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One Tip Podcast Guests Can Do
Improving your speaking capabilities
After recording an episode for the Unlabeled Leadership podcast, I do two rounds of edits. The first is to clean the audio— remove umms, long pauses, background noises, and distortion. The second is to add the introduction, narration, and music tracks.
After editing almost one hundred podcast episodes, I discovered something guests could do to improve their speaking.
Being a guest is difficult. The first time that I was a guest, the host did a great deal of editing. I had the typical umms, awkward pauses, and a low-quality condenser microphone. While the messaging was great, the delivery took away from the content.
I wanted to improve. To stop my umms, I had to practice. I used the dictation function of MS Word to record a monologue and reviewed the transcript for feedback. Over time, I cleaned my dialogue and improved my messaging.
I even learned to open my voice with vocal warmups.
I still pause frequently to think about what I’m going to say, but even this has improved over time.
