Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You.
Today, we're giving you guys a look into why and how we started this podcast, Living the Team Life. It's a personal one, sharing our journey all the way from the flickering of an idea to the weekly published podcast we have today. We do dig into the nuts and bolts of creating the show, but we're hoping that what you take from today will also be around the knowing that following your dreams is possible no matter what they are.
Hey, we're Kim and Roger, and we're here to show couples how to get the best out of their relationship so they can start living their dream life together.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: We're a West Aussie couple who are living the life of our dreams. We don't entertain the word should. We think about the future as a field of possibilities and we let joy be our compass.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: We've taken the simple idea of working as a team and applied it to our marriage. And it's been a game changer, allowing us to work out what truly lights us up in life and to go after it together.
[00:00:56] Speaker B: From living in snowy Japan to starting our own house flipping business, we've achieved some big dreams. And most importantly, we feel fulfilled and are having the most fun we've ever had.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: Hear conversations from inspiring couples, thoughts from relationship experts, and tales from our own lives as we help you to gain the wisdom and skills you'll need to turn your relationship into a real team.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: These are relationship conversations for real people by real people. So sit back, get comfortable, whatever tickles you pickle, and enjoy living the team life.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: You.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: Apart from relationship advice, we do get quite a few questions. Specifically around one, how do you start a podcast? I've had some of my mates go, I wouldn't even know where to start, or some other people going, I wish I could start a podcast. And then, of course, other people have asked us, well, why have you started a relationship podcast? Why a podcast on the relationship specifically? So today we thought we'd actually kill two birds with 1 st and talk about not only why we started a podcast, but how we started it.
[00:02:08] Speaker A: Yeah, it's going to be a fun show because it's a little bit of our journey to get here and starting something new is a fun experience. I mean, it has some stress as well along the way and we'll talk about a few things that sort of crop up as it goes along. But, yeah, I'm excited today to dig in a little bit to the background of Living the Team Life, which is our podcast. And as we record this, this is episode number 43, I think.
[00:02:39] Speaker B: 44.
[00:02:39] Speaker A: 44. Sorry, beg your pardon. And we've almost completed a full year, so it's a kind of nice close out for us for coming towards completing one of our big goals, which was 52 podcasts.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. So this is a bit of a nuts and bolts episode to talk you through the ins and outs of how you might start a podcast or our journey through it. And of course, one of the essential ingredients is you need to have a topic you can talk about every week, and some of that means a lot to you as well. And to us, that's relationships and being a so.
[00:03:16] Speaker A: Roger, I just want to say I don't think it needs to be a podcast per se. I think today's episode is a walkthrough, starting a business, particularly as a couple, right? And it might look different for different people, but it's kind of like a roadmap of how you might do this with your partner, or at least how we did it, and you get a peek behind the scenes of what it looks like setting this up together. So with that, let's kick on to some of the I guess, well, let's kick onto our journey. How did it all begin?
How did we start living the team life? And we noticed a few years ago, and you might have heard this before, because we talk about it a bit on the podcast, we noticed that people were saying the same things to us and we are not joking about this, we would hear these things over and over again.
Three things really stood out. One, how did life get harder? And you guys seem to have gotten happier. And I think that was largely in relation to the fact that we did have to turn away from our dream life in Japan. We had dreamed of living in the snow and come home, and I actually should take that word have out of that sentence. We chose to come home to find the best supports possible for our daughter, who needed a lot of support and continues to need a lot of support. And making that decision was hard. Those were difficult times, especially at the beginning, but we did get happier. So that was the question that cropped up. How did life get harder? You guys seem to have gotten happier. The other thing people would say is, you guys are such a team. This was a repetitive thing. People would use that word, team. It really, really stood out to us. Obviously, we're now called living the team life, so it stood out that much. And the third thing we would hear people say was, I wish we could do what you guys are doing. And that one really stuck with us. And I'll unpack that a little bit. But that one was a powerful one because getting our heads around what they meant when they said it took a little bit and was pretty profound. So between these three things that we would hear repeatedly, we started to realize that a lot of people in our world didn't feel like they had the same level of purpose and planning as we did as a couple.
