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Transcripts
So Monday came, Monday went, and I didn't publish anything.
Speaker:Not because I forgot, because I was properly buried under the kind of client
Speaker:work that eats your whole week and then burps politely and asks, "What's for
Speaker:pudding?" And somewhere in the middle of all that, I clocked a feeling, a feeling
Speaker:that I'd failed, which would've been fine.
Speaker:I mean, that's manageable.
Speaker:Failure is manageable.
Speaker:It's what happened next that really shook me.
Speaker:I started feeling like a failure for feeling like a failure because guess what?
Speaker:I'm the bloke who makes a podcast telling you not to do exactly that.
Speaker:Yeah, let that sink in.
Speaker:I had to
Speaker:This is Podmastery Podcasting Insights, the show for people who've had a proper
Speaker:go at this podcasting thing, probably got episodes out, you know your way around
Speaker:the gear, but you can feel that there's a gear that you haven't quite found yet.
Speaker:I'm Neal Veglio, 30 years in radio and audio behind me, and still apparently
Speaker:entirely capable of feeling like a rank amateur on a day ending in Y. This episode
Speaker:isn't really about missing a deadline.
Speaker:Everyone misses deadlines.
Speaker:It's about the thing that you do next in your own head that turns
Speaker:a missed Monday into something a lot more, something deeper.
Speaker:Let me give you the truth about this first And this is quite vulnerable.
Speaker:I publish on a Monday.
Speaker:That is my slot.
Speaker:I don't know why.
Speaker:I think it was really down to looking at the calendar and going, "Do you know what?
Speaker:Monday is probably the most realistic day that I can get my ass into gear
Speaker:and get content published out there." For this episode, this one right now,
Speaker:this is publishing on a Wednesday because Monday got swallowed whole
Speaker:by the work that I do for the people who actually pay me, and that's it.
Speaker:That's the entire scandal.
Speaker:There's no drama.
Speaker:There's no crisis.
Speaker:Nobody died.
Speaker:It just happened.
Speaker:Now, if you'd asked me on the record on this very microphone I'm speaking into
Speaker:now whether publishing two days late matters, I'd have told you the truth.
Speaker:It absolutely doesn't, not even slightly.
Speaker:The day you publish makes not the slightest bit of difference to
Speaker:a single download you receive.
Speaker:I'd stake this entire show on it.
Speaker:Your feed doesn't know what day it is.
Speaker:Your listener isn't sat at home with a calendar that's got your
Speaker:face on it going, "Look at that. He's late." I know all that.
Speaker:I've said all that.
Speaker:I could even probably dig out some clips of me saying all that, and
Speaker:yet I still felt like a failure, and that's the first feeling.
Speaker:Honestly, that first feeling is allowed.
Speaker:It's just data.
Speaker:You make a thing, you had a rhythm of making that thing,
Speaker:and you broke that rhythm,
Speaker:and you felt a flicker of disappointment.
Speaker:Fine.
Speaker:That's human.
Speaker:Let that pass through you.
Speaker:But then there's the second feeling that they don't tell you about, and
Speaker:the second feeling is the one that does the most damage to your mindset.
Speaker:The second feeling goes something like this: You feel like a failure.
Speaker:You.
Speaker:Well, you make the show about this.
Speaker:You've literally recorded the episode telling people the day that you
Speaker:release doesn't matter, and here you are sat in exactly the misery you
Speaker:try to get everyone else to avoid.
Speaker:What kind of fraud does that make you?
Speaker:That's the second feeling, feeling like a failure for feeling like a failure
Speaker:And here's the uncomfortable bit, the bit I'm not gonna rush past just to make
Speaker:either of us feel better about all this, because it's a good learning moment
Speaker:Knowing the right answer to this does not protect you from feeling the wrong thing.
Speaker:Being the person who gives the advice doesn't inoculate you against needing it.
Speaker:If anything, it's slightly worse because now you've got a second
Speaker:charge stacked on top of it all.
Speaker:It's not just, "I missed it," but it's now, "I missed it, and I should
Speaker:probably know better." Expertise doesn't switch that feeling off.
Speaker:It just loads it
Speaker:It makes the bang louder I am not immune to this.
Speaker:I wanna be really clear about that because it would be very easy for me to stand
Speaker:here and pretend I've got it all sorted, and you're the one who needs fixing.
Speaker:I haven't, I don't, and this week I was the case study.
Speaker:And you know this feeling.
Speaker:Even if you've never missed a podcast episode in your life, you know it.
Speaker:It's the exact logic of, "Well, I've eaten one biscuit, so that diet's
Speaker:ruined now. I may as well finish the whole packet." The failure isn't the
Speaker:biscuit, the failure is the story that one biscuit means you've now blown the
Speaker:whole thing, so why bother trying again?
Speaker:We do it with diets, with gym memberships, with alcohol consumption,
Speaker:with the untouched novel that sits atop our bedside table, and
Speaker:we do it with podcast production
Speaker:So why does it happen?
Speaker:Why does a two-day slip on a metric that measures precisely
Speaker:nothing feel like a moral failing?
Speaker:Now, I've been turning this over and over, over the last 48 hours, and I
Speaker:don't think it's just about the deadline.
Speaker:Here's what I think it actually is.
Speaker:Dead air is quite a problem in radio, certainly live broadcast radio.
