Monday, August 2, 2021

Today:

“Remember, it’s not what you say, do, or wear. It’s how you make people feel that generates executive presence. Nothing. Else. Matters.”

Hello, this is Joe Kwon, the Connection Counselor, and welcome to another edition of Executive Presence Morsels - bonus episodes. So we've been talking a little bit about how I make this podcast, as well as other podcasts. And so you can understand kind of the process and maybe you're the type of person who's thinking about doing a podcast yourself.

It's a really popular and creative medium, but maybe you don't have the confidence or the wherewithal to figure all that stuff out, in the crazy worldwide web with all the information that's out there. So what I'm trying to do here in 5 to 10 minutes is just share with you some of the basics that I've learned after years of doing this to maybe give you a jumpstart and get you started in the right direction.

There's plenty of additional information and you should probably talk to others, if you know, who've done this before. But hopefully this will just help you get situated.

So today we're going to talk about the polish, right. Making of a podcast - the polish. And what I mean by that is if you have been listening to podcasts, you'll notice that there's a difference between one that someone just makes on their own and one that's heavily, heavily produced right by a major news or production company. And here's the thing, even without all the resources and the staff, you can do little things to really Polish and upgrade the production of your podcast. So it seems, you know, nearly as good, right? No, one's going to mistake you for NPR tomorrow, but you can do things to really bridge the gap and they don't cost a lot of money and they aren't complicated. They just require a little bit of planning and execution. And probably the last part, which I'll talk about later, is consistency.

So, what are some of the basic things that make for a polished podcast? Well, one thing you'll notice is they always have an intro, right? And that intro could just be you talking about the show and what it's about. It could be someone, a friend or a person that you know, who does voiceover, who does the introduction. It can have a little bit of music playing in the background or you can go without music.

The key is. It's the opening of your show, kind of like when you watch a TV show or something on Netflix, it's that same opening every time. Now people can skip it or they can listen to it, but it's consistent and it's kind of a marker that, okay, this is where you are. This is what's going on and this is what's about to happen.

So, all podcasts and other media with sort of polish, have that consistent beginning, right? To let people know what's going on, and what's about to happen.

Let's switch to the tail end. One thing that also shows polish is your close. So, if I were just to end this podcast and say, "okay," and that was it, it wouldn't really feel like I put a lot of thought or energy into it.

So there's two ways you can handle the close - you can do similar to the intro and have something prerecorded, and just play that and drop that into the end of your episode every time. And the nice thing about that is it's truly consistent, right? It's like pre-recorded and you just drop it in and it's the same every single time. Again, you can use music or you can do without, you can do it yourself, or you can ask someone to help you do it. The key is you're going to leave a consistent kind of closing message a thank you. If you want a call to action. If you want some information or requests for them to do something like, follow the show or tell other people about it. Or even just to reflect on what's been going on.

So that way you kind of develop that...it's like a sandwich, right? You have that bottom piece of bread and the top piece of bread and your content, right? Your great content is what's in the middle of the sandwich, the tasty goodness in the middle of the sandwich. But, you kind of need, the open and the close to hold everything together. So those are two things that really help make your show seem more polished.

Also, I talked about consistency. That's also something that's really helpful. You don't want your show to be a different format every single time, unless your show is about being different every single time. Generally people are gonna want a consistent format. So if it's an interview show, you should constantly be interviewing, right? If there are certain types of questions or, or approaches you take, that should be fairly consistent.

Cause when people like that, they're going to want some more of that. They're not necessarily going to want you to drastically change everything every time. That makes people confused and they just want to typically be challenged, but also in a way that's relaxing and not jarring, right? So they can get the most out of the content you're producing. So consistency is also key even in the totally creatively generated things that aren't prerecorded. There should be some consistency about it.

And that's the last point I'm going to make on the polish is, most polished podcasts have a framework with which they always deal with. So if you were to look at the show behind the scenes, the way that clips are put together, you would see like opening segment, and then there's an intro, and then there's an introduction of the guest or introduction of what you're going to talk about. And then there's part one, there's part two, maybe there's part three. And then at the close, you have the closing actions - so requests, call to action. And you develop sort of a rhythm. It's like a routine that feels familiar and the more people listen to your podcast, the more familiar it will feel.

So I've tried to do that with my episodes. And when I do something different, I announce it is different, right? So these making of episodes are different than the Executive Presence Morsels episodes, which we'll be launching on July 5th, the day after Independence day. Can't wait to see you every weekday, 7 a.m.,five days a week for one year.

