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