Rebuild Your Motivation to Podcast

Howdy -- I’m Kyle Bondo, and this is Podfader! My weekly podcast for helping you survive the day-to-day struggle that comes with keeping a podcast going.

S1:E12 -- Rebuild your motivation and get back to building better podcasts

TL:DR - Focus is Step Six of the Nine Steps Back to Podcasting and requires you to rebuild your motivation and find your hunger for podcasting before you can truly get back to podcasting.

• What are your Motivations?
• What is your Why?
• Strategies for Rebuilding Your Motivation
• The only easy day was yesterday

Step Six of the Nine Steps Back to Podcasting is Focus.

You need something to change when it comes to your motivation to podcast. Why? Ask yourself this question: Does the feeling of having to produce yet another podcast tapping your motivation? You know you love podcasting, but maybe it’s become exhausting, frustrating and even painful to continue. You see your competitors still maintaining the same podcast production tempo they did in past years, yet you at a loss to how they can keep going at that pace. Now, you start finding yourself saying: “I don’t want to record a podcast this month.” “I just want to go ride my bike this weekend.” “Why am I still building this podcasts?” What happened to your motivation? How do you recover from a slump like this and still manage to produce another season of podcasts? How do you not quit? Hopefully, this will give you the answer.

What are your Motivations? You might not truly dislike podcast production — at least not yet. But if you’re having doubts about building new podcasts, and you’re not doing anything about it, it can only get worse. So before it gets worse, you need to ask yourself some tough questions. You need a motivation intervention. You need a motive-vention! However, this is the good kind of intervention; the kind with healing in it. It requires you to dig down deep and find out what’s going on in your head, starting with your need to understand your own intrinsic motivations.

What is your Why? Why do you build podcasts? This should be a simple question to answer. Your first answer might be “for the love of the medium.” Or maybe you got into podcast promotion “to make money.” You need money to make a living, but the time it takes to make your first real money in podcasting is long. Knowing there is the potential for good money after doing podcast promotion for five years or more, doesn’t help you in year two. No. If love or money is not enough to keep you truly motivated, that what else drives you to build podcasts? Chances are it has something to do with an intrinsic motivation. This is the driver that pushes you into doing things worth doing. The three important intrinsic drivers for podcasters:

• Creativity: Creativity is the freedom you feel from being able to build podcasts without anyone telling you how you should do it.
• Mastery: Mastery is your capability to learn new disciplines and improve your skills.
• Purpose: your Purpose should not just be focused on the mechanics of building podcasts, but why you believe in building podcasts in the first place.

Strategies for Rebuilding Your Motivation If you’re ready to focus on rebuilding your motivation, here are few steps you can take to get you back into the podcasting game:

• #1 – Stop Being Hard on Yourself: Successful people know that making small continuous improvements every day will be compounded over time and give them desirable results.
• #2 – Build a Better Why: You need to create a vision of how you see your future self.
• #3 – Focus on One Goal: Learning a new skill is an excellent goal, and a great way to keep from getting bored.
• #4 – Learn from Others: Spend some time appreciating the drive and determination others have for podcasting and explore how they overcame the challenges they faced on their journeys.
• #5 – Get Your Hunger Back: When you decide you’re hungry enough to do it, keeping motivated won’t be hard anymore.

The only easy day was yesterday There is no easy way to stay motivated. Motivation is a continual process that requires discipline. You will always need to force yourself to go through your motivation process to find your hunger again. Hence the need for the discipline to know when your motivation is lacking, and the hunger to actively do something about it.

And now you know.

About the ShowPodfader, hosted by Kyle Bondo, focuses on tackling the challenges all podcasters face when the drive to keep podcasting becomes a struggle. If you’re a podcaster or trying to become one, Podfader is your sanctuary for getting you through the messy middle of any podcasting journey. Stop podfading and start podcasting!

Learn more at Podfader.com

Presented by Gagglepod.com