Article: Many people, especially when in high-stress scenarios, tend to catastrophize. That is, they assume the worst possible outcome for a given event. Try to recognize when you are catastrophizing a moment. Catastrophizing takes on many forms. Say, for example, your boss sent you an email about contributing more during work meetings. If you're prone to catastrophizing, you might take this to mean your job is in jeopardy, your boss thinks you're a poor worker, you'll end up fired and unemployable, and your friends and family members will all think less of you. If you catch yourself snowballing like this, take a deep breath and try to think logically. In this example, you could think to yourself, "It's my boss's job to give me constructive feedback. She just wants to push me to perform my best and everyone gets criticism on occasion. It's a normal part of life." Minimizing is a form of catastrophizing where you ignore your successes and good qualities and do not see the negatives in other people's lives. You may think some people have it all, are flawless and successful, and then when you realize they are flawed in some manner you write them off. You might also do this for yourself - you'll think you're the most successful person in the world then, after a small setback, see yourself as a massive failure. Try to recognize these thinking patterns as flawed and recognize the fact everyone is made of both good and bad qualities. Having an unrealistic sense of self-importance is just as bad as catastrophizing. If you think of yourself as the most important person in the office or the most talented student in a class, you're probably not thinking clearly. Everyone contributes an important role to a company, school, organization, and field. A sense of grandiosity is not only off-putting but it can actually cause you to have setbacks at work and life. A sense of self-awareness is important to regulate how you interact with others. Try to combat feelings of grandiosity by reminding yourself that while it's important to feel good about yourself you need to acknowledge the hard work and contributions of others as well. Personalization is a form of self-aggrandizing where you think events that have little to do with you are somehow caused by your presence. This can be for better or for worse. If a co-worker is talking to an attractive person in the office, you may assume he or she is trying to make you jealous. If the same co-worker can't make it to your birthday party, you may assume he or she harbors a secret grudge against you when in fact he or she may have simply been busy. If you find yourself personalizing, try to remember that other people's lives are as hectic as yours. They likely have little time to make decisions with regards to you. Magical thinking is not just for children. Adults sometimes engage in superstitious thought patterns as well, particularly in response to a traumatic event. People believe engaging in some ritual, like wishing or thinking positive thoughts, can have an impact on a situation. Try to remember that, while it's painful to acknowledge, there are many situations over which we have little or no control. This type of thinking is often causes people to not take responsibility for their actions. If you have a problem, make sure to acknowledge and accept it, then find a way to correct or learn from it. Logical leaps are leaps in judgment, where you make assumptions about people or situations that are not based in reality. People make logical leaps all the time without realizing it. For example, if a cashier is rude to you, you may assume, "I bet she doesn't like me because of my appearance, weight, attire, etc." when in reality you have no idea what another person is thinking. People also tend to assume someone will naturally know what they're thinking, which can lead to confusion. For example, you may assume your roommate knows you want him to let your dog out as you'll be home late, but if you do not express this he may not realize it. Try to be conscious of logical leaps in your day-to-day life and catch yourself making them. All or nothing judgments are a common form of irrational thought patterns. People are unable to see the gray in situations and see situations, people, and outcomes as either entirely positive or entirely negative. You might, for example, feel like you're a complete failure if you misspelled one word in an e-mail without acknowledging the fact your message was conveyed successfully and no one commented on the error. Make an effort to accept that most things in life are neither entirely positive or negative.
Question: What is a summary of what this article is about?
Recognize how you catastrophize. Stay away from self-aggrandizing thoughts. Be aware of magical thinking. Watch for logical leaps. Recognize "all or nothing" judgments.
Article: You may want to put together scripts for what you will say at the beginning of a show and when you transition from one story to another. Put your content in order so you can read down the list. Whatever it is, make sure you enjoy it. You probably won't become rich from this endeavor. Spend your time discussing or promoting something you really care about; the reward will be in feeding your knowledge/humor/music to others. This is probably the biggest step for without your voice, your podcast doesn't exist. Talk in a consistent pace and show passion in your subjects. Read the scripts and don't forget to thank people for being part of the show. You can have the perfect podcast delivered, but sometimes technical glitches run the show, ruining all your hard work. Before you begin the actual recording session, take a few samples to test the software, mess with the volume controls, and just plain make sure everything is functioning. Make sure it's in MP3 format; a bit rate of 128 kbps is probably sufficient for a talk-show podcast, but podcasts featuring music will want bit rates of 192 kbps or better. Do not use special characters (such as # or% or?) in the file name. Open it up into your sound editor and edit out extra background noise or long periods of silence. Put in intro/outro music if you'd like. Of course, you can always save it as a WAV file first, to give you a master backup to work from if something were to go wrong. ) and give it album art. Either make it yourself, find some free, non-copyrighted images online, or have a friend make one for you. Be careful to name the audio file so that the name of the podcast and the date of the episode are clear. You may also want to edit the ID3 tags of the MP3 file to help people find and catalogue your podcasts. The feed must meet all industry standards for a valid 2.0 feed with enclosures. Try using a complete solution and service such as Libsyn, Castmate or Podomatic (see the external links below). For longer podcasts, you'll be paying a small fee. The easiest way to do it is to use a blog. So hop on over to Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, or another blogging service, and start a blog with the title of your podcast. Don't make any posts just yet. If your host has limits on the amount of bandwidth you can use, you could incur overage charges if your podcast becomes very popular (fingers crossed!). A feed acts like a "container" for the MP3 file that tells feed aggregator programs where to get new episodes. It can be done manually with some XML coding. It's similar to HTML. You can copy another RSS file and use the template to make your necessary modifications.
Question: What is a summary of what this article is about?
Prepare your content. Record the audio for your podcast. Save the audio file to your computer desktop. Tag it, give it ID information (artist, album, etc. Create your RSS podcast feed.