What part of your podcast do you love the most? What part of your podcast do you like the least? 

Once you have the answers, it’s natural to assume the easy position of eliminating or reducing the thing you don’t like as bout your podcast and doubling-down on the thing you love about your show.

But that’s not what you should do. What you should to is quite the opposite.

Your show needs tension. Often, it's the tension between the things you like and the things that you don't like as the host, creator, producer, or showrunner of a podcast that give the podcast life. Maybe not all of the life, but certainly some flavoring and seasoning. And no one wants to listen to a lifeless, flavorless podcast. So you never want to get rid of all tension.

It's in that margin -- the gap between what you love and what you hate -- where you find the true life of your show. It’s also where you may find new opportunities to take your show. Because growth often happens in this “conflict” zone. It’s where your innate problem-solving attentions keep returning to time and time again. So… lean into that tension!

There’s another trap that’s easy to fall into when thinking through the love-hate question. That’s the trap of conflating things that you just simply don't like to do with an aspect of the process of making a podcast that you don’t like. Sorry, but you can’t decide not to do the staples of making a podcast. You have to either get over that hatred or hire somebody else to do it for you. 

There's the old saying of “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and change the things I cannot accept”, but I don't know that it’s all that useful in this setting. Sometimes the things you could change would make a vastly different and perhaps inferior product.

Maybe instead of looking for things to change about your show and your process, perhaps you should spend attention on the tension-parts of your show? Yes, I know that sounds really, really weird. And honestly, I'm not even sure I'm properly communicating the point I’m trying to make. 

But that's okay. That's one of the things that I love and hate about this show is that sometimes I don't know exactly where I want the conversation to go. But it tends to get there in the end.

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Podcast Pontifications is published by Evo Terra four times a week and is aimed at the working podcaster. The purpose of this show is to make podcasting better, not just easier.