069: How Podcasting Parallels Working Out
I’m getting a bit personal in today’s podcast episode. For one, I started working out again and it’s been funny because I’ve drawn so many parallels from the experience of starting to work out again to podcasting and some of the journeys that I see our clients go through as well as the one I go through as a podcaster myself.
In this episode, I share a story about my lifelong dream of being a ballet dancer and how this ties into me working out again. You’ll get a deeper look into my life as well as some fun inferences on how podcasting parallels working out.
What’s in this episode:
My personal story as a former ballet dancer
The parallels between my fitness journey and our podcasting clients
Misconceptions people have about their podcast
How your podcast goals will likely shift over time
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The Transcript:
069: How Podcasting Parallels Working Out
Welcome to the Wild Home Podcast, where we talk about podcasting, life and all the wild in between. Join me, Caroline, every week because I share a peek into the world of podcasting and my wildlife as well. Ready? Let's get into it.
Hello and welcome to the Wild Home Podcast. I am so excited to chat today and I thought I would get a little personal on today's episode. I recently started working out again, and it's funny because I've been drawing a lot of parallels from the experience of getting back into working out and just the evolution that I'm going through as a person and how it has kind of related to podcasting in some of the journeys that I see our clients take, the journey that I took as well as podcaster. And so I thought it would be fun to share with you a little bit about what's been going on and how that relates to podcasting. So let's dive in.
Yeah, I started working out again. I'm really proud of myself. I need to tell a little story. Some people know this. I think I've mentioned it a few times, but I feel like there's a lot more to the story that I haven't really explained. And I think it would be fun to kind of have this as a placeholder for the story and to reference it. So I actually was a ballet dancer. I started dancing when I was three, when I was about 10 or 11, really caught the bug and saw The Nutcracker and decided that's what I wanted to do with my life. And so I did, and I gave up a lot to do it. I did not have a normal high school experience. I was always at the dance studio. I moved from dance studio to dance studio to find the best places for me. In fact, we even my senior year of high school moved to a new city so I could attend ballet school there.
And without going into too much of the details I never had the what they would call ideal ballet body. And I even hate talking about this because I just think it's so horrible what is said to people and what is acceptable to be said to people in the ballet world. And I know that the ballet world is changing, but the sides that I saw of it were not pretty. And I was told many times to my face as a young girl, as a young woman that I was never going to make it because of my body.
And I fought against that for many years and even went to college to major in ballet. And I would say that when I was in college, that was probably the worst of it, the worst of how people's words were affecting me. Some of the choices that I made and how I took care of myself or didn't, because people told me that I would be dancing more if I was thinner. And unfortunately for me and for them, it was true. When I was at my thinnest, I had a very unhealthy weight for my body. I was cast and was dancing. And so it only validated to me that, you know, if I didn't take care of myself, I would get the roles. So I had every intention of graduating from college and dancing as a professional dancer. That was what my goal was. I wanted to be a choreographer. I wanted to be a dance teacher.
And then my junior year, I started having a very strange pain in my hip. And that pain in my hip just kept getting worse and worse and worse to the point where I couldn't actually turn out my leg. So when I am talking about turnout, I'm talking about like, you know, when you're sitting on the floor with your legs straight out in front of you and how your toes can kind of fall to the side. My toes didn't do that anymore. And if you know anything about ballet, you know that turnout is pretty, pretty important. I saw a doctor there at the university. He said that he thought I had sciatica really bad. And they prescribed a few treatments, none of which worked. And then the dance department sent me to an orthopedic surgeon who did an MRI and that he saw a tumor on the head of my femur, possibly. And nobody seemed to know why my hip was getting bad.
And so that summer between my junior and senior year, I went home. My mom took me to see the doctor who treated the ballet company in our town. He did a bone scan, and he said he thought he saw what was the remnants of a fracture on the head of my femur. And he did some research and he felt like the only option. For me to have a normal life and to be able to walk when I was 40 and to not have a hip replacement in my thirties was to quit dancing. And so I did.
I quit dancing. It was not easy. It was probably one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, and I wish that I could say that, you know, it led to happy, happy things. But it was the beginning of an incredibly difficult transition in my life and a transition that I feel like I've been making for so many years because honestly, I was, you know, I was going to dance. My whole life story that I had built for myself was around the fact that I was going to be a ballet dancer.
