← Podcast Answer Man
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Well, I did it. I missed an episode. Last week was the first time since I made a commitment to return to Podcast Answer man on a weekly basis that I failed to release an episode on Friday morning at 12:01am and you know what? The world is still spinning. I could give you all sorts of details about my travel schedule, how I was in California for Social Media Marketing World last week and spoke to an audience of around 400 people, connected deeply with 116 people. And even though I brought all of my podcast gear with me when it came time to record this episode in my hotel room on Thursday evening so that it would come out at 12:01am Friday morning, I simply didn't have it within me. I was so spent socially and I'm an introvert, so I find myself getting recharged when I spend time alone. And all throughout the event, I was up early in the morning and consistently with people throughout the day and had an incredible time. But when it came time to record that episode, I'm like, nope. And then the day after the conference on Friday, when I might have done this, maybe just a couple of hours late, no. I went to Disneyland with some folks from my Mastermind group. It was an incredible day. It was the right way to spend the day. And as I went to bed in my hotel room on Thursday evening, I asked myself, am I okay with missing a week? And the answer is yes. I didn't feel any guilt around it. I didn't feel any shame around about it. I wasn't worried about how you would perceive me if I failed to show up one week after making a commitment. I will be here every single week without failing. You know, and by the way, my travel schedule is not over. So I got back from Social Media Marketing World late Saturday night, technically early Sunday morning. Then I worked Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday of this week, and today is Thursday. Got up early this morning, had our normal routine, Stephanie and I. And then Thursday evening is when I typically would record Podcast Answer Man. But I'm not at home. I'm not in my studio. I'm in Bowling Green, Kentucky. I'm in an Airbnb and I want to paint the picture for you. I have my MacBook Pro 16 inch here on a bed at the edge of a bed. It's connected with a USB C cable that goes to my Zoom PodTrak P4 next little audio interface device. I do have my Sony headphones, my, what are they, MDR7506 headphones with the beautiful lush replacement ear pads that I talked about in my talk at Social Media Marketing World. And then for the microphone, I have a ton of mics that I've purchased to test out for portability. I'm actually using the Rode podmic, just the $99 rode podmic. I do have the foam windscreen over top of it and it's a great sounding microphone. It's a little bit on the heavy side, but you know what? It's what I threw in the bag. Out of all of the options that I have, and I have many, I chose this setup and it's of course connected with an XLR cable. Now I brought my power bank, the USB power bank, so that I could record my audio or so that it could power my Podtrak P4 next. Off of that, however, I didn't need it because I'm actually using the power from the USB bus port of my MacBook Pro to power the actual Zoom Podtrak P4 Next audio audio interface device. Now, I am not recording into the Podtrak P4 next. It is sitting here next to me. I could hit the record button and I could record as a backup to the SD card. But I'm doing now what I have done for many weeks now, and that is I'm recording directly into Adobe Audition. So everything that I'm speaking is going straight into the software, which will capture everything in high quality. And that's what I'm doing right now. But this is all just setting at the edge of the bed in this master bedroom in the Airbnb that we're staying in in Bowling Green, Kentucky. I am sitting at the edge of the bed, leaning over into the microphone that's sitting precariously on the bed. It's an odd looking setup and I'm just sitting on a chair from the corner that I pulled up to the bed. And it is not pristine recording environment material. It just is what it is. It's as portable as it gets. So last week I was in Anaheim, California. And again, I want you to know that for me there's something about if this show is going to be produced or published on Friday. Even though I sometimes will have this idea, you know what? Let's put Podcast Answer Man Recording on Tuesday in the schedule. Even though I do that, I've never recorded a Podcast Answer man on Tuesday. It always gets moved to Wednesday. And even though it's always moved to Wednesday, I never record on Wednesday, it always gets moved to Thursday morning. Now, I will say that sometimes on Thursday morning I record Podcast Answerman. However, more often than not it gets recorded on Thursday night, usually somewhere between four to six hours before it's scheduled to be released. So Thursday is my recording day. And last Thursday, as I said, I was in Anaheim, California, doing what was most important last week. And I missed the