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Your Podcast Needs Systems, Not Motivation · Your Mic

• 0:00
  We do not rise to the level of our expectations.
• 0:02
  We fall to the level of our training.
• 0:06
  This is not a TED Talk.
• 0:08
  My name is Freddy Cruz, founder of Speak Podcasting, and welcome back to Your Mic.
• 0:15
  What does an old quote have to do with podcasting?
• 0:19
  Nothing, you say?
• 0:21
  Hard disagree.
• 0:23
  It's got everything to do with podcasting.
• 0:27
  But before we get to that, let me take you back to peewee football.
• 0:29
  It's the time of year, okay?
• 0:31
  I played for the Klein Jets.
• 0:33
  Think of me as a soft, pudgy kid.
• 0:36
  Not the soft, pudgy, middle-aged bro you see every now and then on Instagram.
• 0:42
  But I was a soft, pudgy kid, brutal Houston August, running laps until I literally puked.
• 0:49
  My coaches, Tamez, Knight, and Torres, rest in peace Coach Torres,
• 0:55
  They ran us for a hard reason.
• 0:57
  What I did not know until years later, decades later, was that my coach had actually asked my mom if she wanted to take me home that day.
• 1:07
  Thank God she didn't.
• 1:09
  Because what that taught me wasn't try harder, even though that's probably what I heard.
• 1:15
  But,
• 1:16
  because I was definitely not running fast enough for coach's pleasure.
• 1:20
  It was that the work you do before the pressure shows up is the only thing that holds when pressure actually arrives.
• 1:29
  Here's what that looks like for a podcast host.
• 1:32
  You wake up at six, you get the kids out the door, spend all day putting out fires at work, dinner, dishes, laundry, and now it's 11 o'clock.
• 1:39
  You've got no episode in the queue in your next release.
• 1:42
  Drum roll is doing 48 hours.
• 1:46
  If that happens once, do the hard thing.
• 1:51
  Record the episode.
• 1:54
  But if that happens every week, stop calling it grit.
• 1:58
  It's not a discipline problem, it's a systems problem.
• 2:01
  You didn't fail because you were tired.
• 2:04
  You failed because your process required you to be a hero on a Thursday night at 11 o'clock.
• 2:10
  Heroes, they burn out.
• 2:13
  Systems, however...
• 2:15
  They ship.
• 2:17
  One of our legacy clients, her name is Dr. Angela Sturm, host of Beauty Unveiled.
• 2:21
  Check her out on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
• 2:24
  She can record literally six talking head videos in 90 minutes with no script.
• 2:32
  Not because she's some superhuman, although sometimes I think she is, but because she's built a repeatable batch process, a topic bank, a recording block on her calendar, and a checklist she doesn't really have to think about.
• 2:46
  That's training.
• 2:47
  That's falling to the level of your system instead of hoping your willpower shows up on the worst day of your month.
• 2:54
  If your show has you sprinting to the finish line every single week, it is definitely holding you hostage.
• 3:01
  It just doesn't have duct tape over your mouth.
• 3:03
  So hit me up for a free roadmap.
• 3:05
  You can grab it at speakpodcasting.com slash free resources.
• 3:10
  Plan and build your bank of topics.
• 3:13
  Batch your recordings.
• 3:14
  Keep two episodes in reserve at all times, possibly more.
• 3:18
  And,
• 3:18
  Do that and the next bad day does not touch your release schedule.
• 3:24
  Listen, you don't need more motivation.
• 3:28
  What you actually need is a system strong enough that motivation stops being the thing your show depends on because eventually that motivation is going to run out, possibly at 11 o'clock on a Thursday night.
• 3:40
  I believe in you.
• 3:41
  So go build that show.
• 3:42
  And thank you so much for spending your time with me.