They were in fact, a little bit sad that they didn't have this. So these comments, especially, I wish we could do what you guys are doing, were said with a little bit of what felt to us. They were said with a little bit of maybe not regret, but definitely wishfulness that they could embark on a journey that was a dream journey for them, that maybe they had already embarked on a journey like that, that sort of wishfulness there. And we started reflecting on these themes that were coming up at the time we were flipping houses. And I started thinking, this is important. These themes keep popping up. How can we support other people to do what we've done, which is follow our dreams? That's what really stood out to me. And that's, I think, where we got to with the I wish we could do what you guys were doing. That just kept pinging in my head. And I kept thinking, how do I support others? Because they can. They absolutely can. But they obviously don't know the route to get there. And I thought, okay, maybe I can help them understand how they can live their dream life, how they can live what we would often say a strategic life. So plan their life, be clear about what direction and what the purpose is that they have, and get that sense of purposefulness as a result.
And so I spoke to Roger about it, and this was a few years ago, and I said, I'm thinking about starting a podcast and sharing with other people how they can start their dream life with their partner and really talking about what it would like chasing down their dream. What it would be like chasing down their dreams. And Roger left this with me for a while on my own. He said, Yep, absolute support of me 100%. You go out and do your thing. I went and spoke to some branding people, started to think about how I might deliver this content and teach people how to go after their dreams and really pursue what they really want out of life through the lens of a renovation business. Because at the time, that's what we were doing. So it made the most sense. I wasn't 100% sure how that was going to evolve, but I thought, well, that makes sense. It's a big dream people often have is flipping houses. So I can use that lens, that context, to explain to people how to start dreaming about what they really want and then going after it. And I was spitballing with Roger one day about some of the reflections I was having about the business and about people pursuing their dreams and how to teach people this. And Roger said to me, we actually do that because we're a team.
And it was a really profound moment, because up until that point, I think I knew it in my bones as one of the reasons, but I definitely hadn't articulated it clearly. We had heard that you guys are such a team thing over and over again, but I hadn't realized that was step one to following your dreams as a couple. First of all, you had to know how to become a team. And I said, you're so right.
Will you come on board if I pivot? And we teach people how to become a team so that they can follow their dreams. And he said, yes, and the rest was history.
[00:09:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. It's actually a bit nostalgic going through it and that thought process. And I'll deep dive into a couple of things that you talked about. There the last bit around it's the fact that we're a team, that makes us special, and that's what we should do our podcast on. And this was sort of during my career, I was exposed a lot to the, I don't know, marketing jargon or corporate jargon. And it actually took a while to get it out of my vernacular sound bites.
I think that was Kim's favorite of mine. But some of the things we learn about there and you get exposed to in business is this unique selling proposition or is also called a market value proposition.
What makes you special? What makes you special in this world where someone would want to consume or have your product? And when we looked at Kim and I flipping our houses and let's do a podcast on flipping houses, well, there's a lot of people that sort of do that. There's not as many podcasts out there, but there's a lot of people who go and do that. Yeah, we are special for doing it. But is that what really makes us so special? What is the one core thing about us? And to me, it was the fact that we are a team. And sort of the happenings of our life over the past three years where our little one was diagnosed with autism.
No, but I was going back in time.
[00:10:35] Speaker A: Oh, sorry.
[00:10:36] Speaker B: Three years before that.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: Sorry.
