This Whole Life interview prep

Thank you for being a part of
This Whole Life!
We’re so excited to welcome you to the show and for our listeners to hear from you.

This Whole Life is a podcast full of practical wisdom and honest conversations for real people who are living in the real world. By offering insights and lessons learned from our roles as counselor and minister, spouses and parents, our goal is to equip listeners with principles and practices for a sane and saintly life. This podcast seeks full integration between authentic faith and mental health.

  • If you’re reading this, it means that you’ve generously agreed to take time for a conversation with us. Thank you for that gift! To access the online recording studio on Riverside, you can just click here. And if you have any questions at all before we record, please let us know - no question is too small or silly.

    • Please plan to use Google Chrome for your browser, as well as an external microphone and headphones if possible (see more best practices below).

  • We will record both audio and video for the interview.

  • The event flow of a typical episode is:
    1. Welcome & introducing guest
    2. Highs & Hards:
    At the beginning of every episode we connect with our listeners by sharing one “high” and one thing that was “hard” from the past few weeks. We’d love it if you would think of one high & one hard to share as well! A High is something great in your life, and a Hard could be a bad event in your life or it could be a good thing that was very difficult - either definition of “hard” is welcome here. They could be simple (a great movie you saw lately, a stressful season at work) or very significant (a beautiful experience in prayer, the death of a loved one).
    3. Interview
    4. Challenge by Choice
    5. Prayer & send-off

  • Requests before the day of recording:

    • Fill out the Prep Questionnaire to help us prepare for the conversation

    • Email us a headshot and a short bio (2-4 sentences)

    • After the episode is posted, we always appreciate any ways that you’re willing to share the episode with your community & supporters (contact us for embed code, sharable posts, etc.)

Best Practices for Recording on Riverside.fm:

Riverside is a great place to record podcast interviews over the internet.  The genius is that Riverside continuously uploads everyone’s audio to the cloud as the recording is happening.  Therefore we get separate high quality tracks at the end of the interview. It is important to NOT close your browser until it 100% loaded to the cloud (Riverside will prompt you when the upload is complete).

Here are a few things that will help us get the best recording we can:

  • Preferred Browser: Use a computer with Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge.  If neither of those will work, let me know and we can get you set up on the Riverside App.

  • Quiet room: Just do your best - if a kid comes running into the room to give you a hug we can just do some editing (or if it’s awesome, we’ll keep it!)

  • Decent internet signal: You don’t have to have a hard-wired connection but it helps to have a strong reliable signal. If you want to check out internet reliability here’s a place you can test it.

  • Good microphone: Preferably it would be an external microphone (rather than the default mic on your computer). If you don’t have an external mic, a decent headset with a mic or even Airpods would do the trick.  If not, we’ll do our best with the built-in computer mic.

  • Notifications and Apps: During the recording silence any notifications and close out any unnecessary applications.  This will help limit distractions and save some bandwidth for the recording.

  • Headphones: This isn’t a must-have, but we’ll call it a nice-to-have. If you don’t have a set of headphones, click the “I am not using headphones” button when you are getting ready to enter the recording space.

  • Recording Levels: Once you are in the This Whole Life recording space we will check the audio levels to make sure it’s not too loud and not too soft, but just right.

  • If you’d like to watch a video that explains all of the above and more, click here.