I'm Effie, a life coach who profoundly gives a fuck about
you feeling better for good. I teach people how to cut the
crap and live according to their own rules.
It's a crime we don't learn this stuff in school, but it's
simpler than you think to break the pattern and start living the
life you want. Listen on to find out how.
Hi, my love. I am coming back after a little
hiatus, if you even noticed. But I feel like I feel like with
the right friends, you don't even notice when there's been a
break or when there's been a lapse that you just fall back
in. It's kind of like riding a
bicycle, right? Like good friends are like
getting back on a bicycle. That doesn't sound quite right,
but I think you know what I mean is it's like, yeah, you just,
you just fall back into the rhythm that you knew with them
and that you've always known with them.
So that's what I am feeling. That's what I'm betting on.
I'm so glad to be back. And I wasn't sure when I would
come back. And to be honest, I wasn't sure
even if I would come back. And I'm going to tell you
exactly why on this podcast and also let you know that I have
decided to continue. This is the last podcast that
will be in double digits. Actually, after today, after
this episode, we're going to be in triple digits and it's going
to be a completely new experience than it's been in the
past. So if you've been listening for
a while and you're like, I love what I love this.
I love what Effie's done. I love what she's doing with it.
I bet that you will continue to love what I'm doing with it.
But it is going to be a different experience most
certainly for me and a more sustainable experience just
overall in terms of production. And then I'm hoping a more
alive, more riveting, even more valuable experience for you.
So here's where I was at when I decided to take this hiatus as I
guess I'm calling it a break. We, yeah, me and the podcast has
this wonderful, amazing, loving, occasionally sordid
relationship. And we just went on a break and
I, when I cheated on her a little bit, I was on another
podcast or two. But for the most part, I just
was like, OK, I'm just honoring my time solo.
And I have to say it felt great. It felt great not to have the
podcast production be something that was in the back of my mind
working on me. And not to say that I haven't
absolutely adored producing the podcast over the last two years.
I have, and I have really knocked my own socks off in my
ability to be consistent with it.
It has not been 100%, but I have produced.
I mean, I'm on episode 99, right?
And for somebody who really has had a very hard time with
consistency in the past in my other work and particularly, you
know, working for myself, I think it's just very, very
exciting that we've gotten to this point.
And also the way that I was producing the podcast and the
way that I was approaching the, I guess, workflow of the podcast
was not sustainable. Now, the context for this is
that when I started this podcast, I was thinking, this is
going to like, this is going to reach so many people.
It's going to be a marketing engine for my business.
It's going to help so many people.
And I'm not saying that it hasn't helped.
It has, it's been a really amazing experience and my
listenership still is quite a bit lower than I would have
wanted or foreseen when I started out, you know, two years
into creating the podcast and I've heard that this is
relatively normal. And then I've had other people
who have who've had different experiences.
And of course, I compare myself to the people who have had much
more successful experiences in terms of numbers.
And I cherish every single one of my listeners.
And that's why I've kept doing this for two years is because
even though the numbers weren't where I wanted or expected them
to be, I was like, it's a miracle.
It's a miracle that people are listening to this.
It's a miracle that they're really listening.
And getting so much from this and that I'm getting so much
just from giving it. And I want to, even if this
could, this could help one person, I feel like it's worth
continuing. And yet the amount of time and
effort that I was putting into podcast production every week.
And I'll explain to you exactly what that means.
And what that looked like was not something that I could
continue to do while while also growing other aspects of my
business, other areas of my business.
And so I did an experiment when I went on hiatus and I told
myself, OK, I'm not going to do the podcasts for a month or two.
It's been 2. And I'm just going to see how
this frees up my energy or how I behave differently in the ways
that I'm showing up to different parts of my marketing engine in
my business. And my findings were very
interesting. So I felt some initial relief of
like, OK, now I don't need to plan and design and publish
because here's my workflow was that I would spend quite a bit
of time actually thinking about and scripting and or detail
outlining. Most of the time scripting, if
I'm perfectly honest, I mean totally honest with you,
scripting out exactly what I wanted to say.
I would either dictate it or I would write it free form as I
was saying it kind of like either stream of consciousness
or and then, you know, tighten it up or structure it a little
bit afterward. Sometimes it would be the first
draft and then sometimes it would have a a quite detailed
outline and occasionally I would have just a very loose outline.
And I think once or twice in the two years that I've done this
podcast, I've done like a just, you know, free balled it, as
they say. And so let's say, let's say it
was an hour, you know, hour and a half of conception and and
creative right. And then I would go into the
actual recording and I would record basically what was there,
what was outlined or scripted for me to do.