That's my commitment to you for one year, and really excited to start the journey with you. If you have any requests or any encouragement you'd like to share, please go ahead. I'll leave a link in the show description where you can easily leave a voice message on Anchor and let us know what you think about the show so far.

Thanks so much. I'm Joe Kwon, the Connection Counselor. Remember, you can change your life - one connection at a time.

Tuesday, July 22, 2021

Today: Find out the basics of how this podcast and other podcasts are made. Today we talk about how to come up with compelling content and some basic options for delivering it.

Sarah Elkins' website: https://elkinsconsulting.com/

Joe’s 1st ever podcast appearance on Sarah’s show: https://elkinsconsulting.com/sarahs-blog-podcast/2018/2/27/you-think-youre-a-good-manager

Your turn: We'd love to hear from you. Use the "Message" button on the Anchor app to share a story, question, or feedback related to this episode. Or email us at joe@connectioncounselor.com

Learn more: Details about the book, online course, YouTube tutorials and more can be found at www.connectioncounselor.com/executive-presence-place

Music: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann is licensed under a CC0 1.0 Universal License

“Remember, it’s not what you say, do, or wear. It’s how you make people feel that generates executive presence. Nothing. Else. Matters.”

Hi, this is Joe Kwon, the Connection Counselor, and welcome to another bonus episode of Executive Presence Morsels. Today, we'll be talking about making of a podcast. The content - specifically. Before we begin, I just wanted to give a special shout-out and thanks to a good friend and colleague of mine, Sarah Elkins, who’s a storytelling consultant and also a podcaster and author.

She has this great podcast about storytelling, “Your Stories Don't Define You, But How You Tell Them Will,” and I was fortunate enough to be invited to be a guest on her podcast many years ago. And after the podcast concluded, I asked her if she had some time to spare, so she could share with me a little bit about how she got started, the equipment she uses, just kind of basic things like that.

And she was very gracious, spent just a little bit of time with me. And just that additional amount of inspiration, and inspiration, gave me the boost I needed, to have the confidence and just the willingness to go through and start my own podcast, “Why It Works,” and the rest is kind of history.

So I just wanted to give a big thank you and acknowledgement to Sarah for helping me, give me that little nudge to get me on my podcasting journey. Now, for those of you who are listening, these will be some insights on the content and how to come up with content for a podcast, sort of the thought process I used for this one and all my other podcasts, as well as if you're thinking about doing something yourself, this may be helpful.

First point - topic. What is the topic that you're going to talk about? There's probably many things you could talk about. So how do you decide, which is exactly the one that you want to share in the podcast?

And there's a pretty straightforward way to think about this. What are you passionate about? What is the thing that no one would even have to pay you to talk about it? You just light up like a sun when you talk about it and people respond positively positively to you when you talk about it, because you're bringing such passion and joy to the topic.

So when you figure out what that thing is, that really helps you zero in on a great potential topic for your podcast.

Now, what you want to talk about is not all that matters, right? The audience is important too. If you're just talking to yourself and not to anyone else, you're, you're monologuing like, like a villain in a movie, right? And we don't want that.

So how do you figure out how to connect with your audience and how to engage them. And a good way to think about that, I heard this on a lot of sort of marketing type videos or coming up with content videos, and I think it applies equally to podcasts is, “What is the pain of your audience, right?”

What is the challenge, the issue, the difficulty, that they're going through? And if your content can acknowledge that pain, if what you talk about resonates with them because of that pain, and even better, if it can help alleviate and solve some of that pain, then you will have an uber-engaged audience.

So on the one hand, your topic, you love talking about it, you're great at talking about it; you bring the energy, the passion…on the other hand, your content dovetails or coincides with the pain that your audience is experiencing and what they want to hear about and, listen to you about. Then you have a really great beginnings of the content for your podcast.

So now you have the topic. You also know how it's going to engage with the audience. How are you going to deliver that content? What is the format that you want to use?

So there's two basic ways. We're going to keep it simple here, that you could do that. The first way is more of an interview format. And the second way is more, just you talking and sharing.

So both ways are equally valid and each have their pros and cons. So I'm going to talk very briefly about each of those.

Now the interview format is probably what you're more used to hearing in a podcast. You are the host or the moderator or facilitator. You have a guest come on and they share their expertise on the topic of the day.

Now, the great thing about that is you're meeting with a guest, they're providing insights, you're learning, your audience is learning. There's variety because you can have different guests on different shows.

