Podcast Overwhelm Coping Tactics

The more you strive to grow your podcast, the more your plate fills up with things you need to do and eventually, you end up with more and more plates to the point that you could enter the world plate spinning championships.

The point is: there are a lot of people giving you advice on how to grow your podcast and most of it is decent advice (except those dodgy LinkedIn "podcast promoters") and so when you begin to think about actually what to do about your audience growth, you can feel so overwhelmed that you do nothing because you have no idea where to start or what is the most important thing to do, and when.

I have a way to fix that. Read on my wonderful friend.

(Before you do, we have this free Podcast Maker Day event this week that will give you a few hours of focus time to work on your podcast with our team. It's open to everyone.)

I hate the word "coping" - I want you to experience more than that.

I work best under pressure. The shorter a deadline is, the better my work is and until a few years ago I thought that was something that was a problem but that couldn't be further from the truth - it's a real power.

When I owned my digital and design agency (from 2005 to 2017) I used to be the "face person" of the business - I'd produce the content and lead the vision of the agency whilst also working on the tendering and pitching for some of our biggest contracts. 

Tenders, in particular, were a complete and utter pain in the proverbial, though.

We would receive a request for quotation (RFQ) a few months before the tender closing date but every single time our tender documentation would be submitted just before the deadline closed - I was never ahead with it.

Granted, there was a little strategy to that (look up "Primacy, Frequency and Recency" to understand that a little more) but if I'm completely honest I left things to the last minute because I knew that my work would be better with some pressure.

Sure, in the early days I'd make a deep start really early and get things done way ahead of time but the work was never as good as a "rush" job and I had absolutely no idea why. 

On the days that we got the heads up on a tender that closed "tomorrow", I did better work than on those tenders that we'd had months to work on and it baffled me. I mean it really baffled me.

Once I noticed it I began to relish it, though.

I knew my business, I knew my industry and I knew how to write good tenders; I had come to understand myself enough to know that my "quick" decisions were actually highly thought out plans and strategies that I'd been mulling over in my head for months before and it was just the getting it on paper that was done at the last minute.

On the morning of a big tender deadline I knew that I usually had until 1pm to submit it, so I would get up at 4am, grab a Yorkshire Tea and get to the studio for 5am.

Once I got there, I would put on some loud rock music and forget that anything else existed for the few hours that I worked on the tender.

At around 12:30pm the tender would have been checked by Don and off it went, getting submitted and often, won.

When I moved into public speaking, I'd do the same.

I'd have a talk planned for some time way in the future and would leave the prep until the very, very last minute - I even did it with my TEDx talk!

But it was the same scenario: I'd already planned the story, takeaways and the beats of the talk in my head and had been practicing it, refining it and rehearsing it for weeks prior to simply getting it down on paper.

In...