Show notes
That’s it: it’s our season finale—and our last episode of No You Go, ever. Really. But don’t worry, we’re not quitting the podcast game. We’re coming back January 10—with a new name that, well, we’re really feelin’. In this episode: we ask each other tough questions about our first year as podcasters—like what was great (spending time together! Learning new skills!), what was hard (uhhhhh long answer), and what we’d suggest to anyone looking to start a new jam. The highlights: How to celebrate a milestone while in the middle of some major burnout What to do when you end an interview and realize there’s no audio Why we wish we’d made friends with other podcasters a lot sooner (and what you can learn from our mistakes) Plus, we reveal our brand-new name: Strong Feelings—and talk about why we decided to rebrand the show. There’s so much great stuff we want to dig into next season on Strong Feelings, like unfucking your work life, trading #selfcare for true self love, facing our own bullshit so that we can be better feminists and activists, and what the power of female friendship can really do. OH! And we want to hear from you, too! If you have strong feelings about something, we set up a hotline for you to share them. Leave us a voicemail at (267) 225–5923. > Strength and emotions are often seen as being at odds with each other, and something that I really think we do on the show—and that I want to do on the show—is demonstrate that having feelings and talking about those feelings is strong. That’s a strong thing to do.> —Sara Thanks for listening to NYG this year, and we hope you’ll join us next year for Strong Feelings. New episodes start January 10! If you’re already subscribed to the show, no sweat—NYG will simply become Strong Feelings in your podcast app in a few days. We’ll also be moving our site over to strongfeelings.co later this week, and updating all our social, too. And while you wait for new episodes, definitely sign up for I Love That, our biweekly newsletter—next edition comes this Friday! Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by:Harvest, makers of awesome software to help you track your time, manage your projects, and get paid. Try it free, then use code NOYOUGO to get 50% off your first paid month. Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers for more. Transcript Sara Wachter-Boettcher Shout out to Harvest, our awesome sponsor once again. Harvest makes time tracking and project planning software for freelancers, tiny teams, huge corporations, and everyone in between—even me! Check them out at getharvest.com, and when you upgrade to a paid account, use code “noyougo” to get 50 percent off your first month. That’s getharvest.com, code “no you go.” [intro music plays for 12 seconds] Katel LeDû Hey everyone. I’m Katel. SWB And I’m Sara! KL And you’re listening to the season finale of No, You Go— SWB —the show about building satisfying careers and businesses, KL —getting free of toxic bullshit, SWB —and living your best feminist life at work! And speaking of best lives, Katel, welcome to our last 2018 show! How are you feeling? KL So, I seriously cannot believe that it’s been a year and I’m really excited about next season and next year…but…I have not been doing super great—just in the last week or so—and I’m feeling a lot of feelings about that. SWB Okay, so before we celebrate, [laughs] I think we have to talk about that. [KL laughs] KL Yeah, so I was really kind of struggling last week and trying to keep on top of everything and just feeling like I wasn’t doing a great job at anything. I wasn’t doing anything well or right and I was also beating myself up over it, which felt even worse. And over the weekend, I pretty much spent all day Sunday crying. SWB Oh, no! [KL laughs] I’m so sorry, Katel! [KL sighs] KL So, I mean it felt good because I’m a person who likes to cry and that actually feels good because it’s a big release for me. SWB Ughh same. I totally love to cry. [KL laughs] I do cry a lot. I definitely cry a few times a week. KL Yeah, totally. But it also felt terrible because I kept thinking about how excited I should be and how ready I should feel about wrapping up this season and heading into everything we’re doing next and next year. And honestly, I sat down to write some notes for today’s show and all I wrote was that I feel burned out and I don’t know what to do about it. And then I just was like, “okay, what is my plan here?” I do know what to do next in these moments, but I have to take those steps. So, I’ve gotta talk to my people. I got to talk to my partner and my therapist and you. And I knew I just needed to say some of those words out loud. SWB And I’m so glad that you did because I really want to know how you are and it’s A) because I care about you and I care about how you feel—I want you to feel good. And B) if things aren’t working for the show, then we have to pause and talk about it, even when that’s weird or hard. If we don’t talk about it, how are we going to have the show be meaningful and relatable and real? It’s going to start feeling fake— [2:46] KL Yeah. SWB —and obviously we don’t want that. KL No. SWB And also, something I think about a lot is that it takes a lot to put together this show—we spent a lot of time on it. And so, it’s way too