[00:10:37] Speaker B: So the three years before that, when we were talking about this with our daughter's diagnosis, it could have split us apart, and it does. The divorce rate doubles for people with children of autism, but for us, it seemed to forge us, make us stronger, and it's because we approach life as a team. So as we moved on from that concept, I used my learnings from business. And Kim has a business background as well as a counseling background to really, I guess, not only structure the business, but know, Kim talked about living life strategically. She realized that people weren't living their lives strategically. And although our unique selling proposition or market value proposition was the fact that we worked as a team and we do that to achieve our dreams, well, we also realized that there's no other collaborative effort, really, on Earth. Not in business, not in sport. In fact, so much money, millions and millions, billions and billions of dollars are spent in business, are spent in sports to try get a group of people to come together to work as a team, to achieve an ultimate outcome, to achieve a goal. And the ones that do it the best are generally the ones that achieve those goals. Yet there seems to be this underlying social norm that that's not how a relationship should work. And Kim and I identified this very early on because why isn't everyone working as a team? And we know it's not that simple. In fact, that's why we've done 44 episodes on it. In fact, we could do another 444. And I think we'd only still be scratching the surface in many ways because they're so complex, there's so many issues to dive into. But again, it just gave us more food for thought around, hey, people need to be working as a team. There's a lot of lessons we can learn from business and from sports and other collaborative efforts where the team is the way to go.
And then, of course, the more we did our research into understanding why isn't society like this, we understand that there are these social norms that bind us.
Even though a lot of the leading relationship experts and couples counselors themselves, names like John and Julie Gottman, Adam Lane Smith, Stan tatken are all saying what we're saying, double down on your relationship. Put your partner first, put the relationship first. And that's how you're going to have a solid foundation not only to your relationship, to your life. And so we're trying to figure out why isn't this message getting out there? And I guess that's where we came to the point of view was like, maybe that's our role in this. Maybe our role is to get the message out there.
[00:13:20] Speaker A: That was good. I just want to pick up on something you said, which was that there's a lot of complexity in relationships and there is a lot of complexity. But part of what we realized was not only that we wanted to get the message out there about doubling down, going all in on the relationship is actually the way to become a team, which is the way to pursue your dreams. We actually wanted to get the message out there in a really easy to understand, simple format. We were very clear that there was a lot of messaging out there in the relationship land that was problem focused and complex and it made people gun shy in terms of going into it. It felt heavy. I mean, when you're already struggling in a relationship to then get deep into complex relationship psychology. People talk about attachment theory and things like that. Now, for the women in the relationship who might have been more exposed to a lot of these concepts, that can be easy to follow. But for and this is research based, what I'm saying here for blokes, this can be a lot harder because they're not necessarily as exposed to some of this terminology. And so they want to tune out, they don't want to be talking about something they don't have necessarily even the language to talk about. So we were very clear, we wanted to deliver the message of the team and teach that and we wanted to do it in an easy to understand way and I guess that takes us to building of the brand. So we had this idea, we got really clear in what this idea was and what we wanted to do with it. We got clear on what our point of difference was. And then we went to a branding professional and we spoke to them about how we could build this brand and deliver this really important messaging in relationships, about becoming a team so that you can pursue your dreams in a way that was simple to understand and really relatable to people. And you really need to get clear on who you are, if you want to hit on those goals of how you want to deliver it. So we went through who our target audience is, who our ideal customer avatar is, so that one person that you keep in your mind all the time.
We looked at where what we want to deliver and what people's problems are and what they're struggling with and what they need, where those points intersect, that's the sweet spot of what we focus on. And we documented all of this. We have a huge branding manual. We did a tone of voice which is describing what we would sound like as a brand, what words would we use, what was our brand personality? These are things that get you really, really clear, so that when you actually go to market, you are consistent in what you're delivering. Because brands need to build trust and likability if they want to have longevity. If you want to build a business that is sustainable and actually delivers your mission, we're building a business because we have a why behind it, right? And I'll talk about that in a little bit. But if you want to get to that really, truly delivering, that why you have to build trust, you have to build an audience who genuinely want to hear from you, who believe in you, who like hearing from you. And to do that, you have to have a really clear brand. You have to be consistent on who you are. They have to know that they can depend on what's coming out from you, that when they put their very precious time into listening to you, that they're getting value from you. Because there's nothing more important than time. And we are competing with a lot of people out there, a lot of information. And we want to make sure that when people dedicate their important time to us, that we deliver consistently for them in a way that they want to.