A bonus thing is you're getting to meet those new people that you might not otherwise have a good context to meet. So it's great for networking to meet those people.

The con is you're dealing with another person and scheduling can be a problem. They may not be as much of an expert as you thought they were. All those normal kind of variables that come into play when you're dealing with another person. That's something that you have to be willing, to deal with when you're dealing with a guest.

Now the other format is when you were essentially the guest and you're sharing your information. Now, the good thing, the pro about that is, you know, your schedule, right? You're on time for the thing that you want to do, you know your expertise, you know how good of a guest you're going to be. You're not going to surprise yourself by being a much better or worse guest. So you're going to have some consistency and predictability there.

The bad thing is, you are the guest. So you have carry the entire show by yourself and you have to do it the whole time, whether it's 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes, and you have to do it from show to show. So you have to bring the variety, you have to bring the energy and you have to bring the engagement for the audience because you don't really have anyone else like a cohost or a guest to sort of lean on.

Again, both of those formats are equally valid and equally enjoyable for the audience. You just have to decide what makes the most sense for your topic, for your format.

Well, thanks for joining us again on this bonus episode of Executive Presence Morsels, Making of a Podcast. We talked about the content today.

On July 5th, we are launching our daily podcast, Executive Presence Morsels, five days a week delivered in the morning at 7:00 AM Eastern, so you have a chance to listen to it first thing in the morning, and then reflect, or maybe even use some of the things you learn during the day.

I'd love to hear from you until then. If you have any questions or suggestions for the show or any reactions to this episode, we'd love to hear from you. Just go to anchor FM, either the app or the website where you can leave a voice message.

I'd love to hear from you. And when we can, we may feature it on a future episode. This is Joe Kwon, the Connection Counselor. Remember, you can change your life - One connection at a time.

Monday, August 2, 2021

Today: Find out the basics of how this podcast and other podcasts are made. Today we cover how to edit your podcast to sound like a pro with a minimum amount of time, money, and headache.

For help with your podcast, contact Neil Hughes: https://techblogwriter.co.uk/

The audiobook I mention, Unlock Your Charisma: Feel like a Star can be found on Audible: https://www.audible.com/pd/B0889YVCMM/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-195466&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_195466_rh_us

Your turn: We'd love to hear from you. Use the "Message" button on the Anchor app to share a story, question, or feedback related to this episode. Or email us at joe@connectioncounselor.com

Learn more: Details about the book, online course, YouTube tutorials and more can be found at www.connectioncounselor.com/executive-presence-place

Music: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann is licensed under a CC0 1.0 Universal License

“Remember, it’s not what you say, do, or wear. It’s how you make people feel that generates executive presence. Nothing. Else. Matters.”

Hello, this is Joe Kwon, the Connection Counselor, and welcome to another edition of Executive Presence Morsels - bonus episode. Today, we're going to talk about the making of a podcast - the editing.

So you have your equipment and you figured out what you're going to talk about, right? That's what we covered in the first two episodes, the equipment, and then the content, and now you've recorded it. Now, you have to get into its final format, right, before you upload it or post it. How do you do that?

Well, again, we're going to keep things really simple today, just to give you the basics so you can put together a decent, professional sounding episode without spending hundreds of dollars or having to buy really arcane software, sophisticated software or paying an arm and a leg for that..

So with just a minimal amount of editing and thoughtfulness, you can actually create a very clean professional sounding episode. And here's the great thing about editing. Nobody can really tell that you've done it. Right? Even just with the most simplest, basic edits, if you do it with a little bit of practice, it'll be very hard for people, Maybe someone who's got a really good ear and is listening for it; but for the average listener, who's listening to it in their car, or, at the gym or while waiting for coffee, they're not really going to notice the difference and it's going to sound fantastic.

First of all, what do you use to edit the audio, right? So you have the audio recorded, there's a couple options. One, you could use a free software like Audacity. They also have, different types of software you can use on your phone. These all have the basic kind of editing functionality that's very similar. If you've used iMovie or any other sort of editing app, you're probably familiar with the basic functionality. We'll talk about that in a second.

You could also use functionality that [is] sometimes included in the podcasting platform that you're using. For this podcast, I happen to be using, Anchor.fm. I don't use it for my other podcasts, but I am using it for this. And Anchor recently released its own editing, sort of, not really software, but ability to edit it, on their website and on your device. And that functionality is also very similar.

