Origins
I've always felt strongly about the importance of mentoring and the notion of giving back. I've informally mentored people for years and more formally couple of decades while working at IBM. In fact, I received so many requests to mentor people that I thought it might be an idea to record some of the advice I was giving. I started doing that and decided to make those recordings available as a podcast called "Life Habits Podcast". That was more than 18 years ago.
Version 1.0
The podcast was initially really popular, regularly being on the top 10 self-help podcasts list. It was in the early days of podcasting and I put out an episode every week.
I would regularly seek out topics from listeners and address them my self on a episode or with my regular guests, Mandy Kloppers and MJ Shaar. I also did listener questions episodes.
Over the past few years, work got busier and I was doing more traveling so I still put out episodes but very infrequently and irregularly. As a result, the listenership went down and many more podcasts were available too.
I still wanted to publish the podcast but I just didn’t have the requisite time to do so.
Version 2.0
At the beginning of 2024, I was having dinner with a good friend, Paige Heron, and I was lamenting that I didn’t have the necessary time to devote to the podcast. She had earlier been saying that her chronic illnesses prevent her from doing a regular job. But then I remembered that she took Radio Broadcasting in college so I suggested that she join me on the podcast. And, that’s how Paige and my partnership on the podcast began.
I’m absolutely delighted to have Paige join me as my co-host for the podcast as well as serving as the executive producer and handling the overall production, guest acquisition and scheduling, recording, editing, posting, monetizing, and marketing.
Version 3.0
Paige’s chronic illness got progressively worse and she wasn’t unfortunately able to continue co-hosting or producing. So I gave the podcast more thought and dug into the feedback from listeners who asked me to bring back the most popular guests I’d had, go back to a mentoring approach rather than mostly interviewing authors, and to create a video version. So I reached out to the two most popular guests that I’d had on about seven times each—Mandy Kloppers and MJ Shaar—and also to an additional amazing professional that I recently discovered and discussed the idea of doing a video and audio version of the podcast with the three of them as permanent co-hosts and getting back to my evidence-based mentoring. We had a couple of working sessions and then relaunched the podcast with video on YouTube and audio on all the podcast platforms.
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