Grow With Soul: Episode 154 - The End Of Grow With Soul
As you can tell from the title of this episode, today is the last episode of Grow With Soul. I don’t really know what to say after that. It feels like I need to say everything at once. I know some of you have been listening from the very beginning and some of you have only more recently found the podcast, and I imagine you may have feelings of some description around this news. Today, I thought I’d tell you how and why I came to this decision, show you the thought process, and hopefully leave you with one last pep talk.
What I talk about in this episode:
How I came to the decision to end Grow With Soul
The direction of my work
Where you can find me now
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Read the episode transcript:
As you can tell from the title of this episode, today is the last episode of Grow With Soul. I don’t really know what to say after that. It feels like I need to say everything at once. I know some of you have been listening from the very beginning and some of you have only more recently found the podcast, and I imagine you may have feelings of some description around this news. Today, I thought I’d tell you how and why I came to this decision, show you the thought process, and hopefully leave you with one last pep talk.
It may seem a bit out of the blue and in some ways it is and in some ways it very much isn’t. The decision itself was made about a week ago, over the course of a dreary walk around the block. I’d been thinking about what to do about the next episodes for this season and not really coming up with anything, so I pulled on my coat and went out into the grey, wet air and as I walked I found myself writing this episode in my head - the episode where I tell you I’m ending Grow With Soul. And that was more or less the decision made.
Of course, though, the decision didn’t start and end on that walk. It’s probably been a year to 18 months in the making.
This podcast started in 2018. That was the first full year of my business, the year where I was doing all the things and making it work and getting myself nice and ready for a burnout episode. This was a marketing podcast then, and I was a business coach, and I had a very clear vision for what this podcast was going to be and what was going to make it stand apart. I remember I’d put off having a podcast for a while because I wanted to make sure it had something a little bit different to all the other small business podcasts out there, so it started with coaching episodes mixed with a few interviews and solo shows and it really took off.
In the four years since I have bought a house and moved into it, gone through a protracted and extremely messy break up, sold the house, moved into a different house, dated, been heartbroken, stopped talking about marketing, stopped coaching, transitioned my business, started hiking. My business is totally different to the one that this podcast was started to support, and I am a completely and utterly different person to the one who started it.
Grow With Soul was a constant thread that joined the before with the after, that through all the transitions and changes provided a continuation. I think that was important for a while, to have this link to the past, that even as I stopped the coaching episodes and shifted the style of content here it was at least, still here. I just think it was performing this function for longer that it needed to. Without me noticing, it went from providing consistency to holding me in the past.
Coming up with podcast episodes has been the bane of my life over the last year. Poor Jen must have lost count of the number of texts she’s received saying “ughhhh I don’t know what to do for this week’s episode”. When it comes to the blog I have so much, too much, I want to say but for the podcast I couldn’t get anything to fit. I couldn’t think of anything that was substantial enough to fill 30 minutes, and anything I could think of that would fit with the topics of the podcast I didn’t really feel galvanised about creating.
Don’t get me wrong, there have been episodes that I’ve been really proud of, that feel like some of the best things I’ve written. But the struggle to get there wasn’t worth it - especially when really I’d rather they were blog posts.
Because that’s the thing. My work is really tugging me towards the writing. That’s where I get the best feedback, that’s what I most want to be doing, that’s what I want to be able to give time to developing. I think there is a more expressive and creative direction I’m meant to be going in there that I’m only just being brave enough to consider. And the more I hold on to Grow With Soul, the more it represents an anchor in a business that no longer exists; the more I make Grow With Soul, the less I’m going where I want to be.
There is of course the argument to just move Grow With Soul with this move in my work. I did that once before, changing from a “simple marketing podcast” to a “work in life podcast”. The trouble is, Grow With Soul is Grow With Soul. It is its own beast and its own thing and it holds everything that I had originally intended it to be and everything I was. Grow With Soul can’t move forward into a brand new version because it is Grow With Soul. To me what Grow With Soul content is is so clear that I can’t not create that kind of content here. But that’s not the kind of content I want to be creating. I can’t keep dragging around a dead limb. And I can’t spray that dead limb with air freshener and buff it with powder and pretend it’s not dead.
That is the main reason, the most overdue reason. This podcast just is no longer in alignment with the work I want to be doing. And if I’m going to do this, really do this, this life and work that is truly mine and what I want - then I have to do it. I can’t keep hedging my bets with the past.
The other reason is that this podcast is the most resource-heavy thing in my business. This is in terms of the time it takes me to create each week (usually at least 3 hours by the time I’ve come up with a topic), and also financially. Creating a podcast is expensive. It costs approximately £300 a month to have Grow With Soul edited, proofed, hosted, published. Four years ago I had the kind of money to swallow that cost, and I was booking clients who consistently said the podcast was a decision-maker for them. Quite frankly, I don’t have that kind of money anymore. I’ve always thought I “couldn’t” stop the podcast because it was my biggest acquisition driver but really I’ve got no evidence to show this is still the case. But I’m certainly not making a good enough ROI to not try something different.
I have to-ed and fro-ed over this decision. I told Sasha in a WhatsApp and walked away from my phone, before rushing back to delete the message 30 seconds later because that made it real. I find I get a lot of validation from having a podcast. It impresses people I’ve dated, and when I talk to strangers around a dinner table it seems to be the thing that makes them “get” what I do - “I have a podcast” is the moment where they stop frowning and understand. It has, for some reason, made me feel more legitimate than “just” having a blog (although the two aren’t any different). But none of these are reasons to continue.
This is unlikely to be the end of my journey with audio content. I am sure that there will be something else, in time. But it needs to be something I’m excited to do, something that aligns with me, something that doesn’t stress me out, something I’m not doing because I feel I have to. I have no concept of what that could be, and it may be years away. I need to shrug off my self-imposed limits of what podcasting and audio has to be first. And I need to focus on the work I really want to be doing.
I am looking forward to the space this creates, both with my time and financially. Breathing room all round. I am looking forward to not stressing and rushing every week to get something out. I am looking forward to what I am going to create. I am looking forward to continuing to connect to you with words, just perhaps in a slightly different way. I am open to hearing what would help make my writing and emails more accessible to you if you have only been a podcast listener so far.
Grow With Soul will stay live and there is an excellent archive that I am so incredibly proud of that you can go back and explore. Stay subscribed because if there is a future audio project I will share it in this feed. I am writing on the blog and on Instagram, and obviously the best way to keep in touch with my work is my subscribing to my email list. I want to thank you, so so much, for being here. It has been an honour to have accompanied you in your studio, on your walks, in your car, in your kitchen. It’s kind of crazy that in all these houses in all these countries my voice has wafted through the air. Thank you for inviting me in. Thank you for trusting me. I hope this is not an ending but a new beginning.
And until next time. I hope you Grow With Soul.