[00:17:11] Speaker B: Hear it the way you connected. First we wanted to be accessible to people to then us going all in and doing a proper strategic plan, branding exercise and all these things which people might see, oh, geez, you need to do that for a podcast. Well, you don't, but if you want to have a successful podcast or give yourself the best chance to be successful, these things are really important. Because if you Google how many Instagram images and videos are shared every day, I think Google pops up with a number as 95 million. And there's plenty of podcasts out there, don't worry about that. Well, how do we reach people? How are we going to be accessible? Well, we had to do things properly. We had to really own what we were doing. We couldn't go half asked about that. I don't know if that needs to be baped out or I'm sure I've said worse things, but we had to really double down on it. And these exercises took money and they took time. And of course, the next part was after we've got our brand going, after we figured out who we were, I guess, selling to or trying to connect with and the messages we needed to get out there, we actually had to get down to the nuts and bolts of all the things we had to do to actually produce a podcast. So you can actually just with your laptop or with your phone, grab a USB microphone that plugs into it, get one of those circle light things, you can get them from Kmart and you can start just banging on about stuff. And a lot of people do. Some people do it really well, some people don't. I think the statistic I heard from another podcaster who at the time wasn't as big, but is massive now. He does the modern history podcast that's Chris will X.
One of the things he quoted and as something that drove him, was that 90% of podcasts don't make it past the first three episodes.
[00:19:10] Speaker A: I heard that stat the other day.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: As well, and 90% of that remaining 10% don't make it past 21. So 21 podcasts was a massive goal for us, so we've doubled that and we're going to keep going, but there was a lot of learning experiences along the way. I'm not a sound engineer. We bought two USB microphones, for example, straight up. And then after a bit of research, we realized that our laptop a laptop won't support two audio microphones at the same time.
[00:19:38] Speaker A: You're being kind. I bought the microphone and I was so excited.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: So this is when we defined our roles in terms of it. And I have a bit more of an It background, but that stuff we learned. So I had to learn to use audacity. We had to research actually getting a proper mixer, which was thousands of bucks.
You have to deal with more editing software because all of a sudden editing.
[00:20:04] Speaker A: Software, though, we have like a million.
[00:20:06] Speaker B: And everything's subscription these days. Is this just me or is everything a subscription? It used to be like Reader's Digest and now you can't even join up to something online. You used to get free and it's all subscription anyway.
[00:20:20] Speaker A: Big subscriber to Reader's Digest.
[00:20:22] Speaker B: Roger well, not anymore of those prices, but it's one of those things that I think it got big on us really quickly and we just had to really take the time and take the effort. And yeah, we watched YouTube, we made mistakes with the two microphones.
We bought things we didn't need, we didn't buy things that we actually needed and it took us a while to get there. Kim and I actually recorded three episodes of this podcast in December last year or even way before that. And they went in the bin because they sounded terrible. They sounded terrible and it was because they were like they're almost scripted. And that's a big decision we had to make as well. There's some great podcasts out there that are heavily scripted and they're ones that are not scripted at all. So we tried the scripted approach and we just found it didn't work for us. So while it's important that we're talking about important stuff so we do research. But we found if we using our knowledge base not even from our relationship with Kim's Masters of counseling, but also from our degrees, it was important to do some research on top of that. And then we could talk about it and also put it in an accessible way that we feel some of the psychologists out there struggle to do. In those sound bites.
[00:21:37] Speaker A: Yeah. So you've talked about a few key things there, Rod. Certainly the surrounding infrastructure to the business, which is all of that software hardware, the learning guides, how to do A, B and C. That's a lot of work. It's a huge part of what we do. It's not the most fun work, which is probably why a lot of it falls to you as the chief operating officer of our podcast.
