The Daily Pep! Part Five
This is the last in my five part series, documenting the run up to developing and launching my new daily podcast - The Daily Pep! - on 29th February 2020. It’s a warts and all look at behind the scenes. If you’re wondering what even is The Daily Pep!, you can read go back to the first post in this series here.
THE. PODCAST. IS. LIVE.
There is something seriously surreal about hankering away at somethig with your head down behind the scenes and then putting it into the world.
Though I’m sure it’s nothing like it, it feels a bit like how I imagine sending a child off to high school feels. Worried about how they’re going to get on, if they’ll get picked on, who they’ll turn into,.
Last week was a whirlwind. I’ve been writing lots of episodes and really getting back into writing and the calm I felt a couple of weeks ago was still lurking in the background.
But to say the whole week was easy and that I was calm would be lying. Up until Wednesday night when I submitted the podcast to Apple Podcasts and Spotify for approval, I was - to put it nicely - freaking the fuck out.
However, the minute I submitted it, a whole load of the anxiety and fear just dissipated. It was 3:30am which might have had something to do with it, too.
It was as if I had complete confirmation that the quiet calm I’d been feeling at the time had been there for a reason. Because actually, I could do it, nothing bad happened and quite frankly, it was a relief.
I remembered just how much courage it took to launch The Couragemakers Podcast and I was reminded that I can do scary things.
And while it is a relief for it to be out there, I’m still anxious to see how this will all pan out.
The podcasting landscape has changed just so much since I launched Couragemakers. When I was starting out, it was still a pretty indie movement. Now it seems like every celebrity and their pet hamster’s hedgehog has a podcast, and there are these huge production companies behind them. Now if you look at New & Noteworthy, so many of them are created by the BBC/ITV or some mega corporation.
(Don’t get me wrong, I love so many of them, but some of them do make me roll my eyes).
I’m still doing it in the way I’ve always done it - it’s just me: the recording, the audio, the production, the editing, the promotion, the marketing, the admin. In a year’s time, what with sponsors I hope I’ll be able to hire people to help (say, WHAT?!)
I said I would be honest in this series and even though Couragemakers has been a huge success, I do worry that it’s been a fluke, that the podcasting world is way too saturated now and that it might just disappear into the ether.
But I had an important realisation last night:
Even if no one listened, I would still create it.
Because I LOVE the work I do, I love writing, I love ideas, and like many creatives, I find that I often make the things I most need.
If nothing else comes of this, I will be spending time developing skills, building up a body of work and most importantly enjoying the process. (I figured out, if each episode averages out around 700 words, by the end of the year I’ll have got down 200,000 words about courage, creativity, persistence, dreamshitters and dream-chasing.)
The importance of documenting the process
When we look back, I think we can tend to gloss over how things felt in the moment and I’m really grateful I’ve documented this journey so I can look back on it when I’m working on future projects or need a reminder that fear doesn’t get to win.
So start documenting your journey and go do the scary thing!
If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’ll be that I will have been so glad to actually have done this, instead of just thinking about it and imagining what if.
And that’s a wrap for this blog series. I hope it’s inspired you to go do the thing you can’t stop thinking of, no matter how scary it feels. Thank you so much for being on this journey with me, thank you so much for all your encouragement and I’m looking forward to re-visiting this series next year with knowledge about how this all turned out!