episode this week, on Thursday, right here, right now. I brought my gear. Thankfully, I have not depleted my social batteries. I am recharged, energized. And here I am just hours before this episode is scheduled to be released. And I am here showing up for you. And we're gonna talk about what goes through my mind as I think about all this. I've been thinking about what I wanna share about. The importance of consistency and what to do when you miss a week. And how I'm thinking about that, how I'm processing that. And it's not just this week, next week. So basically, we will get back on Saturday and I will be at work on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and next Thursday, myself, my wife and my daughter. By the way, did I say why I'm in Bowling Green? I'm in Bowling Green right now because my daughter graduates from college tomorrow. She's a. She's going to be a graduate of Western Kentucky University. And that's why we're here in Bowling Green next week, the three of us, my daughter McKenna and my wife and myself, we will be boarding a plane next Thursday to go to Fort Worth, Texas. We are going to be shopping for apartments for McKenna because she is going to go to law school at Texas A and M. And I'm not sure what I'm going to do next week as it relates to the show. I could record on Monday, I could record on Tuesday, I could record on Wednesday. All of those are very real options. And also I might be packing up all of this gear to record from Fort Worth, Texas, next week. It's all to be determined. But one thing that I do know is that outside of some very. Outside of the ordinary circumstances, I will be here every Friday at 12:01am that is my commitment. But even though I'm committed to something, one thing that I'm not committed to is perfection. So it is not important to me that I am perfect in keeping my streak. It is important to me to understand the reason why I've committed to being here every week. And it's not to impress you, it's not to show you how disciplined I am. It's not any of those things. It is. I am here because I believe in the power of consistently showing up to be available as a source of entertainment. Education, encouragement and inspiration in your life on a regular, ongoing basis. And you know what? I have people in my life that are committed to certain relationships with me, that we have routines that we do together. And even though we are committed to one another, whether that be friends, mastermind, group members, or even family, sometimes very outside of the ordinary situations come up where we miss a committed meeting, a time of gathering, it happens. The question is, what do you do when it happens? Hopefully it doesn't break the commitment. The commitment was still there last week, but there was also a little bit in my mind that says, you know what? I want to commit to showing up when I feel like I can be a source of encouragement when I feel like I could be a source of entertainment and education and inspiration. And showing up last week after three full days at this conference and actually a whole travel day before that. And going even before the first day of the conference, there was influencer dinner and it was late into the evening. So yeah, there's something about the standard for which I will want to show up. Now. Am I meeting that standard in my mind right now? Just barely. I am just barely meeting the standard of what I would hold myself to with this episode. I do have an idea of what I want to share with you. I think I have an important, important message. I think there's a message of grace that's involved in missing a week. And just because you miss one week doesn't mean that you have to say, well, it's all or nothing. I guess it kind of just back to whenever I feel like it again. And maybe my schedule, if you, if you go on a podcasting schedule, that's. I will record an episode whenever I have the, the ample amount of margin and time to record. And, and my schedule's not crazy. Well, if that were the case, there would be no episodes in May for Podcast Answer Man. Thankfully, as far as I'm concerned, there will have only been one episode in May, maybe only one episode in 2026 that I will miss. And it was last week's and I feel really good about the reason why I consciously made the decision to not record. I didn't have the energy level necessary because I poured all of that energy into something that was a much higher priority. And these circumstances were so far out of the norm that I gave myself grace. Now am I in my normal circumstances? No, I'm not. But I have the energy to come here with a pre thought out idea of what I want to say. And so even though I broke the streak, I did not break the commitment. So don't fear missing a single week. If you make a commitment to showing up every week for your community, just don't let it turn into some sort of vague drift where it's hit or miss from that time forward. Just make a commitment to return, to come back. The other thing that I want to say is that your podcasting schedule needs to be able to survive your actual