Your listener can hear your body even if they cannot see it. If you slump in your chair, that collapsed posture shows up in your voice.

Physicality and voice are mechanically connected. Your breath and vocal resonance change based on whether your chest is open or contracted. When we record alone in a quiet room, we tend to stay still to avoid making noise, but this results in a flat, low-energy performance. To sound engaging, you must bring physical energy to the microphone.

In this micro-episode:

1. How gesturing with your hands changes your vocal energy
2. Why standing up improved my improv and sketch comedy performance
3. A simple A/B test to prove that physicality alters your sound

Resources:

Example Mic Arm (style is not "low profile" - can be raised so arms don't bump): https://www.elgato.com/ca/en/p/wave-mic-arm-mk2 -- genuinely happy with this compared to what it replaced!

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In improv comedy, the first thing you say in a scene is called an "initiation." A good initiation contains a gift—specific information that gives your partner something to work with. Vague openings like "Hi, how are you?" force your partner to do all the heavy lifting.

The same principle applies to podcasting. Opening an episode with "So, today I want to talk about..." forces your listener to wait while you figure out your point. Specificity is generous. When you start with a specific client question, a metric, or a concrete moment, you give the listener an immediate reason to care.

In this micro-episode:

1. The concept of "The Gift" in improv and how it applies to business content
2. Why vague introductions increase cognitive load for your audience
3. How to test if your opening sentence is specific enough to hook a listener

Find more episodes and subscribe at stereoforest.com/minute.

Decision fatigue affects your listeners just as it affects you. Every choice depletes their finite brain resources until they default to the easiest option. That option is usually "no" or opting out entirely.

Your audience is likely multitasking while listening. They might be driving or exercising or working. When you ask them to subscribe and share and download and visit a website, you overload their working memory. Recent research suggests our working memory holds only about four items rather than the previously believed seven.

In this micro-episode:

1. Why multitasking listeners have lower cognitive capacity
2. The link between choice overload and low conversion rates
3. Why you must limit your episodes to a single Call to Action

Resources:

Choice overload: https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/choice-overload-bias

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1057740814000916

Stats: https://riverside.com/blog/podcast-statistics

Find more episodes and subscribe at stereoforest.com/minute.