Hello! My name is Elyse Kane, and if you’ve paid attention to The Mentor Project within the last few months, you might recognize my name. I’ve been an intern here since early 2021, and I first heard about TMP through my dad, Neil Kane, who is a mentor here. I ran my own podcast, Meet Your Mentor, for quite some time. Through this podcast, I interviewed various mentors in our organization for about half an hour to get to know them better and to introduce them to anyone who might be interested. I interviewed people who were entrepreneurs, futurists, comic artists, Gen Z researchers, and everything in between—a very wide range of people! I absolutely loved working on this podcast. Since I learned so much from my experience, I decided to share some of the highlights. I plan to cover topics such as being comfortable on air, overcoming challenges, episode highlights, and more, so keep an eye out for future posts!
Throughout my time hosting the Meet Your Mentor podcast, I would say my biggest challenge was making sure I was able to voice my own thoughts and opinions in a clear, succinct way. In general, I have always found it difficult to find simple phrasing to communicate my thoughts, both in speaking and writing. This happens more often when I get nervous, as I’d imagine it does to a large portion of the population, so this was definitely a learning curve for me when I began hosting the podcast. Sometimes, I would have to pause and think for a moment to sort out my thoughts. This meant I would have to pause long enough to succeed in organizing my thoughts, but not so long that the audience would notice a lull in conversation. After I’d finished a few episodes and had figured out a good balance between the two, everything ran a little bit smoother, and I can confidently say I felt I’d gotten the hang of it. But I think I noticed the largest difference in my podcasting when I finally realized the fact that I would never achieve a ‘perfect’ episode. This was my first experience creating content and putting it out on the internet, and I was pretty nervous about having an audience and knowing that, if I were to mess up, it would be on the internet forever. Accepting that I could never have a flawless episode took some of the pressure off, meaning that I was less nervous and had an easier time communicating and maintaining the flow of conversation, which I found very beneficial seeing as that was my job as the host. It was also easier for me to stay in the moment, which allowed me to connect more with the mentors, and I ended up having more fun. Decreasing my stress and improving my communication skills really went hand in hand with active listening, a topic I will be talking more about with my next post.
If you are curious about Meet Your Mentor and want to learn more or listen to an episode, you can use this link for Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0BbxTRTiEjYKIuaJ2ArfX9 This link for Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mentor-project/id1486267030?ign-mpt=uo%3D4 Or this link for Spreaker: https://www.spreaker.com/show/the-mentor-project
Remember, you want to scroll down until you see podcasts titled “Meet Your Mentor: Firstname Lastname.” You can also find my podcast on The Mentor Project website. Simply click “Explore” and then “TMP Podcast.”
