Lessons
Lesson Info
Preparing Your Guest
This is one of my prep docs for Jim Qwik, and I've got a set of highlighters here, on the right, and this is called "highlight tool." I love creative titles, and so what this highlight tool does is it creates a set of, obviously, highlighters and they're in different colors that I can see on my screen while I'm doing the show. So, something that deserves my attention, yellow I've already discussed, this is something that will go in the intro. After I'm done with the interview, I will do the introduction separately for the guest. A practical, cause every episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show has practicals and worksheets that the audience can use. That's sort of my unique angle, is that it's not just chit-chat, it's practical. And then gray down here is ignore/fluff. It doesn't mean that's not good content, it means I'm not gonna cover it in the show. So, during the show, or before the show, I will go in and I will highlight the top. This is gonna be what I read when he's not there. This...
is his bio, this is what I'm gonna use to create the bullets for the show description. After that, I've got this red, which actually down here is one of the highlight tools. It says "bullet," it's blurred for some reason, not sure why. You don't have to read any of this so don't worry about the focus or lack-thereof. Bullet is something where I say, "Today you're gonna learn, bang, how this guy "memorizes all these different things, "and two, how you can do the same using simple tools." That's what the bullets are, that's what you hear in the beginning and the end of The Jordan Harbinger Show. And then down here, you'll see green things where it's like, alright, I wanna make sure I include this, I wanna make sure I include that, and I go down and I've taken all these notes. A lot of them are cut and paste from another document. Green stuff is gonna be my roadmap for the show while I'm doing it, and then purple, our practical. So if I've been talking a while, I've got a lot of stories, I see that he's done a lot of chit-chat talking, I might go, "Alright, let's wake everyone up, "three part brain-training how to remember names." That's a practical, so I wanna make sure that I'm getting to one of those maybe every 15 to 20 during the show. That's, again, something that I do, you don't have to do that. If you're a story-telling show, great, good for you, I just wanna make sure I've got that in there every few minutes. And you might have your own thing, like maybe you wanna make sure you get a personal story every fifteen minutes, maybe you want a business tip or something. So I highlight that in a different color, cause what I'm trying to do is avoid going, "Oh gosh, where is that in here?" Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, "Oh shoot I haven't been listening "to what he's been saying for an hour, "I'm in trouble now, I don't know where I am, "where am I in the whole outline?" And then panicking, and then your show suffers. So I, as you can see from here, I didn't highlight much of this at all. I actually ignored most of this during the show because he ended up covering it. I've got a story here at the end highlighted in blue that I knew I wanted to end with, and during the show itself, I use the yellow highlighter so when we go through the old three-part brain training, I will actually go through here, select all this as we're talking, and then highlight it in yellow. I don't think it'll work right now cause I'm offline for obvious reasons, so that you don't see my texts pop up, cause, Murphy's Law, it's gonna be that one friend from 10 years ago using the reactivation method with something from college that you all don't need to see. I will then highlight the yellow in there, and the reason I do that is because I wanna know where we go, and of course your show flow doesn't actually match what you talk about during the show. He's not going in this order, right, he's talking, we're having a free-flowing conversation, so I wanna highlight in yellow when something gets discussed because maybe we talk about childhood first, but then maybe we skip all the way down to the brain training, and then maybe we go back up to this business concept and this other practical and this automatic negative thoughts concept he had. What I don't want to do is try to figure out where I left off and then scrolling around in the document. If I highlight it in yellow, my brain can just tune it out, we've already covered it. The gray, I was gonna ignore it anyway, already covered it. Intro, already gonna be used later on. Attention, I'm looking for the green, I'm scrolling for the green. If we're all the way down to the bottom, I might scroll all the way back up really briefly just to make sure I didn't miss anything. That will catch my eye, and I'll go, "Oh, right, the story about Jim "forgetting the name of his new course, "that's kind of funny, I wanna throw that in there "because that's how we're gonna lead "into his new brain course." That is why I use the different color highlighters. What you wanna do is avoid having this weird cognitive overload where you're trying to remember your show flow, remember what you were gonna say, that funny thing that you were gonna mention when he did this story, oh shoot I forgot to get a practical in there. This will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, and then if he or you end up skipping around naturally, which you should do, then you don't have to figure out where you left off because what you don't want to do is go, "alright, now we have to tell the story "of Jim forgetting the name," but he's already down here, and then you're like "no, stop, don't talk about that, "let's talk about this," and then you force it into this sort of show flow. You can tell when hosts are doing that because someone will go, "yeah, "and, you know, that was really traumatizing for me "and that's why I moved to America." And then they go, "What's your favorite book?" And you're just like (groans) you knew that was wrong when you did it. Then they try to go, "So let's go back "to what you were saying about "getting kidnapped as a child," and it's like, no, this is disastrous. You gotta let things take a natural course, but you don't wanna be that person who's like, "I don't even prep, I just let the show flow." You're just wasting your audience's time. You're an advocate for the audience every single minute, they have so many options of what they can listen to. The second that you're too lazy to do the work, or you're like, "I'm just gonna wing it "and that's where the magic happens," you're just lying to yourself. That is not where the magic happens, that's where you disrespect your audience by not actually doing what you need to do to make sure that their time is well spent. That is essentially how I run the show during the actual show itself.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Lacey Heward
Workflow? Spot on! This answered so many questions for me. I really appreciated Jordan being so transparent about how he sets everything up, preps guests, and communicates with his network. There were some other gems like reasons you don't send questions ahead of time, and how important it is to have recording and video dialed BEFORE the interview. Plus, I loved that this was such a short class that got straight to the meat. I watched this before going to work! Great format! Thank you!
Martin Backhauss
Really good class and many great tips and tricks. Jordan is great on camera, is well prepared and is an open book. Highly recommend this class.
wendy fite
This course will get you organized! With great recommendations on how to build a very workable, repeatable plan for your pre-production podcast activities. Jordan is awesome. The handout is the 'frosting' to his awesome 'cake' discussion.
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