Five Things I’ve Learned in One Year of Podcasting

You’re listening to the Mastering Money in Midlife podcast with Debbie Sassen, episode 55.

Welcome to Mastering Money in Midlife, a podcast for midlife women in business to overcome financial anxiety and make more money without burning out or sacrificing their families. Join Certified Life and Money Coach Debbie Sassen, as she shares practical business strategies and mindset shifts that help you dissolve the money blocks that keep you stuck in a cycle of under earning and under saving, sabotage the growth of your business and prevent you from building the wealth that you desire.

Hello my friends, and welcome back to the podcast. Today we are celebrating one year of podcasting. And we’re not going to talk about business, or money, or how it impacts you. We’re going to talk about me, what I have learned doing podcasting for one whole year, and the lessons that I want to take away in my business for 2023.

And since you are all listening to me on the podcast, I invite you to eavesdrop in my discussion with me, learn what makes sense to you, take away a few things that you can implement in your business in 2023. And I look forward to next year, when I’m celebrating two years in podcasting, that we’re going to all come together and talk about what we are celebrating, what things have changed. And see if both you and I have up-leveled our businesses and our money in 2023 as a result of this podcast.

I don’t know who’s going to remind me, I might have to download the transcript and read it from time to time to make sure that I’m on board. But whatever it’s going to be, we’re just going to take it away and talk about five lessons that I’ve learned from podcasting for one whole year. And I have two takeaways or growth areas that I want to work on for 2023.

All right, let’s dig in. The first thing that I have learned after 12 months of podcasting is that a year is a long time. I probably knew that a year was a long time, it’s 12 months, it’s 52 weeks, all the days and hours and minutes that go into that. But as the expression goes, we overestimate what we can accomplish in one day, and we underestimate what we can accomplish in one year.

And when I look at the last year, it is mind boggling what I have accomplished in my business, and in particular, in my podcast. When I was launching my first few episodes last year in December, whether you recall or not, the borders across the world had just been shut down because a new variant of COVID had started expanding all over the place.

My parents were supposed to visit me in Israel, they were locked out of the country, there were no more flights. Travel was stopped once again. And here we are at the end of November 2022, I have been to the United States twice in the last year. My parents came to visit me in June, they have traveled in other countries in Europe. And they are set to arrive here to visit me again this year in December.

So from a world health perspective, so much has changed in the last 12 months. Do we still have Corona? Yes, we still have Corona, but the world is not in the hysteria and in the cautiousness that it was 12 months ago. And it’s just mind boggling how much has changed in the world from a health point of view.

If I bring it back closer to home, because that’s what we’re talking about, is business and money. I have shown up on this podcast every single week for the last 52 weeks. And it is also sort of a mind trip to me to really believe that I could commit to something for a whole year.

And that’s really my takeaway number two, is that I showed up, I committed. I thought about things that I wanted to say that I thought would be useful to you, my listeners. I brought guests on that I thought would also be beneficial, expand your mind, share with you what other entrepreneurs are doing in their space and give you ideas about how you might grow your business or bring some of their skill sets into your life.

But just to think about committing to something for a whole year, we commit to our families, to our partners, to our children, we even commit to our businesses. But sometimes in our businesses we’re sort of like on this hamster wheel running, running, running, throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what works, hoping when we try something out that it’s going to be the thing. And we never just commit to doing the same thing over and over and over again and getting really good at that.

As a coach, I mean, I do show up and I coach my clients, and I work on my coaching skills and I improve them. And I take advanced coaching certifications to refine them and hone them even more. But sometimes, whether it is a webinar that you’re working on or you’re working on blogging, or posting on social media, or doing reels, or whatever it is, we tend to jump from thing to thing to thing.

And podcasting just isn’t like that. Podcasting is something that you make a decision about, you invest your time and your energy. And it’s not something that you’re just going to try out for like 17 weeks and then stop doing. It really requires a longer term commitment. And I really want to give myself a pat on the back that I have shown up to do that.

In addition, podcasting has required of me more organization than I like to do. We have talked about on the podcast how I have been one of those last minute people for many, many years. I don’t know if it’s a story that I tell myself, if it’s a fact about me, but it’s definitely something that has been a part of me and my life since about, I don’t know, 40 years, maybe almost 50 years.