Speaker:But here's the important bit.
Speaker:It wasn't me, it was a slot, it was airtime, a job.
Speaker:The show existed whether my name was on it or not.
Speaker:If I was off, the show carried on without me, and nobody at
Speaker:home was staring at the schedule thinking less of Neal specifically.
Speaker:They were just like, "Oh, okay. Well, that's different. Someone
Speaker:new doing that slot now." This
Speaker:podcasting thing, this is different.
Speaker:This show has my name on it.
Speaker:It is me, my brand, my face, my whole identity bolted into an RSS feed
Speaker:And when the thing is you, a missed episode stops feeling like I missed
Speaker:a deadline, and it starts feeling like I am failing at being me.
Speaker:And that's kind of the trap that nobody really gets to warn you
Speaker:about when they tell you to go and build your personal brand.
Speaker:You make the thing personal deliberately.
Speaker:I mean, that's the entire strategy, and then every little wobble
Speaker:in the thing feels personal.
Speaker:The stakes get intimate in a way they were never actually designed
Speaker:to be, and a missed slot becomes a referendum on your character, all
Speaker:because of a Monday that objectively, objectively means absolutely nothing.
Speaker:And this is the actual reason that podcasters disappear.
Speaker:It's not the missed week.
Speaker:I promise you, it's not the missed week.
Speaker:It's the story you tell yourself about what that missed week means.
Speaker:In the dark of your own mind
Speaker:You miss one, you feel like a fraud.
Speaker:The fraud feeling makes sitting down to record feel faintly sickening.
Speaker:So you put it off, and putting it off means you miss another, which,
Speaker:well, would you look at that?
Speaker:Kinda proves the fraud story right.
Speaker:And round and round it goes until one day you're just not really
Speaker:a podcaster anymore suddenly.
Speaker:Nobody's decided it.
Speaker:It just became.
Speaker:It compounded.
Speaker:The missed episode is a pothole, and that second feeling of failure
Speaker:at the fraud is the thing that drives you off the road entirely.
Speaker:So what actually broke the loop for me this week?
Speaker:Because I'm telling you, something did.
Speaker:Well, here it is.
Speaker:I didn't bury it.
Speaker:I could have.
Speaker:Easiest thing in the world, shove this episode out on a Wednesday
Speaker:instead and say nothing, and act like it always releases on Wednesdays.
Speaker:What are you talking about?
Speaker:I've never released on a Monday.
Speaker:Smooth it over.
Speaker:That's what most of us do.
Speaker:We hide the miss and hope nobody noticed.
Speaker:Instead, I did the opposite.
Speaker:I decided to make the miss the episode, to say it out loud to you.
Speaker:And I want you to notice what happened the moment I decided that
Speaker:because it's the whole point of this.
Speaker:The shame disappeared instantly, almost embarrassingly fast, because shame
Speaker:can't survive being said out loud.
Speaker:It's the thing that only grows in the darkness of our mind, in that
Speaker:private little courtroom in our head where we're somehow both the
Speaker:prosecutor and the bloke in the dock.
Speaker:And the second you drag that into the limelight and you just name it, you
Speaker:go, "Yeah, I missed it, and then I felt like a fraud for feeling bad about it.
Speaker:How stupid is that?" Well, now the shame's got nowhere left to live.
Speaker:Which kind of brings me to something I wanna share with you.
Speaker:But before that, a short break where I'd love to play you a podcast trailer from
Speaker:one of our Podmastery community members.
Speaker:We'll be opening the doors to the public soon.
Speaker:If you'd like to join the founding members, go to podmastery.co/waitlist
Speaker:So here's the thing I wanna share with you.
Speaker:It's not a list, it's literally one thing.
Speaker:The next time you break one of your own rules, maybe you miss a slot of a
Speaker:release of an episode, or you skip a week because you just don't feel able to do it.
Speaker:If you fall short of some standard that you set for yourself privately,
Speaker:told no one about, Name that miss to your audience, to your co-host,
Speaker:to your followers, or just to an empty room out loud on the record.
Speaker:Yeah, I missed it.
Speaker:I feel a bit crap about it, but that's just a feeling.
Speaker:That's it.
Speaker:Because you can't stop the first feeling.
Speaker:The disappointment is coming and that's data.
Speaker:But the second one, the shame around it, the what does this say about me?
Speaker:What does this say about my reputation?
Speaker:That needs secrecy to survive, and the fastest way to kill
Speaker:that is to deny it its secrecy.
Speaker:Say it out loud.
Speaker:Watch it die.
Speaker:So that's what I did this week.
Speaker:I became the episode.
Speaker:It turns out that the failure was better content than whatever I'd
Speaker:had planned for Monday anyway.
Speaker:If you've got a podcasting thing that you're beating yourself up about that
Speaker:genuinely is holding you back, those are the kind of conversations I like to have.
Speaker:Head to podmastery.co and get your podcasting challenge solved.
Speaker:It's me on the other end.
Speaker:It's not a sales funnel.
Speaker:Everything gets actioned there and then
Speaker:Click Need Help in the top menu, book your 60-minute call, and
Speaker:we'll get you back on track
Speaker:I hope you found this useful.
Speaker:I'm Neal Veglio, the podmaster.
Speaker:Good luck with your continuing journey towards podmastery
