By Cait Donovan
NSA’ers, we have a thing in common. Most of us like to hear ourselves talk.
Some of us even got “Most Talkative” in our eighth-grade yearbooks. (Wait, just me? I doubt it.)
And we’re so lucky because during keynotes and trainings, we get to experience our love of the gift of gab. Even better is when someone asks a question during a program and we get to answer with a long, winding road of an explanation that eventually ends with, “Did that answer your question?”
Here’s one place where that doesn’t work quite as well: podcasts.
When you’re a podcast guest, you want to make your ideas portable.
A portable idea can be lifted out of a 45-minute conversation and dropped into a 60-second reel without losing its meaning. It makes sense to someone who didn’t hear what came before it. It doesn’t require 30 seconds of setup. And it doesn’t make an editor piece together six different sections of your answer to create one usable clip.
Portable ideas are good for the podcast host, good for the listener, and very, very good for you.
Here are two ways to create them.
1. Give the Clip Before You Give the Journey
You know your work inside and out. You know which sentences and lines really resonate with audiences. You probably have lines you’ve said hundreds of times because you know they land.
Gather that information before your interview.
Then, when the host asks you a question, use this promo clip formula:
Repeat their question + Add your best line or two about that particular question + Stop talking = Great promo clip.
That last step might be the hardest one.
Stop. Talking.
The host might ask you to dive deeper. If they do, great! Take the listeners on a journey. Tell the story. Explain the nuance. Give us the winding road and the loop-de-loops.
But give us the clean answer first.
Why? Because the number one reason long answers with tangents and loop-de-loops don’t work well for podcast promotion is that it’s really hard to turn them into a 60-second reel that will gather people’s attention. Even with all the AI tools at our disposal, getting a great clip is harder when the editor has to piece your point together.
A short introduction with your strongest lines gives the host an incredibly easy-to-produce promo clip. Your best ideas get spread all over the internet, and their work, or their production team’s work, just got easier. Clean question-and-answer structures give both human editors and AI clipping tools much cleaner material to work with.
Everybody wins.
2. Stop Making Your Listener Figure Out What “It” Means
The next thing I’ll have you do is start paying attention to how often you use words that point backward to something you just said: it, this, that, they, these, those, the first, the last. This (see what I did there?) is totally natural in everyday speech. We do it constantly. And in a face-to-face conversation, it usually works just fine.
Podcasts are different.
People listen to podcasts while driving, walking the dog, doing dishes, folding laundry, working out, and generally being a little distracted. They’re not sitting at a desk with a highlighter giving you their undivided attention.
So imagine I say:
“Burnout happens when chronic workplace stress creates a mismatch between what a person needs and what their environment provides. It develops over time.”
What develops over time?
Burnout? Chronic stress? The mismatch?
A tired, distracted brain now has to go backward and figure out what I meant.
Instead, I could say:
“Burnout happens when chronic workplace stress creates a mismatch between what a person needs and what their environment provides. Burnout develops over time.”
Does repeating burnout feel slightly unnatural when you’re used to replacing repeated words with it?
Yep. Do it anyway.
You’re doing two useful things at once. First, you’re lowering the cognitive load for your listener. They don’t have to hold the previous sentence in their working memory and figure out what your pronoun refers to. Second, you’re making your sentences more portable.
“Burnout develops over time” can be lifted out of the conversation and still make sense.
“It develops over time” cannot.
That distinction matters when someone is creating clips from your interview. Instead of needing to keep an extra sentence just so your whole point makes sense, your strongest sentences can stand on their own while still supporting the overall message.
This doesn’t mean eliminating every it, this, that, or they from your vocabulary. You’d sound ridiculous.
It means noticing when your listener has to remember what one of those words refers to and asking yourself whether repeating the actual noun would make the sentence easier to understand on the first listen.
Think Portable
As professional speakers, we’re used to having time to build an idea. We tell stories. We create callbacks. We take audiences somewhere.
Keep doing that.
But on podcasts, learn to build smaller units inside the larger journey. Give the clean answer before the explanation. Repeat the important word when it helps the listener stay oriented. Say the sentence you want someone to remember in a way that allows it to stand on its own.
Make your ideas portable.
Because the easier your ideas are to lift out of the conversation, the easier they are to share. And the easier they are to share, the farther your best ideas can travel.