I’ve told the story about how I pulled my first all-nighter in school when I was in fifth grade. So that makes it almost 50 years that I have been the kind of person who does things at the last minute and pulls all-nighters. But podcasting has required that I look at my calendar so that when I am going away traveling overseas for a couple of weeks, when I’m on holiday, when it’s the Jewish holidays and I don’t want to be sitting in my office and recording podcasts during my holidays.

I want my podcasts to be organized ahead of time so they’re just going to drop on the day. And so that has stretched me and helped me develop new skills. And it’s something that I want to remember for the future that, hey, Debbie, you are the person who can actually look at your calendar a few months ahead of time, or maybe a few weeks let’s get a little bit realistic, and plan content ahead of time.

And I know that as I move into 2023, that is a growing edge that I want to stretch a little bit and I want to develop. People talk about batching content, I have successfully batched content before I’ve gone away on trips overseas. But it’s not something that I do in my business on a week to week or even month to month basis.

And I’m just like planting a little seed that maybe something will sprout and will grow and I could be the kind of person, or I could become the kind of person who batches her content for her business over longer periods of time. And I know with the podcast, when I have done that, it has just been such a feeling of joy and freedom that I didn’t have this thing on my to-do list that I had to do.

I mean, nobody’s holding like a rock over my head, forcing me to do it. But it’s, again, my commitment for a year. And I wanted to show up and do that for you, for my audience and my listeners, and for me. And maybe my next stage of growth and development is stretching myself to plan my content more intentionally and to plan it ahead of time. So number two is my commitment for the year.

Number three is that podcasting is a labor of love. I love you, my dear listener, whoever you are, wherever you are in the world. And you know what? I show up every week on my end of the microphone and I have no idea where in the world this podcast is going.

It was fascinating to me, about a month ago I saw on somebody’s Facebook page that she was celebrating an anniversary. And I wrote, “Happy Anniversary” on her post. And she said, “Oh, I love your podcast.” And I was like, wow, I didn’t know that she knew who I was or knew that I had a podcast. I mean, she’s in my local network of Israeli entrepreneurs, but it was just fascinating to me.

It was like, oh, people are actually listening to the podcast. I know they’re listening because I have about 10,000 downloads. But be that as it may, the podcast goes out there into the world, I have no idea where it goes or who listens to it. Sometimes people will tell me, “I listen to your podcast.” My clients have told me, “Oh, I listened to your podcast, it was really good.” I’m like, “Oh, I better go back and listen to that, that sounds like it was a really good episode.”

So I’m just really happy to know that it’s going out into the world and it is creating this ripple effect and it’s making an impact. And I thought that I could make a parallel between my podcast and the other things that we do in our businesses. I write on social media. I show up on Facebook, that’s where I think my main playground is on social media, is my Facebook page. I’m also on LinkedIn, also on Instagram. But Facebook is my main playground.

And wherever you’re posting on social media, if that’s part of your marketing strategy, what we often do is get graspy for the likes and the comments. We want to have some feedback, it just feels necessary. Like we need that validation, we need that proof, we want to know that people are engaging with our content and they’re giving us feedback. We kind of want it to make us feel good.

There’s this sort of like underlying sneaky thought or need that we have when we put something on Facebook or Instagram or whatever, that people should be commenting, liking, giving us an emoji or whatever. But podcasting isn’t like that at all. As I said, I put it out into the world and whatever happens, happens.

And I want to take this lesson from podcasting back to the other content that I give out, whether it’s on my social media channels, or even in my newsletter, is that I’m giving it out from the goodness of my heart. That sounds really cheeky. But I’m just giving it out there as a way of sharing value with the people in my audience who just want to show up and listen to it, absorb it, learn from it.

And, you know, I’m giving myself some self-talk, it’s not to have expectations, or even entitlement that something should come back to me. And that’s really an invitation to everybody listening, is that put your content out there, share value, be valuable, and really release the reins. Don’t have any expectation that it should come back to you. Of course it will, but we never know how it’s going to come back.

I’m putting out content on my podcast, it could be that somebody’s going to like, I don’t know, meet me at the supermarket and we’re just going to start talking while we’re waiting in line and that person is going to end up hiring me as a coach. We don’t really know how all of the energies work in the world and how I put something out one way and it comes back to me another way.

So just share value and really trust, have faith. There is an almighty God who is organizing everything out there, and whatever you put out, will come back to you 10 times, or 20 times, even 100 times over. Just keep showing up sharing and trusting.