much time, [KL laughs] if it’s not going to be real, right? KL Right. SWB It feels like we need to get through that kind of stuff honestly, otherwise it’s not worth it to invest this time—and obviously, I want it to be worth it. So, I’m really glad you told me. KL Yeah, and I think that is part of my plan is just connecting with people—letting people know that I’m struggling. I know that if I tell Jon, my partner, he will block for me. And I know that if I tell you, you’re going to block for me too in whatever way that is most helpful. And I know that if I go and talk to my therapist, she’s going to be there for me. She’s going to say, “that sucks” and she’s also going to give me some tools to help me get through whatever I’m dealing with. And she knows pretty much everything that’s happening with me, so she asks me to think about my optimal self. When I think about who that person is, what does she need? And to think about what that person needs and what am I missing right now? So, that really helped me just kind of think about what I’m missing and what I need to prioritize and one of those things is space and downtime. SWB Yes, I think that we all need down time, obviously, but it’s always hard to actually consistently do for yourself. And then the other thing that I was thinking about as you were talking about feeling burned out and you weren’t doing great at everything…I think something that’s been extra stressful for me the last few weeks at least—and I suspect maybe for you too—is that we have been working on all of this kind of side planning for what we want to do next year. We’re going to have a big reveal later in the show. And so I feel like I’ve been kind of carrying around a lot of that with me, both the extra work of planning for it, as well as just kind of not talking about it. And so I’m hoping that when we talk about on this show, that means we won’t have to hold on to it anymore. KL Yeah, I feel exactly the same way. It’s been very exciting [KL laughs] and very stressful. So, I can’t wait to just talk about it. SWB Before we get to that though, first we want to talk a little bit more about the year that is about to end, so things we learned—which was a lot of things personally that I learned—and also what that means for what we want to do next and where we want to grow. So, is there something that you just can’t stop thinking about that you heard a guest say this year? [5:06] KL Yeah. When I sort of started to think about this, I thought back to one of our very early episodes with Eileen Webb when she said why should only work get my best brain? And that has been stuck in my brain ever since that episode. And I think we talked about it a little bit on the show—we kind of recapped it—and I think it’s something that has come up a lot and we’ve sort of come back to a bunch of times. So, I love that something so early on has kind of carried its way through. SWB Yeah, I don’t think we’ve explicitly brought it back up, but I feel like it’s been lurking there in the back of my head. And you’re totally right, and it’s such a good concept, so thank you, Eileen. [KL laughs] KL Yeah. Alright so, Sara, what was harder than you thought it would be? SWB Oh my gosh. [KL laughs] You know what was really hard for me? Feeling like an amateur. [KL sighs] KL Yeah, I get that. SWB I don’t think I had done something that made me feel so out of my depth for a while. And that’s probably good for me! Like when I took that pottery class a couple of years ago, [KL laughs] and I was really bad at it. I think that was good for me to be bad at it and to just enjoy doing it anyway—enjoy doing it without feeling successful at it. I think that was good. But the difference is that like in this particular circumstance, I am doing something that I came in with no experience in and I’m doing it really publicly. And so it’s not like my pottery class where I’m like, “okay, I made some shitty pottery [KL laughs] and I can keep that to myself.” [SWB laughs] KL [laughing] Yeah. SWB It’s like I made some shitty pottery and now I’m going to, what? Sell it to the world at this art fair? KL Yeah. I’m going to publish it. SWB Right? And so I don’t think our podcast is shitty, don’t get me wrong. But I do think that we’re doing something that we hadn’t done before and that was tough. And I feel like over and over again, I was reminded of how I was an amateur. If you remember very early on we were interviewing Alisha Ramos, the founder of Girls Night In? KL Mhm. SWB Okay, so we hadn’t quite figured out at that time that in order to do that interview, we had multiple people signed into our recording service Zencastr that does separate tracks for each party. And that if you do that, you can’t all be in the same room because you will get your voice coming in over the airwaves, as well as the voice in the room, and it’s so disorienting. KL Yeah. SWB So, remember that Jenn was leading the interview, so we left her [KL laughs] in the office space [KL laughs] where she was recording and we moved to a couch on a different floor and huddled over a laptop— [7:38] KL Yeah. SWB —and I remember just feeling so out of it. KL Yeah, and then even you and I on that couch were sharing headphones. [laughs] So, it was just super awkward and we were like “is this right?” [laughs] SWB