And then I went from being super active to not being able to do a lot of things. And it wasn't until I met my husband, whose father is an orthopedic surgeon, and he actually like would watch it the way I walked and he finally came up to me one day. I think we had been dating for a little while. I don't know that we were ever engaged yet, and he asked me why I walked funny and I told him the whole story. And then, like months later, he sends me this paper and he's like, I think this is what's wrong with your hip.
And I read it, and it was just I mean, it sounded just like my injury. And it was called FAI or femoral acetabular impingement. And there weren't many doctors at the time who were treating it. We had to find we found a doctor in Dallas and he was like, "your case is too far advanced, you need to go see the guy who pioneered the surgery." And so in 2009, I went to Nashville and had surgery on my hip.
OK, so this is setting the stage for you to all understand. So now I'm married, I'm having kids, I'm running my own business, and I have this hip that limits a lot of what I can do. I can't do like running. I actually walking on pavement is very uncomfortable for me. So even if I like when I get fit by walking. But does it really work for me? I do love hiking and hiking actually works because I think because you're on like different terrain and you're not just walking like on a straight, hard path. So I've actually done pretty OK with hiking. Sometimes it's hard on my hip because I lack a lot of strength in that leg. I did do a lot of physical therapy. Let me just preface this.
So, you know, I've kind of gone through these weird phases in my life, having been somebody who was so active for like the formative years of my life. And then now I'm like so limited to what I can do. It's been really interesting and frustrating, honestly, and I, whenever I feel like I find the thing that I love that I can do that I can work out, something would happen. I would get injured again or something, which is very easy for me to do with my hip. And the way that it is, I can very easily reinjured it. And we're basically in this moment of the impingement is back, but we're trying to hold off on any kind of treatment or anything until I can get a hip replacement because otherwise we're just going to start this very vicious cycle of shots and then surgery and then more shots and then more surgery. And that's just not what I have time for.
So I have been trying to figure out what the thing is that I want to do. I've done yoga for many years, but I really wanted to do something that made me feel strong and sweaty. I wanted to get sweaty and because I haven't been able to find the thing I've been putting off since I had my third getting back into working out and getting back into shape. For me, it's not so much about losing weight at this point, as much as it is about feeling good and being able to run up and down the stairs and not be out of breath. We live in Colorado. The air is thinner here, and if you get out of shape when you're here, it's hard to breathe anywhere you go. And so I just really wanted to feel better.
I mean, I've been thinking about this for years, right? As do many of our clients who are wanting to sort of podcast. They think about it for years. They don't know where to start. They don't know what the thing is. So flash forward to this past Christmas. My husband got an oculus for Christmas and we started doing Beat Saber, which if you don't know what that is, it's music and you hit targets. And I love it. It's so much fun and I was pretty good at it and I noticed that we started working up a sweat. And I kind of start thinking to myself, I wonder if there's like a better version of this that's more of a workout. And we discovered Supernatural. Which is boxing and what they call falo. They also have stretch of meditation, but it's so it's on Oculus, which is their VR, right, a VR game. And you work out while you're in VR and we thought we would do the free trial and see what we thought and we did it and loved it.
And now I'm working out six days a week. I work out in the evenings after the kids go to bed and I am loving it so much. And what's so great about it is that it is enabling me to do what I can physically do. I am able to do like everything because it's like standing in one place. There's not a lot of high impact. There are squats and things like that, but there's no like jumping or force being put onto my hip, and so I'm able to do it. And when I do supernatural workouts, they make me feel amazing. I feel like I have finally found the part of me that's been missing for so many years as I've been trying to figure out how to be active again since injuring my hip. It's really quite fascinating just how much of an impact it's made on on me as a person and how I feel.
And so that is the story of my little workout journey. I left out a few things in there, but I think you kind of get the gist of it. So I started getting really frustrated with this a couple weeks ago. I love the workout. I love doing it. I love setting aside the time for me. And in fact, it was doing one last night, I think, or the night before last. And one of the coaches said one of the greatest gifts you can give your family is to take care of yourself. And I just really resonated with that because I just I feel so good and I know that it's a good thing for my family as well.
