Listen to these 5 Podcasts for Inspiration and Learning

What podcasts do you listen to?

Almost daily I listen to podcasts, while driving my car, while jogging or during flights. A spoken blog post—and for me a podcast is exactly that—provides me with important stimulus.

Since frequently colleagues, friends and acquaintances ask me which podcasts I listen to, in this post you find my recommendations for podcasts in English language. My recommended German podcasts I listed in a previous post—in German of course.

1. Advanced Selling Podcast

For over five years now, Bill Caskey and Brian Neale, two sales trainers from Indianapolis, bring thoughts and inspiration on selling and business development to their ever growing audience. Their episodes of the Advanced Selling Podcast take about 15—20 minutes each. They are very convenient, casual and content rich chats around the inner game, expert positioning, selling productivity, farming, prospecting and problem solving.

Everybody in the business of selling—and be it just selling an idea in your own company—should listen to this podcast. It is a precious gem in the podcast universe.

Inspiration: high – Learning: high – Entertainment: high
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2. Michael Hyatt – This is your life

Michael Hyatt is fairly known in the blogging and social media community in the US. Previously serving as the CEO of publishing company Thomas Nelson, a couple of years ago he changed gears and built his career as a professional blogger, conference speaker and internet platform expert.

The slogan of his podcast and his business is intentional leadership. Following this, he speaks about conflict resolution and your own mindset as well as productivity, blogging, spirituality and self finding.

Often Michael Hyatt will refer to Stephen Covey and David Allen. He offers references to many of his other sources of inspiration, too, and uses all that to prepare a delicious menu of job, business and life tips.

Some reviewers on iTunes accuse Hyatt to be too broad in his podcast, to verbose and to have too little own ideas. In contrast, I especially do like the fact that he works with multiple sources and always references those—this man does read and listen a lot. This makes him a curator of information and inspiration, but adding his very own opinion and world view. The occasional sales pitch for his own products ties in fluently into his podcast.

Michael Hyatt’s podcast comes weekly since two years ago, one episode lasts about 30 minutes. It contains listener questions played in as audio in the second part, some of those are really useful.

Inspiration: high – Learning: medium – Entertainment: medium
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3. TED Talks

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and is a conference series that was brought to life twenty years ago in California. Meanwhile it has spin-outs under the label TEDx all over the world. The conferences bring together speakers from exactly those three areas. Everybody speaks 17 minutes maximum, where a shorter presentation also can last for just five minutes.

TED shows surprising and amazing insights from research, likely at the boundaries to art and architecture. Politics and society are big at TED, too, and depending on where the TEDx event takes place, add a very special local flavor.

Almost all talks are in English and so well to listen to, and many presenters are really good.

I am far from watching all talks and presentations, since new ones are published every day, but carefully pick what is of interest to me. A concrete user value is rarely given, but as a source of inspiration and entertainment I love TED.

Inspiration: high – Learning: low – Entertainment: high
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4. David Allen Company Podcast – Getting Things Done

Getting Things Done. A method, no, the method for self organization that I wrote about quite a bit already, like ”Getting Things Done with Outlook and iPhone“.

Besides the blog that the David Allen Company publishes, occasionally and irregularly they release audio posts, spoken by different employees and sometimes from David Allen himself.

As an introduction or for learning the GTD basics this podcast is not suitable. For deepening special topics I find it quite useful. For those who are looking for a nice introduction and the story behind, I recommend David’s talk at the Do Lectures of about 30 minutes.

Inspiration: low – Learning: high – Entertainment: low
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5. The Lede from Copyblogger

Copyblogger, this is concrete, detailed help for writing texts on the internet. The Lede is the podcast from Copyblogger, hosting their chief writer Jerod Morris with either colleagues or guests about a specific topic around writing.

»The Lede« is still new, the sound quality tends to vary from episode to episode, and the sentences spoken are by far not as polished as Copyblogger teaches and does in their blog. But this authenticity provides the spice and also a message: If you cannot speak as printed, you still can learn to write as printed with their method and tips.

The podcast »The Lede from Copyblogger« appeared irregularly in 2013 about bimonthly, since January 2014 every week an episode airs with about 15 minutes duration.

Inspiration: low – Learning: high – Entertainment: low
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Summary

The user value of a podcast can be multi faceted. Inspiration is welcome, learning appreciated and a bit entertainment does no harm.

And you?

Which podcasts do you listen to and what do you think about the podcasts that I recommend?

Photo: Joachim Schlosser, License CC-BY. Podcast Logo, Peter Marquardt from Podcast lemotox, License CC-BY-SA