life of what's going on. Things happen, and all sorts of unexpected things. Sometimes all sorts of undesirable things, all sorts of inconvenient things will show up in your life, in your schedule, in your travel, all of these things. And much of it can be prepared around much can be navigated. Occasionally something will happen and you'll intentionally, consciously make the decision to not show up that week. But it. You're. But you're going to have to find a way that if I'm committed to this, I'm going to show up. Even when life throws me twists and turns, as much as I have it within me to do it, I'm going to show up. And like I said last week, I did not have it within me and I felt okay about that this week. Not convenient, but I have it within me. I have it fully within me, and that's why I'm here. So traveling is something that is very unique for the podcaster, and this really exposes whether or not the system of your content creation is sustainable. Now, there are a couple of things that you can do if you tend to find yourself traveling either expectedly or unexpectedly. If you're traveling expectedly, you could prepare yourself ahead of time. You could record ahead of time. You could batch process several episodes in a row before you leave. You could have them edited, scheduled weeks in advance. I know some people who have episodes scheduled already recorded for their weekly podcasts months in advance. That's not me. I'm a fly by the seat of my pants kind of guy when it comes to content creation. I love the art of winging it. I love the art of showing up in the moment and sharing what's fully present with me right here, right now. There's an energy about that for which I am attracted. So for me, recording an episode, by the way, I have batch processed before and whenever I've batch processed, here's been my experience, I find myself scheduling all of those episodes in advance. And then I have something that shows up in my life, a teachable moment, a moment of personal growth, a major breakthrough, or some sort of really exciting thing that I want to celebrate or some significant major defeat that just provided a life lesson. And to think that I have to wait until three or four weeks from now to tell this story, that kills me. And I'm like, ugh. But there's already episodes scheduled and ah, I don't want to do that. So I have always preferred myself. And this is not my recommendation for you, but this is just, this is a description of my own podcast production workflow. It's not a prescription for yours, but anyway, you could potentially, if you know, if you're expecting to travel, record ahead of time. Now, if you are not that type of person or if you're unexpectedly going to be traveling at the last minute, it might be a good idea to get some portable gear. Now, your portable gear does not have to be as, as, as complex as what I have here, although mine is not fair very complex at all. I'm like I said, A $99 rode mic. What is it called? The Rode mic. What did you. Gosh, what is, is it called? The rode mic? Anyway, PodMic. That's it. Rode PodMic. The $99 version, the XLR only version. They make one $99 version that is USB and XLR. And technically speaking, if I had that device, I could just plug a USB cable into this and plug it in via USB to my computer and I could record straight into Adobe Audition. And so technically speaking, that would be all I need. Now I do have a little mobile tabletop mic stand that I have the mic sitting on. So you would want to mic stand your dynamic microphone of choice. And if you wanted to, you could go straight USB into your computer. Myself, like I said, I have the Zoom Podtrak P4. Next. I've got my nice headphones. If I wanted to, I could play audio clips. I could do all the stuff that I would want to do and I can do it portably and it all fits into a backpack very easily. So if you are going to travel either last minute you it was unexpected or you're preparing to travel, I would encourage you to have a portable recording set of gear so that you can go and record from your hotel room. Now I also have in my backpack, do I have, can I reach it real easily? I have some other gear. Now if I didn't have all of this, you know, dynamic microphone and the PodTrack P4. Next. Another thing that I carry in my laptop in this little case here is the little lapel mic from Tascam. It's called the Dr. 10L Pro. Dr. 10L Pro. I have two of these devices. They are basically lapel mics and they record directly into a digital audio recorder that sits in your pocket or goes on your belt clip. They got an SD card, a micro SD card that goes into it. These are not wireless transmitters or anything like that. They are simply audio recording devices with a lapel mic on it. And they record in 32 bit float audio uncompressed wave format. I love that these devices, I have two of them, by the way. That's why I'm calling them devices in plural. And they will record until the into a single uncompressed wav file for as long as you record until you run out of space on your SD card. So you could record hours upon hours