Influential Introvert: Communication Coaching for Professionals with Performance Anxiety - Be the Leader Your Podcast Needs By Speaking Up

Starting point is 00:00:00 If you're a people pleaser, then maybe you can relate to this. Do you feel guilty speaking up or saying no to people? Like when a fan writes in saying how much they love your podcast and they would love to be a guest on your show, but you think it's not the right fit. But then you start stressing and second guessing yourself and asking your friends, what should I do? And before you know it half an hour has gone by and you're thinking, oh, why did I check my email instead of just starting to record my show? Well, on this episode, I'm going to talk about how to let go of that stress, take control, and how to step up as the leader that your show needs. Have you been wanting to start a podcast for a while now, but something's holding you back? Maybe it's fear of putting yourself out there or confusion about the technology.

Starting point is 00:00:50 I'm Sarah Mikital, and on podcasting step by step, I'll break down how to podcast with a little loving motivation to give you the skills and the confidence you need to finally launch that show of your job. dreams. Let's get started. When I first started podcasting, I could hear one of my remote guests typing on his computer. We weren't using video, but I knew what was going on on the other side of his Skype channel. So he was probably searching a website just to double check something that he was just talking about. And I heard that click-clack typing, but I didn't say anything. I just thought I'll just let him do his thing and I will clean this up later in post-production, not that I knew what I was talking about. And so later I learned, oh, actually, you can't really remove this sound of typing.

Starting point is 00:01:39 So then for the next time, I knew that I would have to speak up if my guest started shuffling around papers on their end. But when that time came around, I didn't say anything. I felt bad. I felt rude. Like, oh, this person is being so nice. They're doing me a favor by coming on my podcast. And I don't want to interrupt them or call them out for typing. when they should just be talking. But I didn't want to seem like a jerk and I didn't want to come off as bossy or aggressive. I wanted to be nice. I wanted the guests to like me. But since then, I've learned that you can be nice and you should be nice, but you also need to be a leader. On this podcast, my guests and I have talked a lot about how podcasting has made us so much more confident in all

Starting point is 00:02:28 aspects of our lives. And that doesn't happen overnight, but it does happen over time. And one of the ways that this happens is that we finally start speaking up when we can hear our guests typing or shuffling papers, like I mentioned. It seems like such a small thing, but you can only edit bad audio for so long before you say, okay, enough is enough. I need to politely call out my guess on this and ask them to stop making noise. And guess what? They are grateful for that guidance. I've never had anyone get mad at me for telling them that the mic is picking up the sound of their pen tapping or they never get mad if I say, oh, you know what? Could you turn off that fan or maybe we can switch rooms because I'm picking up a lot of noise in here? They have no idea what you can hear, especially if they're not

Starting point is 00:03:22 podcasters. So they're looking to you for guidance as the professional. That's right. To them, you are the podcasting pro. I remember at the beginning of my career, I had to wear a suit, which made me feel like a kid playing dress up. Walking around in a suit in Brooklyn, I felt like such a loser. I never got used to it. So I find myself working in New York City in a skyscraper near Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. And one day I was walking. through our lobby with a colleague, and he started to ask my opinion about something. And he said something like, since you're the communications expert, and I thought, I am. And I may have even said that out loud. I did not feel like an expert at that time. But in his eyes, somebody who was

Starting point is 00:04:12 not in the communications department, I was. I did know more about communications than he did, and I was able to help him out. And so as podcasters, we might not always feel like we know what we're doing, but we are often at least one step ahead of our guests. Our interviewees are looking to us for guidance. So let's give it to them. You are a podcaster. So own this identity. Write it down. I am the kind of podcaster who will do what it takes to create a quality show that my audience loves. This means speaking up when something goes wrong and fixing it in the moment. So if your internet signal drops and cuts off something brilliant that your guest said, don't hope that it's magically going to sound okay later on. Ask them to repeat themselves. We are in control of our podcast and we can't expect anyone else

