biggest possible impact. And so in order to do that, part of that was I need to get outside my comfort zone.
If the end goal is to make the biggest possible impact that I can make, I become my biggest bottleneck, my biggest roadblock. So what is it that I would do? What is it that you would do if you weren't afraid to do it, if you weren't afraid to fail, or if you weren't afraid of success? I was never really afraid to fail, but I was terrified of success. And I'll tell you why. Success meant attachment. It meant that I had to maintain my success. People who are successful have a lot of demands on their time and their energy. More importantly, a lot of demands on their energy. They have to make a lot of people happy, and I'm not sure I was ready for that kind of responsibility.
I'm still not entirely sure, but I'm committed to it anyways. So I guess we'll see how it goes. And if it becomes too much, I can always roll it back to a level where it's a bit more sustainable for me. But at this point in time, I'm ready for what the future brings. And if it's success, then I believe that I'm ready for it. But I think that is a good question for everyone. If you want to make the biggest possible impact, what are you afraid of? What's holding you back? Okay, so now that we've talked a little bit about philosophy, which I can't help myself, I'll take you through a few of the tactical things that I do to get my podcast up and running. So the podcast hosting company that I'm with is Libsyn, and there are lots of others, and some of them I think are rated higher than Libsyn as well.
So take that with a grain of salt. But I find it's been very easy to use. So I guess that says something. I record on Garageband, edit on garageband, export the files, I upload the files to Libsyn. I use canva to create the podcast images. And I've also been using recently, this is just in the last month or so, I've been using canva as well to create our shorts, shorts for YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. I haven't been posting them on LinkedIn yet. I don't know if I will.
I just don't want to overload that platform with a lot of shorts. I don't know that that's the right strategy for that one, but time will tell. I also use an AI tool called Cast Magic, which I've been finding really helpful. And that one helps with the transcript. So it'll create the transcript which you do have to edit because it's not perfect. And I went back and I looked at some and I was like, I clearly did not edit that properly, but oh well. And then it also will create some AI kind of keywords, titles, clip finders like LinkedIn posts, scripts, things like that. I haven't been using the full value of those.
I do take some of it as inspiration. I do think that's helpful to get the inspiration. But you could probably get a lot of that, I think, from just from like you could probably just use Chat GPT as well to get a lot of that. So everything gets put onto Libsyn. So it gets pushed to Libsyn. That's like the title. It asks for the author, the script, yada yada, the actual file, it's audio file itself. And then Libsyn, once you save that, it posts everything and it pushes it to all of the major podcasting platforms like iHeartradio, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
And through YouTube you can actually get the RSS stream, which is the location basically from Libsyn, from the host of the podcast where the podcasts are hosted. You can pull that straight to YouTube. So that's what we've been doing and then adding our shorts onto YouTube. When I first started, I really didn't want to play the whole marketing game. I wasn't doing this necessarily know. I wasn't doing this for lead generation purposes. It was for educational purposes. I was okay with a slow growth.
I was not looking to be a social media, like an influencer of any kind, and still not, by the way. But I do think there's valuable content here. So I did want the content to be found, and it didn't take me very long to discover that you really do have to play the game if you want to be found. And I'm still learning that. I'm still going to be learning that for the rest of the lifetime of this podcast, I'm sure. Because the game always changes. That's the fun part about the game. But one of our values is authenticity.
So I wanted to make sure that we were doing it in a way that wasn't deceitful. I didn't want to have too much legit clickbait if the title of the podcast didn't match the content. To me, that's a problem, but it does have to be compelling. So this is something that we have to think about. It's something that we have to put time and energy into. Is will people be interested in this? What do people want to hear? And that becomes easier and easier the longer you move forward because you are getting that feedback. But there's a lot we can do. There's so much content online already.
So the best place to look is to just start looking and seeing what other people are doing kind of in the same space, and what's been popular and what has not been popular. And from our research, stuff that has a shock value is definitely more popular than stuff that's more educational. And we're trying to not go there. I don't want to just be a shock jockey, although I definitely have the personality for it. The problem with creating something for shock value is that it's really not practical at all. You can't implement it, it's not useful. And more than anything else, I want this to be useful. So after thinking about that, we decided the second season of weirdos in the workplace was going to be very much focused on practical problem solving, still focused on the values of authenticity, transparency, passion and purpose.
