In this episode, Tamara K. Anderson shares how scared she really was to start podcasting and the tips and goals which helped her overcome this fear.
I am so excited to announce an epic change in the Stories of Hope in Hard Times podcast. Starting today, I will be launching an episode every week on Wednesday. This is helpful for you because now you get twice the content. Sometimes I will take an episode to tell additional stories and expound upon the previous episode (like I will do today). These episodes will be considerably shorter than our typical episodes.
Other times I might just launch a new episode every week.
Last week I interviewed Alan Gulledge and we talked about his bike crash and we talked about the fear that went along with setting new goals as Alan tried to build his body back. I wanted to kind of piggyback onto that story and tell you a story from my own life. And that story is actually the story of the launch of this podcast.
In January of 2018 I decided I would spend that year learning all about podcasting and take all the steps necessary so that I could launch my podcast in January of 2019. I hit the ground running. I named my podcast (with your help), Stories of Hope in Hard Times. Then, I had my logo for my podcast professionally designed and people voted on it. And I even picked a format for my podcast.
I spent a lot of time, learning about podcasting, from professionals like John Lee Dumas. I even recorded my first podcasting episodes of May of 2018.
And then in June I hit this dead stop when my kids got out of school. I made this conscious decision just stop and not do anything during the summer. Believe it or not I even stopped doing social media.
Come September, I got my kids back in school and I started just really reexamining where I was with my life and what my goals were. Then I remembered the podcasting goal and I realized I was scared to death to start and launch this podcast. It really freaked me out and that's why I had stopped and had not made any progress.
I really had to pause and think and write about it. In fact, I even drew a picture in my journal.
Here is what I wrote, "This is how I feel. My fear is real and it's keeping me stuck on my path." And so there I was--little me stuck on the path of this mountain that I wanted to climb. But there was this huge word in my way which said FEAR.
And I learned that while I was looking at the fear, I couldn't move forward. It was too scary. I'd had some experiences where I was picked on and bullied when I was a kid. And so I, I realized that I had to raise my sights a little bit higher and start thinking of my WHY: What are the benefits of the podcast? Who will this help? And set my sights on that. I realized that this podcast had the potential to help people who are struggling to help people who have lost their hope.
And as I focused on the benefit of doing the goal and not the fear itself (basically focusing on faith and I believed the outcome could be), then I was finally able to move forward again. I really had to detail a lot of this in my journal and figure it out.
I launched Stories of Hope in Hard Times in January of 2019 and it felt so good to accomplish that goal. But it also felt good to not have that fear incapacitate me anymore.
As imperfect people, we have goals that we set and get excited about and then all of a...