upon hours of a single wave recording onto this little device that clips onto your belt buckle or sits in your pocket. Now, what I do, when I want to record something with Stephanie and we're going out for a walk, I will put one of those lapel mics on her, I will put one on me, we will hit record on both of them, and then I clap three or four or five times and then I can sync up those two recordings in a multitrack recording in post production and export them out. And then I have my single audio file that I put into the podcast feed, so if I wanted to, I could record with just one of those. The audio quality is not going to be nearly as good as this, but it is decent enough for an out of the norm, occasional. I'm traveling, I'm sitting here in my hotel room, or I'm out for a walk in this city. That's unique to me. Outside of the norm of where I'm usually at, back at home in the studio, there's been all sorts of ways that I have recorded things. But having travel gear for you to record portable is something that I would highly encourage you to do. If you, if in fact you are committed to showing up on a weekly basis. The next thing I'll share is that not only do you not need to be perfect and live up to some sort of false perception of your discipline, and that you're going to be that person who never misses. And now I do have some people in my life that I've known who had gone, you know, 13, 15 years of podcasting with never missing an episode. My dear friend and mentor who passed away just over two and a half years ago, Dan Miller, from the time he started his podcast until he recorded his final episode just weeks before he passed, never missed a weekly episode. And I applaud him for that and was always inspired by his journey. I've known several others who could say very similar things. But again, perfection isn't required for you to remain consistent and committed. If you miss just show up again next week. However, the audience doesn't necessarily concern themselves with your perfection. What they are absolutely concerned with, if they're the type of audience that has agreed to this kind of non contractual agreement that you're going to show up and be present in their life, what they most want from you is presence. And so for me, the the fact that I'm like I matter of fact, can I share with you what I wrote into ChatGPT as I after I set everything up here, I said, hey, I need help coming up with a topic for podcast Answer man, episode number 496. I've attached episodes 495 transcript so you can remember what I covered last time and I missed last week, which is the first time since committing to being weekly that I've missed an episode. So effective this week, I'm back on a on schedule, but I'm not even at home. I'm traveling yet again and will be traveling again next week. So last week I was at Social Media Marketing World all week this week I'm in Bowling Green for my daughter's graduation and next week I'll be in Texas helping my daughter sharp for apartments for law school. And so I just submitted that to Chat GPT and it says, hey, here's some ideas that you could cover. And I read through it and I'm like, you know what? This is exactly it. I could, I feel like I could speak off the top of my head about these different items here. And I'm just being present with you. And by the way, I'm not reading from the outline, I'm not reading from the transcript. But I, I did say, you know what, this is kind of what I'm looking for. And my chatgpt happens to know a lot about me, how I think it has practically every journal entry I've ever journaled. It knows so much about how I like to communicate, what I like to communicate, what my values are. And I'm like, yeah, this is it. I'm being present with you. And I created enough of an idea of what I wanted to share and I hit record and I'm just like, I'm going live to drive. I'm not going to edit anything in this episode. This episode is absolutely not perfect. But I'm here and I'm fully present. And yes, I Missed last week, but I'm here today from Bowling Green, Kentucky. There you go. And the next idea is that if you miss an episode, if you want, it can become content. You could talk about consistency. You could talk about feelings of guilt and shame when you've had them in the past and how you've learned to give yourself grace and the concept of tabula rasa. Starting over with a clean slate. Start today. Get back on that horse again. I mean, you could turn your missed episode into content if you sit down and are willing to be authentic and transparent. Tell the truth. And the other thing is that podcasting on a weekly basis has a lot to do with trust. Trusting in your own ability to remain committed to something. It's trusting that when the time comes to record the content or the idea, what you want to communicate will show up. I drove for three and a half hours to Bowling Green, Kentucky today. And on this entire journey here, I'm like, what am I going to talk about? And I, and I'm like, I have no idea. Okay? I did not sit there and think about it for three and a half hours. I did drive for three and a half hours. But I asked myself this question before I got in the car. I asked Stephanie what she thought. You know, hey, what do you think? And I have no idea. And I was thinking about it for a moment, and then I just started listening to stuff in the car. In fact, podcasts all the way down, if you're interested. The podcast that I'd been listening to all the way down here is a podcast that is an old podcast. It is an audio drama podcast and it's called a Scottish podcast. Now, I will tell you, it's a little lewd. It has lots of cursing. