Tune into Episode 29 – The pod is back: lessons from taking a break right here in your browser, find it on your favourite platform (head here for the links) or keep reading for a transcript.
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Episode 8 – Doing the Bare Minimum
transcript (unedited)
So, hello, I am back. What’s up? How are you doing? It has been a while since I have recorded an episode. I think I did a quick check before sitting down to record this, and the last episode I published was back in early September of 2022, and I’m recording this in December of 2022. So it’s a little over three months I think, if my maths is correct.
And yeah, it’s been a bit of a hiatus for the podcast. I think at the time, the last episode I talked about seasonality and you know, there being seasons for things and I think I really needed this season of a pause, right? Sometimes pausing is what we need to do. And I definitely needed that. I had a lot going on at the time in terms of work and multiple sources of work.
My own work, my full-time job. I was consulting, I had uni, I had, you know, the dog a lot of, anyway, a lot of things going on and. I really had to get honest with myself and really ask myself what I was doing and how I was spending and prioritizing my time. And I had to make some decisions to stop doing a few things.
And one of them was to temporarily pause the podcast. And I, one I made was actually, I stopped consulting in October as well, which was a good, what the right decision I needed. But it really made me realize that I was being a full on dig to myself while I was recording this podcast for the first, you know, 20 odd episodes.
Because I put, I had this image of what it needed to look like in my head, and I was doing my darnest to try and make it look that way. And the image that I had was that it was this polished production of weekly episodes with amazing transcripts and show notes and, you know, batched content and amazing sound quality and really this all around polished podcast, right?
Because that’s what, that’s what we see when you open Spotify or you open. Apple Podcast, whichever platform you use, you open your podcast platform, you listen. Most of the ones, especially the really popular ones that you listen to, are polished as fuck, and there’s a reason for that. They’re polished because firstly, they’ve probably been doing it for a long time.
So they’ve got the experience and the know-how to make it polish. But likely, very likely, they also have the cash to pay people to make it polished, right? To host it in a great, on a great platform to have people edit it, make the cover up, look pretty, all of the things, they’ll be able to pay people so that the only thing that those people have to do is literally just sit down and hit record most of the time, right?
There might be exceptions here, but that’s a lot of why polished podcasts look polished, is because people have the time and resource. And the experience to make them look polished. None of which I had yet here. I was thinking it had to look fucking amazing every single time. Every episode had to be amazing.
It had to be a certain length, it had to look all these ways, and I had to do it every fucking week. And that right there. is firstly, a common example of how we are being dicked to ourselves is when we take something that we see other people do and we think we have to make our thing look exactly the same, even though we may not have the same resources, our circumstances might be different.
We still think, you know, oh, I’m doing a podcast. It has to look like fricking.
I was trying to find a decent enough person that I listened to, but I can’t, I can’t. All the big name ones I can think of are actually, I don’t like them anymore. So Brene Brown, dear to lead Brene Brown, right? One of my favorite podcasts. That’s, I think that’s probably one of the exceptions, but she’s, A lot of resources that go into making that podcast polished.
Right. And I don’t, it’s, it’s a one, one woman show over here, and I was being a right dick to myself by expecting myself to be able to not only record a bunch of podcasts, to be able to release them every week, but to then also, Do the transcript. Like I sat down and I listened to Rhythm Back and I sorted the transcripts instead of just using software or whatever.
I did all the cover. I did a lot of stuff to make it look like this polished enterprise when firstly, I don’t fucking needed to be polished. I just need it to be out there. Right? That’s actually when it comes down to it. I just need the thing to be done. I don’t need it to look polished right now, but also,
I’ve just lost my train of thought. I was going somewhere else.
Oh, that’s right. The timing. Sorry. Not cutting this out. We’re just gonna run with it. I thought it had to be, I had to publish it at a particular cadence, right? I thought I had to do it every week. Or even if I think towards like, I say towards the end, but it’s not the end. But I think I started out weekly and then I went to fortnightly, and I thought even even that after a while became too much, right?
Like I actually started resenting having to think about something to talk about because I was making it this big thing and trying to fit it into a box and into a specific schedule. And there’s nothing, don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing sometimes having that kind of a. Is incredibly helpful and there are people who, for who it works really, really well.