Starting point is 00:05:04 to know what's going on or to be in charge of the conversation. That's our responsibility. Another time to speak up is when your guest just can't stop talking. Some people are naturally long-winded. Others are just nervous. Maybe they haven't done many interviews. They don't know exactly what answer you want from them. And so they just keep going and going. You can sometimes prevent this by asking more specific questions. So instead of tell me about your travels, you can try. Tell me about the first trip that you took without your parents. If you're asking great questions, but your guest is still speaking at length, don't be afraid to interrupt them. are they'll be grateful. Some people just don't know how to stop, so they keep going, and you can

Starting point is 00:05:52 always edit out your interruptions. If you don't chime in during the interview, you're going to have two bad options to deal with later. Either one, you're going to have to do a lot of editing to do to tighten up that conversation and delete the content that drags or just goes on and on and is repetitive. Or two, you don't add it enough and your audience suffers through an episode that's when you're 30% too long. And then you might have a guest who is overly self-promotional. They're really keen to promote their book or their website or their podcast or whatever they have going on, but instead of talking about it naturally, they come off sounding like a sales pitch. To try and avoid this, when you're inviting the guests onto your show, you can ask them in advance,

Starting point is 00:06:38 is there something in particular that you want to talk about, anything that you want to pitch? Then right before the interview, let them know that you're going to promote them in the intro, in the outro and that you'll also bring it up in the conversation. And this can help relax them a little bit and reassure them that they're not going to have to find a place to jump in and mention their product or service or whatever else they have happening. So hopefully most of your guests will be great and understand that their message is what's going to motivate listeners to seek out more information on them.

Starting point is 00:07:08 I mean, think about the podcast that you listen to. If you hear a really great guess, chances are you're going to check the show notes. You might go check out their website. You don't need them to tell you to do that. You're going to be motivated by their message. And hard sales, they really turn off pretty much everyone. So if your guest gets overly aggressive in mentioning their website or product, you can just cut out some of these references. It'll be better for your audience and it's also going to make your guests look better. And then you might run into a hijacking guest. So a lot of new podcasters worry when their guests ask if they can share audio of the interview. Maybe they've got their own podcast and they want to

Starting point is 00:07:48 run the episode there. As long as they mention that the interview is from your podcast and they promote it in that way, I think it's really great when guests share your content in that way. It's free advertising for you and the most popular podcast networks like Gimlet and NPR do this all of the time. It's a win-win for both you and the person that you interviewed. However, if somebody is trying to hijack your content, then that's a problem. So another example of something I did wrong at the beginning of my podcast career. I had one guest suggest that she write the blog post for the episode and she pitched it in a being helpful kind of splitting the work kind of way.

Starting point is 00:08:27 But I knew this was a marketing move on her part so she could get all of the website traffic to her site. And she was a great interview. I really enjoyed talking to her, but she was also a force of nature. And I didn't really feel comfortable saying no to her. at first. And also part of me thought, well, I have a lot going on. It would be really nice and helpful if she did the show notes. But she was going to put them on her site and I agreed to let her do that. But this didn't make any sense. If someone wants to play your podcast on their podcast and give you

Starting point is 00:09:02 credit, then that's a bonus advertisement for you. But me pointing my listeners to someone else's website for my show notes, I should not have done let. And just to clarify, when we interview people, we should always be mentioning our guest website and their contact information, but we should do our own show notes and point our listeners to our websites. So even if our podcasts are pure creative outlets and they're not marketing vehicles for a business, we should still treat our podcast like a business. They're both about building relationships with people. And so if we have our business hats on, I'm not going to direct people to another person's website, another business. You know, my customers slash listeners would be so confused. Why are you sending us away?

Starting point is 00:09:52 So sometimes if you're working on a specific collaboration, this might make sense. But in general, point listeners to your own website and continue to build your relationship with them in that way. So in hindsight, when that guest asked me about doing the show notes, I should have just said, Thank you so much, but don't worry, I've got this. And then you have the want-to-be guest. So when you start to grow in popularity, people will start emailing you to get on your show. Some people are obviously not a good fit. If you usually interview women who just graduated from college and the person trying to get on your show is a mid-career salesman, is he the best fit?