But I will admit there is a part of me that's been wanting to see results quicker and faster. And I got super frustrated a couple of weeks ago and it reminded me of so many conversations that I've had with our podcasting clients. So I wanted to just kind of draw some parallels. I think there's a lot of us who will listen to this, and it will make a lot of sense because we feel the same way. So bear with me. You know, it was really hard when we started doing it. I remember the first couple of times we did it. I was just dripping. I was so sore I couldn't imagine there. They have what they call these monster workouts, which is where the pace stays the same for a really long time, like an hour. And I kept thinking to myself, I can barely do 20 minutes, how am I ever going to get to an hour?
But the thing is, is that it has become easier with time because I have become stronger. This is exactly the same as podcasting. The first time you sit down in front of the mic, you're going to feel awkward and you may even feel like you sound terrible when you listen back to yourself. But it gets better with time.
And once you get to episode 25, 50, 75, 100, you're going to feel so much more confident and so much more confident of your voice, like you're going to understand who you are and how you sound and what you want to share. And this is exactly how it's become for me with Supernatural. So we've been doing this for a few months now and. I mean, last night I did it probably 30, 35, 40 minutes of workout, I did like a like at boxing and then I did a flow and I stopped after the flow because I had things to do and I was dripping sweat. But I sat down later and I was like, Man, that felt really good, and it wasn't really very hard. I probably should have done another one.
And podcasting is the same way I remember, you know, when we first started doing one interview and a day was just so much work, so difficult. But later down the road, doing two three episodes in a day was easy and so fun, and we loved it. And I feel like that's exactly how the working out has become for me. I don't dread it anymore, like I wanted to do it, but there was like a sense of dread of like knowing that I'm going to work myself, you know, into some this can be hard and I may not enjoy it, but it's really good for me and I need to do it. It's gone from that to like, "Oh I can't wait to go change into my workout clothes and go do my workout." And it's the same for sitting down in front of the microphone.
So it'll be hard at the beginning, but it does get easier with time. I want to go back to the results. The results are very different than what I thought. I don't know what I thought, but I thought that if I worked my tail off every night for six nights a week that I was just going to shed pounds, I'm going to be honest, I just thought I was just going to shed pounds. And I haven't. I haven't been. But there are changes happening. Amazing changes. Changes in the way my clothes fit. There's changes in how I feel. I mentioned running up and down the stairs so much easier. Now I don't get winded by much anymore. And in fact, it's been interesting because it'll tell you what your heart rate is after the workouts. And when we first started, my heart rate was always late in the one 160s, 170s and now, like my heart rate doesn't go up as high because I'm just so much more fit.
And I was having a really interesting conversation a couple of weeks ago about podcasting and how the results are different than what we think they are. You know, it's hard when you're a business owner and you have a podcast, there are stats that you wish you could get from your podcasts, like how many people clicked from this place, how many people clicked from that place. There are some things you can do, like creating special links for people to click through to opt ins and things like that so you can track them. But it's hard to know like, "OK, where did you come from? Where did you hear about the podcast? Where did you find me?".
And it's hard to quantify if all those listeners are converting into leads of any kind, especially when you're only about 10-15 episodes in, when you get further and you start to hear about it, right? You know, I will have meetings with people and bringing up podcast episodes, and I'm on my second podcast and this is episode sixty nine. So like, it's taken a while to build that up.
I think too people have this misconstrued view of the numbers. They think that they have to hit these really high download numbers to have an impact when it's kind of the opposite, you want the right listeners at the right time. And so there may only be a hundred downloads an episode, but if you walked into a room with 100 people and got to share your message, wouldn't that be impactful? And so you have to kind of reframe the metrics and the results and the goals of your podcast.
If you're a business owner who's using it as part of your marketing, right? And that's the same for me with the working out, I've had to kind of reframe like, my goal right now is not necessarily to lose weight, it's to make sure that you know that I feel comfortable and confident in the bridesmaid's dress that I'm wearing in May, that, you know, I'm able to just go out and go for a hike because I can and I feel great. And I know it's not going to be hard because I'm in shape.