And I, I would’ve thought that it does for me as well, because I’m a structure. I like structure, I like systems, I like, like give me a spreadsheet and I’m having fun, right? . But
what the schedule and, and the system. And the structure that I tried to create for myself because of some idea that I internalized that wasn’t really mine, it ultimately suffocated me. I resented sitting down to record podcasts, right? And so I want to share a couple of things in this episode to firstly let you know that this podcast isn’t going anywhere.
I decided. I will be doing an episode a month for now, so maybe an episode every four weeks. That is my bare minimum, and I’ve talked about bare minimums before, and I’ll put the links to that episode in the show notes too, because it can be incredibly helpful to have a bare minimum, and that doesn’t mean that that’s all you do, right?
Bare minimum does not mean that that is the only thing you’re doing it. If nothing else, that is what you are focusing on and you have something that you can focus on. So for me, it’s to record an episode every four weeks and to publish it every four weeks. Maybe those episodes turn into like a mishmash of, I have a bunch of things I wanna talk about, and then it’ll be a long episode.
Maybe they’ll just be short and sweet like a lot of my previous ones are. And maybe I’ll do more than an episode cuz I might have shit I wanna talk about and I feel inspired to record and I’ll hit record and that’s okay. Basically what I’m trying to say with this is that I am giving myself a bare minimum, but I’m not tying myself to just doing that because what more, what’s more important to me?
To talk about important things, not the cadence or the timing of what that looks like. And I want this to be a reminder to you that you get to decide these things too, right? Not, maybe not when it comes to podcasts, cuz you may not be doing that, but. If you want, if you have a fitness goal or a career goal or whatever it is, if you set, if, if you set yourself a specific plan to do something, I want you to really think about whether or not that plan really is yours.
Is it the way that you want it to look like? Is it on a, is the schedule, the timing real? Based on all the other shit you’ve got going on, right? Because all of everything else you’ve got going on will impact and influence whatever it is that you’re trying to do, right? Just like work uni clients, more clients, a dog.
All of that stuff was influencing and impacting how often I was actually able to sit down. to record podcasts. Right. And I probably foolishly didn’t consider that a lot of the time when I made the plan of I’m gonna start a podcast and I’m gonna have a episode every week. In hindsight, yeah, fuck. That wasn’t realistic.
So I’m adjusting my plan as I’m going, and I want you to do the same. And so to wrap that up and kind of put it in a bit of a tangible thing, cuz I wasn’t sure what word I was gonna use there. Here are some nudges and questions that you can think about whatever it is that you’re wanting to do. Let’s say you wanna start running again because you’ve not done it for a while and you wanna pick it up again.
Do you actually really wanna do that? Like really ask yourself. Why it is that you want to do this thing? Could be running, could be starting a podcast, could be starting a business, could be lots and lots of things, right? It doesn’t have to be fitness related. It’s just an an easy example to use. But do you really want to run that?
Is there something that you’re training or are you seeing a lot of other people do that thing that you are like, oh yeah, maybe I should give it a go too, and. Not a bad thing either, but I just want you to really ask yourself and get honest and true with yourself. If you’re doing the thing because you see other people do it and you think, oh yeah, that sounds like a good enough goal, I’m gonna do it too.
Or is it really truly like, but I’ve signed up for a race and I really wanna, I really, I wanna train and I really want to run. So really get clarity on why it. That you wanna do the thing and if, if you do then that’s great. If you find that, well, hold on. Actually running was just like, it looked like an easy, you know, low barrier thing cuz you basically just need choose and somewhere to run.
But actually you, you’d much rather go lifting than, that’s also a great realization to have. Right. That’s a good. To know, so is there something you can do about lifting, right? Is it that you need to look into gym memberships or even hiring a trainer depending on what’s available to you financially, right.
Or is there a body weight only workout program you can find and do? Like, is there, you know, is it about, even though you said I wanna run, is it actually about just getting some more intentional movement in that isn’t just walking or walking the dog or. Right. So get, get curious here and really ask yourself what it is at the, at the heart of it that you actually want to be doing.
And then once you’ve decided that, so it could be running, it could be freaking doing Zumba. It does not fucking matter. But once you know what it is that you want to be doing, and you’re working on a schedule of you know what it looks like, how many times a week or a month or whatever you want it to do it really have a thing like take five or 10 minutes.