Starting point is 00:10:31 Probably not. Has the person trying to get on your show or their PR person even listened to your show? or are they just emailing everybody? Things feel a little more complicated when a fan writes into you telling you how much they love the show, such and such episode is their favorite, they'll tell you why, they'll give you specifics, this could be true, this could just be a good pitching tactic on their part, and they'll ask to be a guest on your show, and maybe it's a topic that you're not that into, you don't think they would be the best guess, they're just not the right fit,

Starting point is 00:11:06 But people-pleasing podcasters anguish over how to respond to this. Should he be on my show? I always feel bad saying, no, he just wrote this nice email. Maybe I can make it work if I just do this. I don't really want to do this. But how can I say no without hurting his feelings? We need to stop this. We shouldn't be spending any energy on how to craft polite rejection letters.

Starting point is 00:11:33 We have enough going on. And we're just creating this drama in our heads. I mean, to be honest, if we just say no to somebody, they're probably just going to move on and not really think about it at all. But if someone seems like a great fit, we could tell them that we're interested and we'd love to talk more. But if a guest feels like the wrong fit, we could respond by saying something like, thank you so much for listening to this podcast, your book podcast, etc. if they mentioned something to us that they wanted to talk about. We can say that sounds so interesting. It's not the right fit for my particular show,

Starting point is 00:12:10 but I am sure the right audience is going to love it. And that's all we have to do. Or you don't have to respond at all. If a stranger pitches you, you have no obligation to even respond. And definitely we shouldn't be letting strangers like change our emotional state and stress us out. if a fan takes the time to write in and tell me about themselves and how they would love to be on the show and they've written a considerate pitch, then I will take the time to write them back and say yes or no. But if it's a PR agency that's pitching everyone and they're obviously wrong for my show or it's somebody sending the same generic pitch email to everyone, I'll just ignore those. So just remember, focus on.

Starting point is 00:12:59 this. Does the potential interviewee have something to say that will add value to your listener? That's really the only thing that you have to worry about. And it's a lot easier to say no when you are clear on who your ideal listener is and also when you know who your ideal interviewee is. So on my travel podcast, I primarily focus on expat women. Sometimes I deviate from that, but it's always my choice. For example, I just interviewed a local tour guide in the town where I I've been living since January. The seaside town where I'm living now is so cute. It has so much to offer.

Starting point is 00:13:36 It's only an hour from London. And I know that my audience would be curious about this place. But I usually interview other traveling expat women like myself. So that's women who have moved abroad. So if a male fan of my show writes in and asks if he can come on the show to talk about his family's two-week trip to Ireland, I can easily say, thank you so much for listening to the show. I'm glad that you had a great time in Ireland with a beautiful country. On my podcast, I focus primarily on women who moved abroad rather than shorter family trips. However, if our paths cross in

Starting point is 00:14:10 reality someday, I would love to talk to you about Ireland. Thank you again so much for being a fan of the show. I really appreciate you listening. Another way that you can vet guests is to put a form on your website, and this is for potential guests to fill out. So instead of just having them email you, You can ask them specific questions like, what's your favorite episode of my podcast and why? What topics would you want to discuss if you came on my show? Why would my audience find value in this? What makes your story and you a good fit for my audience? But what do you do when you interview someone, you thought they were going to be good,

Starting point is 00:14:50 or maybe you felt guilty and so you interviewed them, and it just didn't work. The conversation didn't flow. the guest was unprepared and gave you, I'm not sure, or I don't know that much about that for your answers. Maybe something just fell off or after listening you realize there's not enough substance here for a whole episode. You can't publish a show that you're not proud of and that would waste your listeners' time. So what do you do? A lot of podcasters just ghost and I will be honest, I have done this myself. You just pretend it never happened.

Starting point is 00:15:24 That, of course, is not the mature way to handle things. So alternatives could be creating a blog post instead, or you could experiment with a narrative episode by pulling together the best sound bites from the guest and then speaking around that. You can also try interviewing a few other people on the same subject and then including all of those sound bites in one episode. So to cut down the work for you, you can focus on one particular question from the original interview and then ask the other guests that same question. And you could set this up in a way for those potential guests to call in their answer and leave it as a voicemail. There's a service

Starting point is 00:16:04 called SpeakPipe that lets you do this. Or you could just write to the guest and say that while you enjoyed the conversation, after you listen back to it, there just wasn't enough there for the whole to create a whole episode. This admittedly feels really awkward because they did give you. You you an hour or so of your time and you feel like a jerk wasting it. This is why the blog post, while it might be more work, could be a nicer alternative. Whatever you do, don't lie and say the audio is bad or, oh, I accidentally deleted the interview because what if they say, oh, no problem. I actually recorded my end as well. Here you go. So just be honest. And then finally, this has nothing to do with yes, but more marketers, content creators, influencers, who are all

