#WhyPodcasts help you create content that you wish to see
I’m Arpita Mishra, a 20-year-old content creator from Delhi. Here’s how I got hooked to podcasts as a creator and used them as a tool to stimulate my creativity.
My style of learning has always been visual. Some early memories include me…
…. doodling war figures on the margins of my history books to remember the events more vividly,
… of scribbling the most basic to-do list because the image would get etched in my mind right away
…. or using colors of all shades to make my physics notes (which however fun it sounds, isn’t the best way to recall formulas and theories later I realized).
But I had discovered it early on that my way of learning, retaining and recalling things is through visual imagery. Or how I controversially call it; imagination (because the perks of convincing people you can imagine things into reality are great).
When YouTube gained popularity in India back in 2012, I was one of the substantially contributing consumers because I was introduced to the magic land of mass communication called Vlogging.
It gained momentum by young girls and boys making 5-10 minute video clippings of going about their lives doing mundane stuff — from getting ready for school, planning a week’s lunch, organizing rooms, digging through bag packs — but made to look magical with One Direction tracks in the background, glitzy room decorations, pastel stationery, and extensive wardrobes.
Everything 13-year-old Arpita desired dearly. 🤗
This grew exponentially until I had subscribed to every lifestyle influencer I was aware of and the hunger to consume more and transform into the glamour shown online was fairly satiated.
An inevitable part of allowing social media to take space in our lives is that we can never tell when our virtual and real identities get merged to that of the content we consume.
I now began to grow curious about the processing that went behind creating these videos. It wasn’t just about the creative process, it had indeed something to do with imagination or visual imagery itself.
How else do we explain the fact that a person is able to conceptualize the video, align it in perfection with related music, maintain the aesthetic of frames, make it appealing and irresistible — all at the same time?
In one of her videos, Lavendaire, one of my favorite YouTubers opened up to confess how she worked on inspiring herself visually that led her to reach where she is today.
The concept of law of attraction, thoughts being things and vibrations affecting actions were hazily familiar to me but I needed to delve more.
We humans don’t rely on to beliefs and ideas to accept a concept but results and statistics, Lavendaire’s channel boasted of the latter. In one of her videos, she talks about the subconscious mind.
Our subconscious mind is in a reality where our consciousness lies. It is a storehouse of all memories and the steering wheel of creativity. It’s a tool which once gotten familiar with, helps us derive best of ourselves because all our actions, thoughts, decisions and emotions are influenced by our subconscious.
Lavendaire suggested to make use of this and fill it with best intentions so that if it had to influence us, it shall do so for our highest good. One such process was to keep feeding the mind with ideas effortlessly as we do in podcasts. This is when I was first introduced to the concept of podcasts, by one of my favorite vloggers as a tool to prepare my subconscious into a fertile ground for my imagination and subsequently my creative ability to grow.
Podcasts dive straight into the subconscious, register their impact in our minds, prepare and signal our brain to co-relate with the new information all while we simply put our ears to use.
What followed was a series of trials into finding which podcaster’s voice fills me up with hope, whose content puts me in the space to do more and most importantly, who makes my imagination prompt.
The Lavendaire Lifestyle was indeed my first ever experience with a podcast. Surprisingly, its audio format did not hamper with my visualization. In fact, it made me more meditative with what I imagined.
This is the best exercise we can offer to our mind, trick it into thinking things that are of good intentions.
As I covered topics on creativity, productivity, staying balanced, I started to feel more empowered over my choices because meditation is 15X better for the body than a 1-hour workout. I vouch for it.
A similar influencer has been Payal who goes by the name “Affirmation Addict” who brought into my space the power of affirmations.
They are words or short sentences which when repeated constantly have the power to divert the mind into thinking it’s true. However, it doesn’t equate to misleading people into something else.
Affirmations are of pure thoughts and are only used for us to believe in them and be motivated enough to take actions from them. I have been following Affirmation addict’s podcasts on releasing self-doubt, loving my body or just infusing new beliefs in self. This soon became a ritual.
Sometime later I was introduced to Gary Vaynerchuk by a close friend who had been a witness to my journey and all he demanded of me was to go home and listen to the man speak. I religiously followed his advice and thank god I did.
Being a person who had never been exposed to entrepreneurship, business, building a strategy or working with people, Gary Vee’s podcasts have transformed me into a much-learned person when it comes to the approach I carry for driving my content. It’s educative, it’s informative and it speaks to every cell of yours.
What I have figured out is that creators have seasons. It lies outside of human tendency to create every day for the rest of the days.
Some time is spent absorbing what has been left unattended, paying attention to details, observing everything around and perceiving the meaning. The rest of the time is spent creating, what sparks joy to the creator, what brings value to the consumer and what is meaningful to them both.
In the time when a creator is consuming, it is important to be surrounded by content that is fueling the process. I have been through both the phases and seen crests and troughs of both, if there’s one thing to name what kept me going then that was the vision I have created for myself and I can not stop without building at all.