And so, okay, that was when we weren’t consistently figuring out where we were going to record and how we are going to record. And I remember thinking, “well, I won’t make that mistake again,” [KL laughs] which is great—okay, fine, we learned something. KL Yeah. SWB However, I felt like very week we were making new mistakes. [laughs] KL [laughing] Yes. SWB Every week we’d stumbled upon something we hadn’t done before and that was hard. And I had a hard time balancing the idea that on the one hand, you got to learn somehow and you can’t learn unless you do it, with the idea that we wanted to make something that was good enough that people would want to subscribe to it and that it would be important to people and valuable to people. KL Mhm. SWB And so how do we make something that’s as good as a podcast we love without the experience [laughing] of the podcasters we love? KL [laughing] Yeah. SWB I feel like finding that balance and finding a place where I was both putting in enough time and energy to get better at it and try to make sure that the product was good, but without beating myself up that it was not perfect—which it wasn’t, sorry everyone. KL [laughing] Yeah. SWB Okay, Katel, I have one for you. KL Okay. SWB Is there anything that you learned from a guest this year that you feel like changed the way you look at your work or the way you look at running the show? KL You know, when we talked to—just recently—the authors of New Erotica for Feminists, I really loved hearing how they collaborate and how they support each other and have each other’s backs. And we heard that they can legit break down in front of each other and they know that that’s not going to change anything. If anything, they’re going to just rally around each other and figure out how to make it work. I think when we asked them about how they work together—when you asked that question, you kind of expect them to be like, “oh, we have these stumbling blocks, we have these challenges”—and I’m sure that they did—but they were like, no, we work really well together and that’s why this is fun. And that’s why we made something we really love and we’re really proud of. So, I loved hearing such a positive story about that and I think it just made me think about and reflect on our relationship and how well we work together. And that’s made things feel good and easy, even in the face of [laughs] some of the things we didn’t feel like we were so good at. [10:01] SWB Yeah, and I think hearing from them, I really heard the trust that they had for each other. And I think that that’s valued in comedy writing that if you’re going to work with comedy writing partners, you have to be able to give each other hard feedback if the comedy is not working. And that if you’re going to collaborate on jokes, then there’s a lot of riffing off each others ideas until you figure out something good. And that bringing that spirit into their work meant that they had that collaboration because they trusted that if somebody was like, “hey, I wasn’t really meaning to go there“— like, ”eeegh, I don’t think this is working”—that that’s okay and right to say and that’s not mean or tearing other people down. It is all in the spirit of making it better. And so I like to think about that trust that they had for each other and think about, you know, the kind of trust that we need to bring to our relationship and the kind of trust that I’ve had in the best working relationships I’ve ever had. KL Okay, so I’ve got a question for you. What’s something that you think went horribly wrong? SWB Uhhh! [KL laughs] I don’t think talk about all the negative stuff, but I will. [KL laughs] Okay, so related actually to feeling amateurish—when we had recording issues, that was really tough for me. KL Yeah. SWB And we had a little bit of a spate of them this summer and fall. And what was especially tough about that is that I felt like we had hit our stride and I was like, “I thought we were past this!” [KL laughs] And then a few things happened where I was just like, “oh, no.” One of them was the time we were trying to record with Cindy Gallop. So, Cindy is a pro. She has done a lot of interviews and she’s so sure of her messages, right? And when we got her on the line to record, we were having some trouble with Zencastr. And it’s a little bit like a Google Hangout—everybody gets onto this line, but everybody is also on their own separate line for the recording. It’s pretty cool. Except that the VoIP—so like the internet connection—screwed up like three different times and we had to stop the recording and restart it, which I felt so silly about, and then eventually we actually switched to using my conference line to record, [KL laughs] which was like a whole, “okay, now we’re going to need you to do this instead.” And, of course, that has some other issues with it like you can’t record on separate tracks, so voices get on top of each other. Anyway, through all of this, Cindy was a pro, but I remember just feeling like, “she must think we are a mess.” [KL laughs] It was kind of traumatic! [12:17] KL I know. It felt very dire in the moment [laughs] because we were just like, “oh my gosh, are we gonna get through this?” [laughs] SWB I know. And I felt so out…
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