One of the things I love about hosting the podcast is that I get at least five ‘touches’ on the content:
1. when I’m preparing for the interview – reading the book, researching the business and the interviewee’s background, thinking about what will be interesting for listeners, preparing the questions;
2. during the interview itself, when I get to chat to some of the world’s most interesting and articulate people (have I mentioned how much I love my job?);
3. when I check over the transcript;
4. when I put together the whole episode, including intro and outro, picking up on the big themes;
5. when I put it live – which can be months after the original interview.
Today I was checking over the transcript for my interview with Caroline Webb, author of How to Have a Good Day. What reallly struck me was her emphasis on the everyday. Her company is called Sevenshift, and I asked her about the name.
‘Sevenshift… talked to me about everyday change, seven days a week. Perhaps even the seven ages of man. The sense of continuous change and how we navigate that. The name for the company came before the name for the book. The common thread was that I was becoming more and more interested in the everyday… My clients were asking me to give more follow-up guidance on reading material for the work that we were doing in person. One of the things that I was starting to become very interested in was the small stuff. Sometimes I went with people helping them think about their career and the next best move for them. More and more I just found that what was really holding people back or what was going to allow them to go to the next level was the everyday.’
In the book she brings together behavioural economics, psychology and neurology and applies it in a very accessible way to those everyday situations. As I read through the transcript I realised just how profound this is: using the most cutting-edge research on how our brains work to take the most mundane aspects of our everyday lives – interactions with others, meetings, email – and make them that little bit better.