Here’s One Tip to Make Your Podcast Interviews Truly Excellent (FS222)

If you make a podcast or need to interview people at all, there’s a trick you can use to get deep into interesting material.

You know that’s how your podcast or youtube channel or interview posts get popular, right? By having incredibly interesting content?

That’s the trick. And this tip is going to help you get that interesting moment into more of your content.

You simply have to hear this tip in action… honestly, it makes it so easy to understand. In the podcast episode here Steph shows us three moments in her own show where she used this trick to find “the moment” for each of her guests.

Boring, canned, cheap interviews

Most guests, unless they’re real good at their talking points, provide boring, canned, cheap interviews. Chances are you would too.

This happens because they’re not being prodded (nicely!) into interesting material for them.

Get your guest truly interested in the conversation and you’ll stumble onto some stunning moments.

So, what can we do to get beyond the canned and into the… grand. Does grand work there? It rhymes, so let’s go with it.

Beyond the canned and into the grand. How do we do that with our interviews?

Finding the moment

In the podcast above — again, mandatory listening! — Steph shares that in her interviews she’s always looking for “the moment.”

• The moment when something scary might have happened that the guest is glossing over.
• The moment where someone shows some courage.
• The moment when someone does something unexpected.
• The moment we can zoom in on and understand some more detail about.

When you find a moment like this it’s tremendously interesting. (The first example Steph shares in this episode showcases this perfectly. Happens around 24m in.)

When you find a moment like that here’s what we do: we push the guest to take us back into that exact moment — one day, one instance, exactly what she was doing, what she said in conversation, what she was wearing or listening to, how she felt.

When you find a moment and really dig into it, not only is it super interesting to listen to, but it brings up all kinds of emotional engagement for you, the listener. You'll connect to it on a different level and REMEMBER the conversation / takeaways much better because of that connection.

Here’s how Steph puts it:

“Everything else in the story really hinges on that moment, the entire story is constructed around it, and I've become really relentless in my pursuit of it, and I believe it has helped set my show apart, and it's something everybody listening can totally steal and use.”

Some tips on finding these moments

• Do you ever know when the moment is going to be? Sometimes you can have a sense of it. On several occasions I’ve sent email to my guests and asked them about where some of these “turns” or “important moments in the story” may be. They responses can help me know what to look for.
• Guests will always gloss over these moments if you don’t stop them and focus in! It’s some sixth sense we all have to avoid things like this.
• The trick is zooming in. In the show Corbett shares a moment where he’s about to cross the border in Mexico. It’s a really good example of this.
• If you are bored as the interviewer then your listeners will be bored. Use your own curiosity as a barometer.
• “You ask the questions that I want to ask.” – your audience. That’s the kind of thing you want to do on behalf of your audience, so learn to get interested yourself!

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