And also, I'm not very good at it. My attention span can be lacking in that area. So that was another thing you talked about, was defining roles. And when we started, obviously we had ideas of how all of this would unfold.
The beautiful thing about having a plan is when it doesn't work, you can pivot but still feel held by the strategy or higher level direction you're going in. And I think even through this, as we learned the microphones were wrong and we bought wrong software and had to buy different stuff and learn more and all of those sorts of things, we knew what direction we were going in and we knew what our strategy is, we knew what our budget was. All of these higher level things that kept us contained as inevitably things were wrong and had to be changed and had to be reviewed and that's the nature of business. And I guess for us, being strategic and being clear about what our goals for the year were, which was to get 52 podcasts out, how we came about, that has evolved significantly. But we've got to 44 today and we will get to 52 this year, so we will hit on that big goal. So yeah, it is having that flexibility within the higher level strategic direction that you're heading that has been really important to us. And I guess coming to the podcast content, which you just started to touch on then in terms of us originally trying to work out our rhythm with that as well with the scripting and not scripting. And we do certainly write a lot of stuff down, don't get us wrong, because we spend a lot of time researching as well. For each episode we try to make it flow a little bit more than we did when we first started, but that also comes with confidence.
You can't overnight learn how to feel comfortable on a microphone, we also record on video and that comes with time and practice. Confidence grows when the brain learns, oh, I can do this, it learns by the doing. So we've certainly grown our confidence coming back to the content itself.
The evolution of the content was interesting. We certainly had a lot of content stored up in our minds in terms of our own marriage wisdom, my background as a counselor, the books that we both read, the podcasts we listen to, the studies we read, we are information consumers. We enjoy that a lot. And we are big talkers. We talk at depth. We've done that for many years about all sorts of issues. And because we were clear from the beginning on what our brand was, what our point of difference was, what we wanted to teach on, we were able to take a lot of that information and start categorizing it and dumping it out into an Excel sheet and some word documents that built it out into a shape where we were clear what we wanted to talk about. That was part of our brand and brand content. So teaching people to become a team so that they could pursue their dreams, it either had to fit in that or it didn't fit. And if it didn't fit, we didn't talk about it. And that clarity has guided us really nicely as we've evolved the podcast and come up with different podcast topics and blogs that we've wanted to write about and social media posts that we've wanted to do, because we're very clear in what fits and what doesn't fit. And it guides us in terms of the production of the content and the information that you guys all receive and in terms of the drive behind that.
Ultimately, we are here for the audience and for our higher why we have this dream and that's the why that we will be able to support couples with skills. It's that simple. We don't think there's anything crazy about learning to become a team, literally just skills. And I think people have this idea that you have to come to the relationship as a certain person or whatever else. And we don't ascribe to that. We say you can learn the skills to improve your relationship and to grow into a team. You absolutely come so you absolutely can. So we have this dream to support couples, to upskill in their relationship, to become a team, to live their best lives, the lives they really want, and have these fulfilling lives together so that they have those lives. But also part of our why, a big part is that the generations to come, their children will profoundly benefit from positive home lives. We want to be agents of change and impact people's home lives intergenerationally. That is our why and it's a deep, deep connection. So in everything we do, in all the content we create, that is what we're here for, that drives us with a deep sense of purpose. And I think that's been really important in the content creation part.