And it was a fun experience. I mean, if you know a little bit
about my story, you know that I come from entertainment and that
as a a filmmaker and a performer, writer, director,
like I know there's magic in doing more than one take
sometimes, but sometimes not. Sometimes all you need is 1
take. And I'm realizing that as the
sole person who has been writing, producing, hosting,
editing, publishing and writing copy for, you know, show notes
and stuff for this podcast, it just, it doesn't make sense for
me to go to great lengths to script this out, especially,
especially when I could just trust that what's inside of me
is valuable. And then it's going to come out
in the way that it needs to be received.
So that was the edge that I was pushing.
And it was really uncomfortable edge because, yeah, I wanted to
say the right thing. I wanted to make sure that it
was, you know, I was on message and it was tight enough.
And it was, I don't know how how successful I was at that, but
when, when I was planning it out, when I was planning the
episodes out and scripting and stuff, I don't, yeah, maybe it
was placebo or maybe it was just like, OK, this, this is crafted
enough that I feel like it is worthy of delivering value to my
listener. So anyway, that's an hour, an
hour and a half process. And then the, to actually do the
scripting and write out the creative, sometimes more.
And then I would record and frequently I would, you know,
stop the recording and do more than one take of a snippet or
whatever that, you know, I was kind of like editing along in my
head or directing and editing along in my head as I was, as I
was speaking into the mic. And it didn't really, I mean,
there was, it was just a longer process than it needed to be,
right? So if it was a 15 or 20 minute
podcast, I could spend 40 or even 60 minutes recording it,
which then because I'm recording multiple takes back-to-back and
not necessarily editing in real time.
And maybe this is too much detail for you, but then on top
of that, let's say it was it's an hour for recording and I
spent much more time than that thinking about recording.
I don't know how to quantify that.
Now we're up to 2 1/2 hours a week.
And then I needed to edit, which depending on the length of the
episode and how many takes I did, or, you know, whatever my
internal dialogue was around my, my recording that week could
take between. I don't think it ever took me
less than an hour. I would say one to three hours
and then I would need to schedule and or publish it and
write the copy for it, which didn't take long typically
between, I don't know, 20 and 40 minutes.
So now let's say, gosh, OK, let me do the maths.
Let's say 2 hours average for editing, that's 4 1/2.
So let's say 5 hours, 5 hours a week as a single mom
entrepreneur that I'm spending on producing a podcast with a
lower than desired listenership. And at at a certain point, and
I've questioned it several times over the years, but at a certain
point I realized, well, the, the, the math just doesn't
really add up. And what could I be doing with
those five hours that could be so much more impactful, that
could reach a larger audience organically or, you know,
through paid? I've actually been exploring
paid ads in these last couple of months.
And so the fact that I wasn't devoting 5 hours every week to
the podcast is what really enabled me to do that.
And here I am coming back to the podcast.
And so you're probably saying, well, why?
Why Are you ready to turn those five hours back over to us every
week so that you can keep delivering on this?
Well, actually, no, I'm not willing to do that.
And that's why I'm coming back. And I'm coming back with a
courage to change the things that weren't working about the
podcast in terms of my workflow, because there were a lot of
things about the podcast that were really working.
It was impacting people. It wasn't reaching as far as I
had wanted to, but it was making a difference in the lives of the
women that it was reaching. And so it was a, it was worthy.
It was just that I wasn't doing it in the way that was
sustainable for me ultimately. And so I'm coming back and I am
committing to allowing my mouth to open and for what comes out
of it to be inherently valuable. So in other words, what's inside
of me that wants to come out and be spoken on any particular
subject, any particular week I am going to trust is highly
valuable to my people. That does not mean that I'm not
going to plan, that I'm not going to have a topic that I'm
not going to loose outline at times.
I didn't for this one. This is all just free flow.
What I wanted to say about the next era of this podcast and me
coming back to this in a way that is so much more kind to
myself and I believe or I hope is more alive for you and will
attract more listeners, exponentially more listeners
than the way I was doing it before.
I used to have this acting coach, Jack Plotnick, so
brilliant. And he did this cold reading
workshop in Hollywood, I think it was weekly.
Whenever I could, I would take it.
We would show up and he would give you the the sides, which is
the script or the portion of the script right with the scene that
you were going to be working on. And I think you had like 5
minutes with them or something in the hallway.