It doesn’t have to be fricking massive ti amount of time, but take some time to really consider everything you’ve got going on in your life and whether it’s realistic to add the thing in the first. and if, if that’s realistic enough, like if you’re like, actually I’m, I think I’ll be able to handle the stress.
I’ll be able to handle, you know, like I’m looking for, like I really wanna do it, like I’m looking forward to actually doing this thing. When and how are you going to do it? And is that realistic? Because wanting to run after work two days a week. If you work a corporate like knowledge worker type of job, is it realistic when.
The last month been working 10 hour days and you have to commute by car and traffic’s a bitch most of the time. So you are already in a, in a really stressed state, like you’ve had a shit day, you’ve had shit traffic. You come home, you have to tidy up, you have to sort dinner, you have to do whatever else you have to do when you get home.
Is it realistic to expect yourself to then put on your running shoes and head out the door again? And if it is, That’s fucking awesome. Like, go you. That’s amazing. But a lot of us in that situation will be like, you know what? It’s just, it’s just too much. I’m just, I’m, I’m not gonna do it because I’m putting my hand up right now.
I can imagine that. And chances are I’m not gonna do it. And I’m not gonna sit here and say, you just need to be disciplined. You just need to want it bad enough. You just need to have the willpower to do it, cuz that’s bull. That’s fucking bullshit. Okay. What you need to do is figure out if that is realistic for you to do and to maybe nudge, nudge, lower your expectations instead of trying to do it two days a week.
Can you do it one day a week? And literally that’s your bare minimum, just like it is with me recording this podcast once a month. For now, are you. Going for a run one day a week. Cuz then that might not have to happen after work. Maybe that can happen another time of the, another day of the week. But also, does it need to happen after work?
Can you look at your schedule and get a bit creative? And either you do it before work and maybe that’s not possible because you are sorting everyone out in the house before you head out the door. And that’s, you know, that, that, that is reality for a lot of. , but could you do it the day that you go into the office?
Can you do it at lunchtime or during the morning and you know, if you have shower facilities at work, is that an option? Or you have a gym membership is, you know, can you use their facilities? That might be an option and maybe it isn’t, and that’s also okay. But are there other things? Could you, is working from home available to you?
Could you work from home one day a week and that day and no one else is. You know, so you still have everyone else on the same schedule. It’s just that instead of you being in the office, you are at home, and so at lunchtime you can go for a run. These are literally just that this may not be available to you, and I’m fully aware of that.
I’m just trying to come up with a couple of examples to help to get you thinking, because ultimately that’s why I’ve, I’m sitting back here recording this and. , I decided that I still like recording this podcast is still important to me and getting it done is important to me. I don’t care as much cuz I can’t say I don’t care cuz that’s a lie, but it’s like I’m okay for now if this isn’t polished and I’m okay with recording it once a month because that is realistic based on everything else that I’ve got going.
So I wanted to leave you with those nudges and I don’t wanna hop on too much longer. I just really want you to get curious about why it is that you’re doing something, especially when it comes to like health and fitness goals. Cuz in, I see so many of my clients pick up goals and think certain things have to look a certain way because that’s what they see everyone else.
When that’s not realistic for them and their circumstances and the other shit that they’ve got going on. So really get clear on that and do a bit of thinking on that. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please follow it because then you get your episodes into your, whichever app you’re following. It’ll automatically pop up when I’ve recorded a new one, so you don’t have to go and try and find.
If you enjoy these episodes, please give them a rating and a review, either on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts, cuz that helps the algorithm, you know, bump it up. And let me know if this was helpful. That was the last thing I wanted to say. You can do that on Instagram or LinkedIn or by emailing. , I’ll put the details in the show notes so that I’m not trying to do all of that stuff now.
And yeah, I am glad to be back. It’s great to be back and to chat even though it’s just me talking, talking to my phone in this case, cuz in the spirit of doing it, unpolished and just getting it. . I recorded this using voice memos, like I didn’t even grab my fancy microphone and headphones and my computer.
This is me recording it on my phone because that was more important. Recording. It was more important to me than some of the how of getting it done. And that’s with that. With that note, I’ll let you go and get on with your day. Thank you for tuning in, and I’ll see you in the next episode
