You're listening to Podcasting Made Simple.

Hi, I'm Ron Macklin.

Welcome to a podcast on the power of empathy in podcasting.

Power, for me, it means it's the capacity to get things done.

It's, uh, although people can say, you know, it's a term of pushing people down or whatever.

Power is just a capacity to do something. Sorry, I'm a, I people down or whatever. Power just capacity to do something.

Sorry, I'm a recovering engineer. Power just means the ability to get things done. When I look at

what is empathy, the first question I ask is, like, what does it do, what does it take to be

empathetic with somebody? And empathy is, my definition here, right? it's understanding what the other person's going through,

their situation, understanding who they are and what they're going through. It's about, kind of about

focused on the other person. And in a podcast, being empathetic on the podcast, either as a guest

or as a host, it's really to be looking at the other person and to understand what they're going

through. How do you do this? We've all built a relationship in our life where it took six months

to a year or maybe years, right, to be able to build trust with somebody where you could just

share who you are and what you're going on in the world. We don't have that on a podcast. We've got like

milliseconds, right? Sometimes we do this ahead of time, but we can do it milliseconds at beginning

of the podcast. So how do we do that? Where do we start? Well, the first place to start is with

ourselves. Like us, when we're getting ready to go on a podcast, either as a host or guest, right,

there's a space for us to look at ourselves first.

In a way, it's going to create our way of being before we go in, and to be empathetic in that

towards yourself.

I mean, we spend our whole lives competing.

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