Like no time whatsoever. You didn't have time to
memorize, you didn't have time to plan and execute every moment
or beat as it's called. You didn't have time to craft a
really detailed character history or whatever else they
teach you in, you know, acting Conservatory or, you know,
there's there's I learned a lot of that kind of shit in my
former career. But he's like, no, no, we're
just going to, we're just going to bring you.
That's what we're going to bring to it.
And the given circumstances say, you know, you're playing a, an
attorney in New York City and you're not an attorney in New
York City. You are a an actor in Los
Angeles is like, OK, those are the given circumstances and you
are in the scene. You are getting a divorce from
your partner who you just found out is having, you know, more
than more than the number of affairs you thought or whatever
it is. We we call that the given
circumstances. So Jack would say, OK, just drop
the given circumstances into your belly.
We're just going to accept them. And you don't need to convince
yourself. You don't need to believe them.
We're just going to drop them in there and agree that they're in
your bones, and then we're just going to read it.
We're just going to read it. In this case, I did have a
script, but I had no plan for how I was going to read it or
how it was going to come out. It just came out and I allowed
myself to have so much fun with it from a place of spontaneity.
What genuinely tickled me, what occurred to me in the moment as
I was performing the scene, as I was just being in the scene, and
it was so riveting. And the reason that Jack did
these workshops this way is the way he talked about most actors,
or at least, I don't know, a large, you know, contingent of
actors. We love to prepare and we love
to feel like we're getting it right, and we love to plan
within an inch of its life. We love to plan the art and the
creativity out of a work like this to the degree that we
squeeze the life out of it. So the Cold Reading Workshop was
meant to to circumvent or to be subversive to that that impulse
inside of us to do it perfectly. You know, we didn't have time to
do it. It wasn't going to be perfect.
It wasn't going to be word for word.
We weren't going to be off book. We didn't, you know, we just
didn't. The time wasn't available to us.
So we had to show up in a different way and thank God
because over planning creates what Jack called a dead gift is
like, OK, so you planned every single moment, every single
physic physical movement, every single, you decided how you were
going to say, every single line, how you were going to move your
body. And then you just executed your
plan. It's a dead gift.
There's no life in it. There's no spontaneity.
There's no like genuine humanness coming out in the
quirky, bizarre ways that it does when we're not thinking
about what we're saying or how we're being or how we're
supposed to be or how we're acting.
And so that's what drew me to this conclusion that I had to, I
had to drop the script with the podcast.
I had to do it. I had to do it a radically
different way for this to work. And I had to be willing to have
so much more fun with it, to drop the perfectionism and to
just fucking go for it. So that's what I'm doing.
I'm not editing this at all. I'm not going back and redoing
any of it. Like, I'm just going to let this
be. And I believe that if I can
allow myself to start giving gifts that are more alive in
this way on my podcast, AI will be able to keep doing the
podcast with a much lower barrier for entry.
Meaning if I spend an hour or an hour and a half a week on this
podcast, like that's totally doable for me.
And then BI don't even know what I was saying.
B Oh, what will this do? Is it will it will make the
process so much more fun. It will I will look forward to
it and hopefully you will even more too than you had before to
what if he's going to say what if he's going to speak on this
week what we're going to talk about and I'll be really curious
to see what happens from here. So this is me committing to
being courageous by, like I was going to say, dropping my pants,
but. It kind of does feel like that.
It feels like dropping my armor, you know, and just being willing
to fly by the seat of my pants, I guess, and be open with y'all
in a really different way. It feels good.
It feels, it feels overdue, to be honest, and I'm excited for
this next iteration of what the podcast wants to be.
So thank you for being here. I'm so glad you're here.
I know I say that every single episode, but I really do feel
that way, that it's a special gift to have your ears and to
have your attention. And I promise I won't let you
down. It's just is going to get better
and better from here. So all right, I'm done.
I will talk to you very soon. I'm very, very excited because
as I'm coming back, it's May 2026 and I am getting ready to
start talking more and more about my group, group coaching.
See, this is one of those moments where I would have
paused and gone back and said, you know, I stuttered over that
line. Nobody wants to hear that.
But you know what I do? It's human.
It's allowed. Somebody talking more about Feel
Better for Good, the podcast namesake, my signature group
coaching program that I'm so fucking excited about is getting
an energetic facelift. I will be talking more about
that in the coming weeks. We will be enrolling in May.
I promise you will be the first to know.
And yeah, let's fucking go. I will see you very soon.
OK, bye. Love you.
If you're ready to do the work to move forward on what you want
and actually get it, I can help you.
I'm offering my podcast listeners a free consultation
with me to talk about what coaching can do for you this
year. Just visit effielevore.com to
get started.