Why make a coaching podcast?

I have been meeting with a coaching friend, Sarah Ives, every month for a couple of years now. She is part of a Coaching Network group we started several years ago and we decided to do some co-coaching. As part of our six weekly meets we practise co-supervision and talk about clients we are working with, and also how we are developing our businesses, what’s working and what isn’t.

The idea

At a recent meeting, we discussed different ways of reaching clients and Sarah suggested, “What about doing a podcast; isn’t everyone doing those”? When we looked at the statistics on podcasts, there are 21 million podcasts listeners in the UK. UK listeners listened to almost 60 million hours of podcasts a week in 2021 - up 50% from 2 years ago, which is pretty impressive growth. We did the usual things you do when talking about a new idea: Who would it be aimed at? How would we know if it was successful? How much would it cost? 

We thought it could be aimed at people who are interested in coaching topics primarily but haven’t necessarily had coaching, as well as active Coaches who we thought would possibly be interested. Looking around, there are a number of coaching podcasts available but still not much out there relatively in the coaching space. We also thought that as coaching is built around an informed conversation then the podcast seemed like a natural fit as a way to express what we wanted - spoken rather than written reflection, although I write lots of blogs on coaching.

Getting started

We both familiarised ourselves with other podcasts, there are some great ones out there for example like Brene Brown’s “Unlocking us” and Annalisa Barbieri “Conversations with”. Checking these out prompted ideas about possible topics we could cover, agreeing on the length of the podcast and how to create a natural conversation between two hosts. 

We also quickly decided that as neither of us is that technical, we would pay for a wrap-around service of recording, editing and placing the Podcast around the seemingly multitudinous streaming platforms that host them. We found a specialist podcast studio in Oxford called Story Ninety-Four (turns out this is when the owner was born!) and decided that £250 per episode was pretty reasonable given the amount of time it took to do all the things associated with producing our podcast.

As for the approach to each episode, we decided we didn’t want a script as such, but did agree some general areas to cover, a “loose flow” or structure of introduction to each topic, some theory associated with the topic, examples from suitably anonymised clients, and also something of our own experiences. 

The episode topics

This was pretty much finger in the wind approach! There were topics that we wanted to talk through and areas we had recently worked on with clients. 

The first episode focussed on ‘what is it like to be really heard’? How often do we really experience being heard in our lives and what happens when we are? What is our personal experience of being heard? Obviously, a good one to start off with in a coaching podcast!

The second episode posed the question; do we learn as we get older? Are we fixed in our “hardwiring” as adults or do we have the capacity to learn and grow? We each shared some hard-won life lessons for each of us around things like self-compassion, holding boundaries and staying connected with others.

The following two episodes which we have just recorded looked at themes of how we make changes in our lives and how to find courage and deal with fear.

What have we learnt?

Overall, we recognise that however we define the success or failure of the podcast, it has really stretched our comfort zones; it’s one thing to train, practise and be supervised as a coach, but to go live into a podcast setting is at times quite frightening (especially for a confirmed introvert!)

We have learnt some things along the way like; allowing lots of time to prepare well for the podcasts even if they seem they are just like a conversation. Be prepared to spend the money if you are not tech savvy to have someone take the pain out of recording, putting “stingers” in (short musical interludes to break up the podcast) and load it onto the various platforms out there. We are grateful we did it as a pair as helped deal with the ideas, the anxiety of starting something new is halved! 

Not to overlook some key statistics and figures, I asked the podcast studio owner for progress to date and his response was: “You have over 100 downloads across the first two episodes, which is great”! The number to focus on is average downloads in the first 30 days, which is currently on 48 - placing you in the top 50% of podcasts. The retention rate is at 88% for episode two, which is greater than the first episode, so growth there!” We have also had several really positive reviews on the Apple and Spotify platforms.

Feedback is helpful and good to know, but returning to the original intention; what was it we wanted and how is it working? I hope it doesn’t sound too worthy to say that whilst we might not have generated “x” number of new clients, in some small way we are trying to help the profile of coaching, especially for people new to it, and understand that there are universal life themes around being heard, making changes and finding courage that apply across the board to all of us.

I haven’t been able to do the geographical spread across the world that I can do with the website that shows people visiting in all sorts of different countries, but hope in some small way, it’s helping others, as it has helped us as two coaches: to navigate a way through our lives being the best version of ourselves whilst connecting closely with others.

Obviously, there are several streaming platforms. This is a landing page for the podcast, which includes the description of the podcast and links to the major podcast apps, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts. 

We would love to know what you think, either by commenting on the posts we are disseminating through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and sharing/re-posting the post. In particular, it would help if you could subscribe to the podcast series and write a review of the podcast on the platform you use.