I'm in my late 30s. I have a two year old like, I'm going to be chasing this girl around for the next 10 years. I need to be in really good shape to be able to do that. And so those are the goals. And so as I'm thinking about the results, I'm having to reframe them and pulling away from just quantifying everything with numbers. And it's the same with podcasting.
You have to really think about what your goals are and how you're going to measure them, and it may not be what you originally thought. And that's totally OK. The other thing is to like your goals can change as a result. Start to change. Right? So, you know, like I said at the beginning, it was like, Oh, I want to lose weight. And I did lose some initially and it was really exciting. But then I've had to kind of shift because no amount of, you know, eating or whatever is changing anything. And so but my body is still changing, and it's important to have clarity and to be able to look at that. And say I can still see the results, even if they aren't what I first thought they were going to be. Right?
And the last thing I want to leave you with is just that I think, well, there's two things, OK? One, this is a long game, right? I'm not going to get, you know, amazing results in three months. I've got to probably keep this up for the rest of my life, if not at least for the next year, to see the kind of results I want to see. Podcasting is the same way. It is a long game. You're not going to see everything you want to see today, tomorrow, this week, next week, next month. It's going to take some time and. That can be really frustrating because we want everything to happen right now. But knowing that I'm in this for the long haul and I have found something that works for me, just like in podcasting, you have to find a system that keeps you consistent. I just had a podcast episode on that will and get in the show notes is really important.
And I think the other thing too, that I keep forgetting about is how important community is. You know, because of the last few years, everything that we do, we do at home and even the working out on the Oculus is a little, you know, I'm not going to classes. I'm doing it at home in the evening and having like my husband there to cheer me on has been really great. But we also joined the Facebook group for Supernatural and they have a really great community and just seeing everybody's results and seeing their struggles and what they're doing as well has been so helpful. And the same goes for podcasting and the business world. You know, having people that you can talk to you, having friends, having an accountability, maybe there's a group you can join. You know, finding where you can get support is super important as well. You know, for me and my working out, and if you haven't done this supernatural game, it's kind of hard to explain. But there are coaches and there are just so uplifting during the workouts. Like, I can't even explain it to you. It just after having been in the ballet world where pretty much everything that was ever said to me was negative. It's really lovely to step into this kind of arena and just have all this confidence and positivity just poured into me. It feels so great, and I'm not even in live classes like these are just recordings, right? And it's just amazing.
And I think having that type of support is so important. And last week, I did an episode on support and why it is important for your podcast. And so either like, find out, source some things, find support that way or find a community where you can get the support that you need because I think it makes such a difference to help you grow and to help you stick with it.
So I hope you enjoyed this episode today. I had this idea for the episode a few weeks ago. I thought it'd be fun to share because this has been such an important journey in my life, and I know this isn't the end of it. I know that this is just the beginning and I'm excited to feel. I don't know. It's been a long time. I mean, I used to go into the dance studio and dance for two hours and just sweat. And I've always miss that and I haven't been able to find the thing where I can do that. I don't know what it is. There's something about just sweating that just makes you feel like you're validated in how much you're working out. And that's exactly what this has been doing for me. And so it's just been amazing. And if you have any questions about it or you're interested in trying it out. Feel free to DM me on Instagram. I'd love to chat about it. I think I even did a story about it a few weeks ago because I was so excited. It was like the longest workout I had done and I posted it and it just felt so good. I mean, like I said, I used to be in two hour ballet classes three times a day. And so to go to that, like it feels really good to be feeling that again and comparing that to podcasting.
When I first started podcasting, I did not feel confident in my voice and getting on a microphone, and now I do, I feel a lot more confident about and talking about what I do and talking about what's important to me. And it's taken time to get there. And it's it's taken a lot of windy roads and trying different things, but to finally have kind of found the thing is very exciting and to sit here and record this episode and share it with you means a lot.
So if you are looking for support at Wild Home Podcasting, seeing we have some openings for May and June and you can go to WildHomePodcasting.com/services and check out what we have to offer there. And of course, you can email me or DM on Instagram with any questions. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode, and we back with a new one next week.
Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. To stay in the know, head to WildHomePodcasting.com and be sure to connect with me on Instagram @WildHomePodcasting. See you next week!