But what are the building blocks that create inclusive, high performing, profitable organizations? And let's focus on those and the real problems that organizations are having today, especially revenue generation. Yes, we're trying to build inclusive cultures, but there's not even a business if you don't have revenue and if you don't have profit. So really thinking about, like, how do we create businesses that have both of those things, purpose and profit. So that's what we're focusing on in season two, and we're bringing those 30 professional problem solvers. So we're going to have 45 episodes, same as season 115 of those episodes are going to be solo episodes, just to help sort of draw a line in the sand and recap, like reflect and go forward. And then the 30 episodes are going to have guests who are professional problem solvers who also have some of their own platforms as well. And we'll be literally real time problem solving. I'm going to walk them through a problem solving framework, and we're going to problem solve in real time a real customer issue or issue from our listeners.
So if you're listening to this and you're like, I have a big problem that I would like you guys to help me solve. We have free expert problem solvers that are happy to help you. So please feel free to email me at Erin at Positivist, CA or you can find me on most social media platforms at. Or, you know, find my team if you want to message my team online at positivist group on most of the platforms except for TikTok, that one's at the positivist. And don't go look, because apparently it's embarrassing. And this is why reverse mentorship is the best. Because these kids, my God, they are just the most amazing, brutal feedback givers in the entire world. Get thyself a reverse mentor.
A younger mentor. Yeah. That's all I have to say about that. So I think you should start a podcast this year if you've been interested in doing a podcast. If you want to dip your toes in, maybe do one a month or something, but schedule it in your calendar, commit to it. Make it sacred. That's how I manage to do things that I don't always want to do. Because believe me, there have definitely been weeks where I'm really tired.
It's been like, I've been working 15 hours a day. I've been grinding, and the last thing I want to do is have to record a podcast, and I didn't have previous content recorded or whatever. So you have to make it sacred. Make it sacred. It's a ritual in your life, and you will not miss it. That's how you get it done. Commit to a certain number of episodes and then decide whether you're going to continue. There's nothing wrong with that, but do it for yourself.
As much as I was just talking about figuring out what your customers want and blah, blah, blah, and researching what other people are doing, well, at the end of the day, if you don't love your content, if you don't love your message, you're not going to want to do it anyways, so you have to do it for yourself. When I was at the TED conference back in 2023 in Vancouver, it was April 2023, I believe I had lunch with a gentleman named Darryl Frank, who is the co president of Amblin television. That's Steven Spielberg's company. And the one question I really wanted to know was, how do you decide on your content? How do you decide what you are going to produce? And the answer that he gave me is, well, we kind of figure out what we want to watch and then kind of backtrack from there and figure out how to get that done. So I would recommend and it was like, yes, that is just the right answer that I wanted to hear. So make content that you want to make that is interesting for you and you will definitely find people who are interested in it. But in order to market to those people, you have to know what words they're searching for. You have to understand their personas.
Right? So it's a both. It's in. Yes. And so as this season wraps up, I'm looking back with gratitude and I'm looking forward with excitement. The lessons that I learned, boundaries I pushed, the comfort zones have expanded, have made this journey unforgettable. So to you, the listener, thank you for joining me on this adventure. Your support and feedback have been what has kept me going. And as we gear up for next season, remember to never shy away from the edge of your comfort zone because that's where the magic happens.
If you like this episode, don't forget to like and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. Don't forget to connect with us at positivist.ca or on social media @positivistgroup. And if you're a business owner or a business leader looking for like, hardcore business learning topics, we have a book club. One of my team members reminded me that I hadn't mentioned that for a while. So if you go to positivist.ca/book-club, then you'll find the book club and you can register. And it's mostly virtual. Every quarter we do an in person in Ottawa.
If you're Ottawa local, then you're more than welcome to join us in, you know, all the rest of the months of the year, we're virtual via Zoom and we focus on hardcore business topics. So feel free to connect and I can share more about that. As always, stay weird, stay wonderful, and don't stay out of trouble. This is Erin Patchell signing off; January 31, the final podcast of the season. Season two gearing up April 3. So stay tuned and there will be lots of sneak peeks between now and then. Have a beautiful day at work.
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If you liked this episode of Weirdos in the Workplace, don't forget to like and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. You can reach us online at Positivist.ca, or on most social media platforms @positivistgroup. Have a beautiful day at work.