Diary of a Podcaster Part 1 – Hit the Record Button
As my hand hovers the record button nervously I push it to begin what will be my first journey into the podcast world.
It’s January 2019 and I am recording my first ever episode of Positive Impact, however my podcasting journey would start many months before.
In May 2018 I had joined a mastermind group which had changed my life for the better in a number of ways. The area of my life I had been struggling the most with was vision. I just didn’t know how I could impact the world. What would I leave behind when I left this world? What would be my legacy? What would be the thing that people remembered me for? What was my why?
I don’t know if you could call it a Eureka moment but the mastermind had given me my confidence back in a way that I hadn’t felt since my early 20’s and those around me were beginning to notice. All my life I had felt different from everyone else but in this mastermind we were all the same – round pegs that had spent their whole lives trying to fit into square holes. I was mixing with positive people who wanted to go somewhere and do something which was infectious. During a long night of the soul it just came out of me while on a video call to a friend “I am going to launch a podcast and movement, and I am going to call it Positive Impact”.
That was the beginning……in Autumn 2018, so for the last quarter of 2018 I went about putting my plan into action. Fortunately I had some good advice and was able to plug into three experienced podcasters to give me some excellent advice from the get go. Many will think that podcasting is just one or two people talking on a microphone and uploading it to iTunes. Sure some are like that but I wanted to make sure my product was professional and impactful from the get go which took planning. Planning to get my message clear, reaching out to guests, scheduling, editing and show notes – as I would find out it takes a lot of work to get a decent podcast off the ground. In the early days you are doing 100% of everything, which means late nights and early mornings!!
Pushing that button was nerve wracking – I didn’t know how I would sound, whether I would stutter, muddle my words, um, ah and use all the wrong words but I did it. It was a massive step for me and my voice was finally out there.
So why a Podcast, and why Positive Impact?
I had been listening to podcasts for well over a year by the time I pushed the button on my own and I liked the medium, I liked it a lot. I liked the free form and long form discussions that went deep into subject’s main stream media didn’t have the time or inclination to go into. Discussions that went a layer deeper than what you would typically hear on commercial or national radio, and discussions that were extremely relevant to the lives of listeners. What I was listening to reminded me of conversations I would have with my own friends and family and how the older I got, the more I looked forward to social occasions for some really good conversations.
I could see that being around like minded people was having a Positive Impact on me and I could also see that being around positive people was an infectious thing to behold. What crystallised in my head was the fact that there was a social backdrop to the negativity that was reaching epidemic proportions in the Western world. My belief is that this social backdrop has contributed to the sense of helplessness many people nowadays feel about their life situation, which is then compounded by self-limiting beliefs, passed down from generation to generation, which crushes any form of ambition or pushing beyond what people think is possible. So many believe that life is just the way it is, you can’t change it so why bother!!! Crazy but it’s true – I have described it to people like a cancer which is afflicting society today.
So many of us have been fed this story that happy high performing people have superpowers or have somehow gotten to where they have through ill-gotten gains, bribery or corruption. Success or achievement is a bad thing. Get in line and conform!!!
I noticed that I had made positive changes to myself that were having a positive impact on me and those around me, indeed the world around me. I also noticed that many of the skills I was learning were not super powers but learnable. It was at this stage that I realised that what I had done was a repeatable process. How could I take it to the world? – Positive Impact.
Currently the podcast is phase 1 of this process and phase 2 is building a Positive Impact community to grow the movement into something much bigger than just me.
#improveyourselfinspireothers is my hashtag which strikes right at the heart of what I am doing.
My qualifications? I had good cause to think that life had dealt me a bad hand. After my grandparents passed away throughout my early teens, I lost my mum at 18 in a road traffic accident, was sacked from my job at 22, felt a failure for much of my adult life, and in 2015 lost my dad along with suffering a business debt that almost sank our second generation family business. I also have an Autistic daughter which means constant battles with the ‘system’.
But……………I got through all this, and the death of my Dad in 2015 was the event that really made me look very closely at how I would be remembered when I left this earth. I get life’s challenges on a deeply human level, I get how they affect people and I get how you can use them to make positive change.
The Positive Impact Movement and podcast is about so much more than me, it’s about sharing my struggles, and the struggles and experience of my podcast guests with listeners. It’s about listeners feeling inspired and realising that they can make positive changes to themselves.
Long term it’s about building a community of likeminded people who are going to build each other up rather than tear each other down. A community where you can come and be accepted if you have always felt like you are a round peg in a square hole.
Next time……………from Los Angeles USA to Melbourne Australia