[00:27:20] Speaker B: Yeah, and just touching on that, sweetie. Not meaning to be harsh, but the research is really clear on this as well, that there are two key factors in a child's life in terms of their, I guess, success in the future. One, socioeconomic. And even though there are variances in Australia, generally, if you're born in Australia, you've won the life lottery and the second is whether you had a stable home life and generally with two parents in the house. Now look, I'm a child of divorce and I turned out amazing. And so we're not ragging on single mums or single parents here because they're doing amazing. And there's actually research out there showing that, well, an unstable family home is actually worse than a stable single family home. And there's some other things like that. But what we're saying is by us really helping people to become teams and greater relationships, the divorce rate might lower, people will get more out of their lives and they'll model that to their kids and their kids will know what a strong relationship and team partnership is. We're trying to break a social norm here through a little podcast we hope can come bigger to help people in their.
[00:28:35] Speaker A: It'S an important, it's an important mission and an important why for.
So that's kind of how we do it here now. We're probably more getting to business as usual. Rod, the podcast itself, how we produce that, we've got to a place where we are pretty comfortable. Like I said, you grow your confidence. We are growing different parts of the business because we are able to these things come easier for us now, doing the podcast, creating the social media, all of that has become. Easier. We are working towards systemizing a lot of things at the moment, another learning curve for us.
And as a result of these things becoming the first parts of creating the podcast becoming easier, we are focused on growing other areas as well. We have some really exciting stuff coming up in 2024, which we're thrilled about, and that's really where we're going with.
[00:29:33] Speaker B: Living the team life 100%. We're trying to take on our lessons learned. We're trying to figure out the topics that hit the most with our listeners and the social media stuff that really resonated with some of our followers and.
[00:29:46] Speaker A: What matters to people and what matters.
[00:29:48] Speaker B: To people and really hone our message and try help people with some of the problems they have or provide solutions we still want to keep in the positive mindset because we believe this is a positive change people can make in their lives. We also, as Kim said at Start, we want to be accessible. We want partners to be able to go home to their partner and go, hey, listen to Kim and Rod. I did an episode on being relationship proud. We want people to go to the pub or go to the what do women do?
Excuse me, Manny Pettis. And I'm still learning. I'm still learning and be able to talk to their friends high t and be able to talk and be able to talk to their friends and say, hey, Kim and, you know, Ralph and Donna are working really hard on their relationship, or we're working really hard on our relationship, and we're kicking ass as a result.
[00:30:40] Speaker A: All right, I think that wraps us up for today.
Ralph, where are we at? What's your gold nugget out of today's show?
[00:30:47] Speaker B: Raj, my gold nugget is you can do you know, as you said at the top of the show, people used to say to, oh, I wish I could do that. And we say, well, you can. You have to just go through the motions. You have to understand your why. So things like that. You can move to a ski field in Japan, turn your life upside down and do something like that. And it's amazing. You can start a flipping business even though you've never done it before. Or you can start a relationship podcast trying to change a social norm and try and grow it and try change the world in your own little way. You can do it.
You got to go after it.
[00:31:29] Speaker A: I like that. And for me, I hope people recognize throughout today that we had a plan throughout this, really, we had a dream, we had goals, and we had a plan. Now those things change over time. As I said, you need to be flexible and pivot as you gain more information and learn about things, et cetera.
The reason we've been able to do what we wanted to do and set up this dream of starting this relationship podcast was because we made a plan, and that's how we've made it possible. That's how we've stayed consistent and delivered. And I hope people can see that. It's not any superpower within Roger and I. It's just skills. It's just practicing, working together, planning together, dreaming together. That's how you can go after anything. So I hope people feel hope when they hear this today and empowered that they too, could do this. It's literally learnable practical skills. And it's totally possible to live your team life and your dream life.
[00:32:38] Speaker B: You're amazing. You've just spent quality time on your relationship.
[00:32:42] Speaker A: Feel like you're on a roll. If you want more Living the Team Life relationship insights and conversations, head over to Kimandroge.com, where you can find all the show notes as well as tons of other relationship goodies.
[00:32:53] Speaker B: And if you liked today's episode, please hit subscribe or let another couple know where they can find us. It'll make them happy and it'll make us really happy.
[00:33:01] Speaker A: Until next time, keep on living the team life.