So, how do you use it? There's some really, really basic steps to take. The first, I'm just going to call it trimming. And that's what it sounds like.

There's usually a lot of, kind of banter or getting ready and background noise at the beginning. And then at some point you're like, all right, we're getting ready to record. And then you're off. You want to get rid of everything up until the point where you actually start the podcast. So it's like none of that existed.

So it's very easy. Usually there's a line or a bar that you pull towards the space that you want. You set it there, and then there's usually a button you hit and then it just wipes out and deletes everything that happened before as if it wasn't there.

On the tail end, you can do the same thing. At the end of the episode, sometimes you haven't pressed finish recording, and you're still talking to your guest or, if you're doing a solo podcast, you're doing something else and maybe there's some noise as you get up. You can also bring the slider or the bar to that point and edit that as well.

So the most basic functionality you're going to want to do is edit the beginning, so you start at the right place and edit the end. So you end and you don't have any extraneous, type audio.

Now a little bit more sophisticated, although not that much, you can split. Right? So splitting basically means what it sounds like. You can make cuts in the middle of the episode.

So why might you want to do that. Here's one really good reason. There could be a time where there's a distracting noise - there's a lawnmower that comes on, your kid comes in, a spouse or partner opens the door and interrupts you, and then you have to right reset.

You don't need to scrap the whole thing and rerecord again, you can just edit out the part that's a distraction. Here's the key though. You can't make sounds go away. So what you have to do is, when you understand what you're going to edit out, you have to get the person, either yourself or your guest, or both to start off at a point where it naturally fits in, even after you cut things off.

So if, uh, the interruption happens in the middle of a sentence, you're going to have to, when you rerecord during that podcast, you're going to have to start that sentence again. Right? Cause the splitting is not magic. It just cuts out the piece that you don't want. It doesn't magically recreate anything.

So that's one reason you can use the split. Another reason - there could be a really long pause, right? Someone could be thinking and that's natural and that's great. But if someone's thinking for 5, 7, 8, 9, 10 minutes, people start to, I mean seconds, people are going to start to think, is there something wrong with the audio? Did it drop off?

So good once in a while for dramatic effect when it's appropriate, but for the everyday, you don't really want silences more than 2, 3, 4 seconds. It's no problem just to cut out some of that time, to make it seem more natural and keep people more engaged.

Last little tip, something that I learned from doing audio books, when, you have a portion that got interrupted and, you know you want to go back to edit it later, sometimes it can be kind of hard to find.

I mean, if you don't have the presence of mind to write down, the time when it happened or you get distracted after you're done recording and you forget exactly what part of the conversation was, you're going to have to listen to the whole podcast over again, to find it and be sure that you find it.

Although I do recommend you listen to the podcast, through and through before you post it anyway, it's a lot easier, if you know where that piece is, so you can get to cutting it right away.

So here's one tip that I learned. When there is something you need to cut, when there's a mistake, it's easy to mark it by clapping. I'm going to clap softly, not too loud, cause I don't want to hurt your ears, but if you clap, it leaves sort of a big, sort of mark or a wave on your podcasting line, timeline when you do the editing.

So it can be very easy to go back and see, you know, there's a certain height, there's a certain height, there’s a certain height when you clap, it's like, boom, the line goes up. So that way you'll know where it is and you can go back and very easily cut that out using the split functionality.

So I hope this has been helpful for you just with a little bit of editing, you can make a really professional looking and sounding podcast.

Quick plug for a good colleague and friend of mine, Neil C. Hughes, he's a tech writer, celebrity interviewer, and podcast tech facilitator. So that's the part that I want to share with you. Some people they don't, I like to do the technology and I enjoy the editing and posting myself, some people you just want to get on the mic and you want someone else to deal with all of that.

Neil is a maestro at doing that so you don't have to worry about that. You can do what you do best on the mic and podcasting. So I'll leave a link, to his website where you can talk to him and see if he can help you get things set up and rolling. So, fantastic guy and he's helped a lot of people get their podcasts up and running, especially if the technical piece isn't something that you like or are interested in.

So my name is Joe Kwon, the Connection Counselor. Thank you for listening to Executive Presence Morsels - bonus edition. We'd love to hear from you. Let us know what podcasting app you use to record and edit your podcast.

Do you use Anchor? Do you use Audacity? Do you use something else? How is it? Do you like it? Are you looking to use something else? Really curious to see what others are out there doing.

My name is Joe Kwon, the Connection Counselor. Remember you can change your life - one connection at a time. Thank you.