How to be interviewed on a podcast

I'm hoping for audio only when I click the link.

Sure, I've put on a nice shirt and done my hair.

But does anybody watch podcasts anyway?

Plus people do their best thinking in private. Not onscreen.

I think of a podcast as a private journal space with myself.

The host is there, asking questions, but it's a time for me to think things through.

When the camera is off, I can look right out the window, as I'm doing now, writing with a black screen. 

But other times, it serves me to look at the glow of the sun hitting the green of the leaves, box elder, and blue sky peeping through. 

I've interviewed and been interviewed hundreds of times.

I enjoy this form of communication: the structure and the clear focus on who is in what role.

If I'm the interviewer, my focus is to listen, to listen beneath what someone is saying, and let my imagination be guided by what they share: letting images and connections happen as we glide toward the next time I will ask a question. 

Finding the right question is like poetry: naming a true thing that bubbles up from the depths.

However, in the role of interviewee, my job is different.

When Angela interviewed me yesterday, I had to try hard not to ask her questions in return. It's not my job.

The role of the interviewee comes with the expectation of surrender: someone else is driving.

Someone else is guiding the ride where they want to go.

They are steering, noticing, and highlighting salient information.

My job is to share deeply the flow of truth inside me and to allow their guidance and curation to shine. 

When Angela asked me to speak about power, children, and parents, I feel the wound’s pull.

Getting triggered publicly, yay.

To be a parent is to be forever in the dual role of not knowing a fucking thing and being the resident expert on everything.

I let my jaw soften, let the words there to be expressed come out, and tried to silence my inner critic who was listening with eyebrows raised. 

I am not a parenting expert, even as I've raised two humans to adulthood.

It was claw and scrape the whole way, with a few moments of grace thrown in for good measure.

I didn't mention any of that: what to do when you hate your child and when you are so far beyond your capacity that providing guidance is the furthest thing from your mind; attunement is not even possible.

Those kids are lucky if they're eating tonight.

Sometimes, it's cereal. 

No, those are not things to mention in a podcast about your book on power dynamics at work.

But every parent has these secrets, the moments of collapse when they just couldn't.

Tenderness.

Yesterday, in response to a question Angela asked, in my mind, I saw the river near my house rise and was reminded about how the day before, I had wanted to go there all day and hadn't permitted myself; there was too much to do.

How I'd felt shitty all day, and what would that day have been if I had allowed myself time earlier to go and witness flow, to see shine and mirror, and water and sky and the poetry of geology?

Water is the nervous system of our planet, and I could have leaned into my impulse for resourcing instead of my desire to get shit done.

I tell Angela those things.

She seems L.A. interested. 

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You have no idea who is listening when you're being interviewed for a podcast.

I experience a vigilance: it's not just wanting to say the wrong thing in the moment; it's the recognition that, on some level, I am anchoring myself in this moment forever, like getting a tattoo.

A podcast is a timestamp of my thinking, a marker of the access I have to truth-speaking, of my current understandings and politics. 

People do not hear us the way we intend to be heard.

The lurking presence of fear shadows my words as I speak on a show: will anything I say now haunt me later, a ghost of my past self?

Will my words be misunderstood or deliberately misrepresented to take umbrage?

The best I can do to assuage these fears is to look out the window, close my eyes, and listen.

I say a prayer before any work that my work is in service to the healing of this Earth and is a blessing to all who encounter it.

Who am I to say what form that blessing takes? 

It feels like my get-out-of-jail-free card: If I pray, I can believe there is something helpful in what I convey. What I transmit.

Often, it doesn't feel like words are mine, coming from my brain.

Sometimes they do.

I feel the support of the unseen worlds as I write and speak: I feel the holy presence of clarity and healing come through, and I receive the blessings of that. 

To speak without a script or preparation is a radical act of self-trust: to know that you are accessing both you and something beyond you.

I do this for the sake of self-trust.

To believe I can share from the heart, in the moment, from my body's wisdom, what is.

I'm a big fan of radical honesty, being human and not fronting and trying to be all professional and experty.

When I listen to a podcast, I want to hear that this human speaking has struggled with what I'm struggling with and doesn't hide behind a white wall of protection. 

It's time to for us all to center our own humanity.