The fourth thing is, and this is a little bit related to what I said before, is not only do you have no idea where your content is ending up and how much impact it has, but really to highlight that your words have meaning. And be mindful of your words. Make sure that the things you’re saying and the things that you’re writing are having the impact you want them to have.

When we were in school there was like this little ditty, “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” And we know, right, as adults who were once kids, that that is a lie. The words hurt us so much and so deeply.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it on the podcast before, but I had these girlfriends, they lived around the corner. And we used to play with them. And once we were in their kitchen and their mom said to me that Debbie is pleasingly plump. Yeah, I was a little plump as a kid. I have some rounded edges, right? Nothing terrible, I’m fine, I’m healthy, thank God.

But those words, right, like 50 years later, they are still in my mind and they still a little bit resonate in my body. Actually, it was really funny, a couple of months ago I had that phrase, Debbie pleasingly plump, come up in my mind. And I went to Google the mom who said those words to me because you can get anything you want these days on Google.

I Googled and there was this like sweet, older woman. I think she’s about the same age as my dad, which would make sense I might have even seen her age, it might even be a couple of years older than my dad. A woman in her 80s who, you can imagine looks like a grandmother in her 80s, gray hair, wrinkled face, happy smile with her grandchildren.

And I was like, “Oh wow, this is the person who said those words to me over 50 years ago. And look, she’s just a regular person.” I’m sure there was no malice involved in the words she said. She was probably just trying to just be nice and sweet. And there was nothing there that was meant to hurt me or wound me, but that’s what the little girl inside of me took back.

And, again, just cautioning you and me that our words have impact. And so be mindful of the words that you use. And understand that, especially on a podcast, also on social media, the things you write on your social media channels, that people are reading them. And, of course, there is diversity of opinion, and there are different political views, and different religious views and different, so many different views.

And just realize that people are going to be reading your content and make sure that you are having content that is appropriate for the people that you want to touch and whose hearts and whose minds and whose businesses you want to touch. Because our words matter, that’s number four.

Number five is that, and I guess I’ve touched on this before, is that the planning stages for my business are something that I have learned to do. Now, as I am recording this podcast, I am also just winding up the enrollment for my Wired For Wealth mastermind. And that is content that I did not plan so well ahead of time.

Some of the emails I wrote on the spot. Some of them are emails that I wrote previously that I took and then I reorganized, re-jumbled, or maybe edited them down, added some different phrases inside of them. But that is content that I did not plan ahead of time, even though I had several weeks of knowledge and warning about when my mastermind was going to enroll.

So on the one hand I can plan, and on the other hand I still have some growth area. And that’s a beautiful thing. We are always in the middle of our journey. Wherever you are in your business, just like keep the faith, show up, keep putting one step in front of the other. We all know that Rome wasn’t built in a day, but they were laying bricks every hour.

And that’s really all you need to do, is just keep laying bricks, one on top of the other on top of another, because that is how you are going to build your business. And after you finish the wall that is maybe the retaining wall, there are going to be some walls that need to be built in the houses or inside, in between the living room and the bathroom and the kitchen, right? There are going to be more bricks that are going to need to be laid. So just keep doing your work in the world, wherever you are.

That’s the five things that I think I learned from podcasting over the last year, is that a year is a long time and so many things can change. Keep showing up, keep doing your work. Number two is that I can commit to doing something for a whole year and having no guarantee of the results.

It is beautiful and fascinating that somebody out there who I had never met before, found my podcast and they ended up hiring me as a coach, shout out to my clients at the Downstream Studios in Colorado, in Loveland and in Greeley, who found me through the podcast and I worked with them for six months. And it was a beautiful relationship that we had. But I had no guarantees and I just showed up and I did my work.

Number three is that podcasting is a labor of love. It’s connected with number two, all of these are connected, right? Number four is your words matter. They have impact, so trust that the things that you’re saying and the things that you are writing end up in the right places where they’re supposed to end up. And your compensation for doing the work that you’re doing can come through different channels.

And number five is that I can plan in advance. I’m on the road, I’m progressing, I am getting better at it all the time. I’m not yet perfect, I still have many, many years ahead of me to perfect this new skill that I have developed over the last year.

All right, so let’s talk about 2023 and where I’m going. So the first area that I want to work on for me and my business and my podcast in 2023 is being more thoughtful about the content that I put out. This year it was all about trial, error, growth, doing the thing, showing up. And I’m thrilled that people have given me feedback that I’m making an impact and they’re learning from the podcast.