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I happen to know the gentleman who produced and wrote the show and put it all together. And I enjoy it especially just because it's all, it's got all Scottish accents in it. But anyway, is it. Let me just see if I can find. Is it a Scottish podcast dot com. Let me do a search for a Scottish podcast. And let's see here. I think I found it. It's@scottishpodcast.com Again, lots of cursing, lots of. Just be warned. But anyway, I listened to that all the way down. I, I had finished season one. It was the. When I first started listening to this podcast, it was when it was first released and I listened to season one back then, and then I, I lost touch up with the show. I recently re. Reconnected with Matthew McLean. Oh, goodness, let me get his name correct here. McLean, I think. But let me do a search here. Matthew McLean. Yep. Matthew McLean. M C L, E A N. And just recently reconnected with him. And so that got me to pull out this podcast or resubscribe to it again, only to find that there's more seasons now. And so on my trip to California, or during my trip to California, I listened to season one over again. And on the trip down here, I started season two, and it's been fun. I gotta stop playing with my tabletop mic stand here, because I don't know if you heard that, but I know that audio will travel anyway. But when I sat down here, I'm like, I just went to ChatGPT and said, I'm looking for a topic, and it suggested that I could talk about missing an episode doesn't mean that you have to break the commitment just because you broke the streak. Of course, matter of fact, it says missing once doesn't break the commitment. And so for me, I just translated that. Because you broke the streak doesn't mean that you have to break the commitment. So I'm not even going off this whole thing. It says the next one. It says, your podcast has to survive your actual life. And so that was. That's the only line I read. And I'm like, yeah, things that are inconvenient, unexpected, undesired, they pop up. How do you navigate that? The third item, travel, exposes whether the system is real. That's the only thing I read there. And I'm like, huh? Yeah. And if you know that you're gonna travel ahead of time, you record your show ahead of time if that's who you are. And if you're not like me, I'm not. Then pack a bag, have some portable gear that's not even in this thing. It's just like that. And so when I say that podcasting, if you are committed to podcasting weekly, it is a practice of trust. It's trusting that in the moment you will be able to speak. The words will flow, they will come. And if they don't, then just talk about the fact that, hey, I'm here, and I have no idea what I want to say that could be. I know it may not be your standard, and so I get that. But at some level, you're going to have to trust in yourself and your ability to tap into some sort of flow state and just let it flow, let it come. If there's one thing I could share with you, that I think might be helpful. There is a book called the Artist's Way by Julian Cameron, I think, or Julia Cameron. Anyway, it's called the Artist's Way and this book talks about this practice called morning pages. And the idea is that you wake up each morning and you commit to writing three pages, handwritten pages of stream of consciousness thought. You literally start writing and you don't stop writing until you've completed three full pages. And if you can't think of what to say, you write. I can't think of what to say right now. In fact, I have no idea why I'm sitting here writing. You're just literally writing every single thought, every word that comes to mind. As it comes to mind there is. The book talks about the fact that there's no expectation or requirement or even suggestion that you need to even reread it, do anything with it or anything like that whatsoever. Now that's what the book says. I will tell you right now. I love the practice of morning pages. And sometimes I get to writing and I have no idea what I'm going to do, but I get into such a flow slate and as a flow, flow sleet now I get into such a flow state that it seems that things are coming through me. I get, I tap into this source, this well of inspiration and ideas come out of nowhere and they're wrangled to the page. In my morning pages and sometimes I do two and a half pages or one and a half pages. There are most of the times I do three or four pages and there have been times it's been more and then for me, the