Due to a toxic cocktail of what I imagine is the anti-authority nature of my generation (X, of course) and the “question everything” ethos instilled in me by my journalism training, I tend to push back on the prevailing “conventional wisdom.”
Anytime I’m met with a widely accepted, unassailable truth, my immediate reaction is one or all of the following:
- “According to whom?”
- “To what end?”
- “Oh yeah? Prove it!”
Take the conventional wisdom du jour that’s thrown at us from every angle:
"Consistency is key."
A random sampling of contexts in which you (and certainly I) may be coerced into this consistency theater:
✔️ To grow your email list, you absolutely must be consistent about sending your newsletter on a weekly without fail 🫣 lest you end up in spam jail
✔️Instagram insights wags its finger at us as it admonishes: if only you’d consistently posted Reels each day of this month, engagement riches could be yours...
✔️If you want those elusive “gains” at the gym, you gotta be consistent. (That one’s probably true. I wouldn’t know.)
For podcasters, “consistency” has somehow come to mean publishing every single week on the exact same publicly declared day…or else!
Or else...what? We might catch our collective breath? Spend some time with family? Find a release rhythm that meets you where you are instead of blindly following advice better suited to aspiring Mr. Beasts?
Ok, sure, I agree that it is a "best practice" to show up ~consistently~ for the people who have generously opted in to what you’ve promised to cook up for them. And I’m sure there are some data-backed reasons behind this well-meaning advice.
HOWEVER.
Somewhere along the way, “consistency is key” came to be understood as “constancy is key.”
Incidentally, podfade–the phenomenon that claims the lives of 90% of podcasts before they even reach episode nine–shows no signs of abating.
I'm certain these two phenomena are not operating in isolation from each other.
I really I don’t think it’s a stretch to draw a correlation between the noisy consistency chorus and this frankly shocking burnout rate among podcasters.
Based on how often the word "podcast" comes up in everyday conversations, TV-show dialogue and--just today--a board game I played with my multigenerational family, it’s completely understandable to feel like there’s a lot of competition out here.
But the real statistics tell a different story. See: exhibit A, the meager 10% survival rate for a podcast.
The real competition is with your own stamina, and how hard it is to ignore the pernicious pressure to be Always On.
(Ironically/not coincidentally, “Always On” is the literal, official classification of a podcast that promises to publish every week indefinitely.)
The dogma that proclaims: “A podcaster must commit to publishing every Tuesday forever and ever til (your unnecessarily early) death do you part” isn’t doing anyone any favors here.
True consistency–which is to say, showing up REGULARLY over a period of time–is seeded by intentionally designing a podcast strategy that is inherently forgiving of the realities of your life.
I'm talking about a strategy that enables you to keep going when reality sets in and you discover you can’t sustain the release schedule you picked back in your well-rested, highly optimistic podcaster honeymoon phase.
Here's the good news/bad news:
No one is setting their watch by your podcast release schedule. No one is constantly hitting refresh on Apple Podcasts or Spotify on a particular day waiting for your podcast to plop into their feed.
This may sound harsh, but it should feel like a balm to your overwhelmed soul. Because it is.
Give yourself the time you need to show up regularly and reliably enough to surprise and delight your subscribers when you do. It sure works well enough for me...
My guest on the latest episode of Talking the Talk is the apotheosis of that kind of consistency (not a typo; consistency not constancy).
Julie Fischer has managed to keep her podcast, Nine to Thrive, alive and thriving for three years. And Julie publishes (hold on to your hats, podcasting police!) every other week.
Nine to Thrive has beaten the odds BECAUSE (not in spite) of this highly humane publishing schedule that Julie built into her strategy from the very beginning.
She understood that an every-other-week release schedule is what would enable her to “be consistent." So while others would have flamed out long ago, Julie is still going strong.
After my conversation with Julie, I found myself doing what I so often do: reaching for the dictionary. #NerdAlert
One definition of consistency is “the achievement of a level of performance that does not vary greatly in quality over time.”
Ummm....that feels like not a worthy goal?
I’d actually like my work to vary greatly in quality over time, thank you very much. Ideally in improved quality, but at the very least I really hope it does not stay the same forever.
The other definition of consistency nearly had me do a spit take: “the way in which a substance holds together.”
HOLDS TOGETHER! As in: The opposite of falling apart and turning into dust.
The opposite of abandoning something you once cared deeply about because you built it on expectations that were never yours in the first place.
That, my friends, is the kind of “consistent” I promise to be for you.
I will never be a perfectly punctual student with every T and I crossed and dotted every time. Heck, my publishing cadence may be so unpredictable at times you’ll wonder if I dropped out. Nope.
I won't be predictable, and I definitely won't be on time, but I will be reliably present when you need me.
And I invite you to also build your own systems that support you bucking the dominant system so that you can do the same.