Starting point is 00:16:52 looking for ways to promote their stuff. So one way they like to do this is by getting other people to link to their website. Google ranks pages higher if they have backlinks. Neil Patel is a very popular marketer who co-hosts the podcast Marketing School. And he shared this tactic with people. So he encourages people to find people who are creating content similar to theirs, email them, praise them on a recent article that they wrote something specific. Say that you wrote something similar and that their audience would probably found tremendous value in it and then offer them a link that they could use so that you can link to their website. Maybe the content makes sense for your audience.

Starting point is 00:17:41 Maybe it doesn't. But this tactic really turns me off. It's obvious that they only want a link to their website. They don't care about your content at all. I really like Neil Battell and his work, but that particular tactic drives me nuts because so many people are doing it and it's obvious that they're not being genuine. In fact, here is a message that I got today. Dear Postcard Academy didn't even use my name.

Starting point is 00:18:06 It was just the name of my website. And it looks like they must have just done some sort of like automated system where they were scraping information or something. So, dear Postcard Academy, I saw one of your articles on Citizenship and decided to contact you since it looks like we aim to help the same audience. To be straight and honest, I am looking for a link back from your article to a complete guide on the topic that we have. It will be a perfect fit and resource for your readers. So at least he was straight and honest about just wanting a link back. What's in it for you? We can help you by sharing your website on our social media channels, which will increase your brand awareness and

Starting point is 00:18:45 visitors. Does it sound worthy? Let me know if you have any other suggestions. I'm, that doesn't sound worthy for me. So, no, I'm not going to respond to that. I'd be more open to sharing other people's stuff. If they emailed me and said something like, hey, I love your show. I know you focus on XYZ topic. I'm really interested in that too. I just wrote an article on XYZ. Thought you might like it. The end, no pitch, just being a good human. Even if that was a non-pitch pitch and they were hoping for me to link back to them, they're at least coming off as more sincere, somebody I would actually want to interact with and promote only if their content could add value to my audience. To sum all of this up, interrupt guests when you need to get the

Starting point is 00:19:32 conversation back on track. If you hear them rustling around or typing or making other weird sounds on their end of the recording, let them know that this is being captured on the audio so they can stop doing that. They're not going to get in that. they will be grateful that you care about making them look good. And plus, you'll be respected as a podcast pro when you take audio quality and interviewing seriously. Two, tell us that you are going to promote them in the intro and in the outro and that you will bring up what they want to talk about in the conversation. If they get overly aggressive in mentioning their website or product, I would cut out some of those references. Three, don't waste your time and energy overthinking how to speak up

Starting point is 00:20:13 and how to say no, just do it. We're the ones creating stress in our minds about how people are going to react. Rational people are not going to get mad if we turn down their offer to be a guest on our show. They will probably not give it a second thought. Four, you owe it to your audience to vet your guests. Your audience trusts you and gives you their valuable time, so make sure that you don't waste it. And five, we need to show up as leaders. This might not feel natural at first, but if you push through being scared and focus on who you're serving, you'll start to feel more comfortable speaking up. As I always like to say, changing how we act changes who we are. And when we start acting like leaders, that is who we become. And that's how we maintain control of our podcast

Starting point is 00:20:58 so we can keep serving our audience in the best way possible. Thank you for listening to podcasting step by step. You are now one step closer to launching that podcast you've been dreaming about. but I want to get you even closer. I created a free guidebook for you with actionable worksheets called Eight Mistakes New Podcasters Make and How to Fix Them. To find that, head on over to sarah micahatel.com slash fix. Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free conversation sheet sheet with simple formulas that you can use

Starting point is 00:21:37 so you can respond with clarity, whether you're in a meeting or just talking with friends. Download it at Sarah Mycadel. can tell.com slash blank no more.

Influential Introvert: Communication Coaching for Professionals with Performance Anxiety - Be the Leader Your Podcast Needs By Speaking Up

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