practice almost always generates something that means something deeply for me personally. And it's all handwritten. I now do that on my iPad Pro, the 12.9 inch or whatever the big iPad Pro is in my Apple Pencil and I use the Notability app these days and I'll just write and write and write. And the great news is that I can export those as JPEGs and I can attach all of those jpegs into a chatgpt thread. And it has the ability to do optical character recognition, ocr. Surprisingly, it can read my handwriting very well. And I have it read it and I say, hey, I would like a full review, a reflection on this. Share with me what are some thoughts? What are some patterns here? What are some insights that would be helpful based upon the things you know about what's going on in my world, who I am, what my values are, what my priorities are, what the things I'm currently focused on creating in the world. And I so enjoy that. And so the reason I'm bringing up the idea and the concept of morning pages is because there's never been a moment, there's never been a day when I sat down to do my morning pages that the, the flow didn't kick in. There's never been a time as long as I'm willing to just start writing. Something always comes. There's always something there. And I think it's the active habit of doing morning pages. And I don't do them every morning, I do them frequently. But because I've done it so much and I have such deep trust in that flow that it's easy for me to say, you know what? I'm committed to showing up every week. I will be here on Fridays at 12:01am and I still consider myself to be consistent with this commitment, even though I missed last week. So how about you? Have you ever thought about making a decision to showing up weekly, to being present and being a part of your community's life, to showing up even when travel comes up unexpectedly or even expectedly, and back to back week after week after week? And are you afraid to do it because you can't guarantee that you're going to after you speak to nearly 400 people and over the course of a few days have deep, meaningful connections and conversations with 116 people and then your social battery is absolutely exhausted. Are you afraid that that will happen? Do you lack trust that the content will flow even if you have the gear? These are the kinds of things that I was just hoping to have you think about. And you know, when I was hoping to have that as I. It all came. All of this, everything you've just heard came after I hit the record button. I hope this has inspired you. If you've listened all the way through, I would love to hear from you. Just say, hey, Cliff, I really appreciate the fact that while you're down there in Bowling Green, you've hunched over the edge of a bed, leaning into your Rode Podmic portable gear, hanging out in the bedroom while your wife is in the living room waiting for you to finish reading her Kindle. I appreciate you doing that. It would love. I love hearing that this was important that I showed up for you. I'd love to hear it. Did you miss me last week or did you not even know it? Did you not even notice that I wasn't there? I'm interested in hearing your feedback on that as well. But yeah, I just. I just love that I have this show. There are some times when I'm like, should I have done this? And the answer is always yes. I have asked myself, should I have actually gone back to a weekly schedule? You know, for the first. Oh, gosh, I think it was 13 years. I was producing several, several shows on a weekly basis, and I was showing up consistently for those, and very rarely did I ever miss an episode. And then probably about a year before the pandemic, it was right around the time I found the book the Prosperous Coach, and I started building my business a different way than content creation. I went to this place where I said, you know what? I'm actually going to go down to only one podcast, the Cliff Ravenscraft show, and I'm only going to produce that episode when I feel inspired. But don't worry, because I feel inspired quite often. And it turned out that there was always at least one episode every month and usually two. But for a series of a few years, I did not produce episodes on a weekly basis. And so since I've come back right at the beginning of this year and I said, I'm going to do Cliff Ravenscraft show every single week, I'm gonna do podcast Answer man every single week. And, oh, by the way, I missed the Cliff Ravenscraft show this past Monday as well. And again, it was a very conscious choice, a very conscious decision to do so. It was. It just was what it was. And there have been times when I'm right up against that deadline to get these things recorded so they'll get scheduled by their committed time. I asked myself, man, was this the right decision? And every single time, the answer is yes, even when I missed the episode last week. Anyway, I can't wait to hear from you. If you want to reach out to me, my email address is cliff cliffravenscraft.com until next time. I encourage you to take everything you do to the next level podcast.