But this one podcast is about women, business, and money. And my goal through the podcast is to help my listeners make more money in their business. My goal is to help you uncover the money blocks, the limiting beliefs that you have about money. To really find them, to notice what you’re thinking and what you’re saying, and to uproot those beliefs. All of those beliefs are sentences in your mind.

So many of those sentences were said over and over and over again by our parents, by our community, colleagues, friends, peers. We want to sort of snap those sentences out of our mind, examine them with like a one foot or two foot view away from ourselves, ask ourselves if we like those sentences. And if not we can toss them away and let them go because they might not be serving us in our businesses at this time.

And so being more mindful of the work that I’m here to do, talking to you about money blocks and limiting beliefs is a thoughtful area of intentional content for 2023.

Also, an area that I have been developing even more deeply during this past year has been money healing. Really going deeper into our nervous system and noticing the energy that’s coursing through your body or getting stuck in your body. It’s a little bit harder to do on a podcast.

Many months ago I think I brought you a visualization on the podcast, which helped you to unearth some of what was going on in your body. And we might do more of that in 2023 because so many of us do have financial traumas. Little T traumas, meaning there was too little money, it was like over an extended period of time that we were in this very needy, or deprived, or semi-deprived state.

And that left an impression in our nervous system and it impacts the way we show up in the world. And so if I could bring in more content that was focused on money healing, I think that would be very beneficial to my listeners.

And then there’s the practical aspects of money, managing your business books, planning for profit, thinking about income, even if you were to have a product business where you could sell, whether it’s $19 products, or $29, or $199 products, like being more intentional about the content that I produce for my listeners.

If you, my dear listener, have anything that you would like me to talk about on the podcast and share from my knowledge and my experience from 14 years of being in business and working in financial planning, please send me an email, debbie@debbiesassen.com, and let me know what you would love to hear on the podcast. Because I’m here for you. Remember, I said this is my labor of love. So that’s one of my plans for 2023.

And the other plan I already alluded to before, is I want to learn how to be more intentional about planning my week, planning the content, planning even over months. So it could be that I’ll take a theme for a month and that way I could batch my content. And that would be, again, a growing edge for me in my business, to just show up, be very intensive and intentional, sort of one day recording the podcast.

And then think about it, I get the rest of the month off. And that sounds so luxurious for me as a business owner, and as I grow into the next stage and development in my business.

And I think the last thing that just sort of like came into my mind that I would love to mention is that as we grow in our businesses we need bigger support teams. If I think back into the day when I was just starting my coaching business, and I’m not talking about the financial planning business because that had different needs.

But as a coach, I can just show up in coach and I’m online, I send a link to my client, we show up on Zoom together, we coach, I might send some notes so that there’s some follow up. But it’s a very small operation.

As I grow my business and now I have a mastermind so that I have several clients working with me at the same time and it requires planning, it requires content, it’s making sure that my systems and my emails and everything gets out on time and my podcast, that that gets produced on time, right?

So that means that I have more of a support network as a business owner. And what that requires of me is that I have my standard operating procedures, my systems and my processes mapped out so that I know what to do. And also so other people who might need to step in my shoes can also follow the directions or the plan that we have laid out in case anything should happen to me or there’s a glitch in the system, a hiccup or something like that.

And that for me is also, that’s area number three that I’m going to focus on in 2023, is getting my workflow much more organized than it is today.

All right my friends, you’ve heard about my five areas of growth during 2022 as a result of podcast. And I’ve shared with you three ways and I’m going to grow my skill set as a CEO in my business and as an entrepreneur in 2023.

If there’s one takeaway that you have from this podcast, do me a favor, write it down and send me an email. Tell me that you also grew in a similar way, or you learned from the podcast and you’re going to take this away with you and you’re going to grow in that area in 2023. And let me know how I can support you on your journey.

I’ve loved being with you for the last year. I look forward to another 12 months sharing with you content about business and money in 2023. And if you love this podcast, if you have enjoyed it for the last, whether it’s week, 12 months, whatever timeframe in between, please go over to iTunes and give me a five star rating. The more people that rate the podcast and leave me a comment, the more it’s going to be shared by iTunes out there into the world.

All right my friends, thank you so much for being on the podcast with me this week, and I will see you next week. Bye for now.

Thanks for listening to Mastering Money in Midlife. If you want more information on Debbie Sassen or the resources from the podcast visit MasteringMoneyinMidlife.com.