Podcaster's Portal: coaching guests

Coaching your guest

Your guest needs to sound clear and be easy to understand
You often need to coach her so she's easy to understand

By Jonathan Halls

In audio interviews, guests need to be understood. Before you invite someone to be a guest on your podcast, make sure they sound good.

You can often judge whether they’ll be good in an interview when you first call them on the phone. If they speak with a soft voice, speak too fast or have an accent that’s difficult to understand, you’ll go find someone else.

Your role as a podcast interviewer is to make your guest sound great

Assuming the person has good audio presence, you will still need to coach her to sound good. If you sound good and have good questions, but she sounds lousy, it is difficult for your listener.

There are lots of things that will make a good interviewee sound poor on audio. They may be nervous.

I’ve seen people change when they see a microphone or a red “on air” light flash on. I’ve seen normally conversational people have mental blocks when their interview comes.

Your job as an interviewer is to coax them out of that so they are comfortable and relaxed. Relaxed enough to share their life story or spill the beans.

Develop rapport with your guest

The secret to this is to first develop rapport with your guest. That means good eye contact and good listening skills. Not until you have developed rapport will they truly speak openly.

If your guest clams up, it’s your job to comfortably encourage her to speak. Don’t be aggressive but ask open ended questions. Use positive body language such as nodding your head, learning towards her and establishing eye contact. Don’t jump in, but give her time to answer comfortably. Smile too.

If you’re not relaxed, there’s a good chance she’ll pick it up and become tense. So if you have to, practice pretending to be relaxed.

Watch Michael Parkinson

One of my favorite interviewers is British broadcaster Michael Parkinson. If you have a chance to watch him, you’ll see he is very empathetic and develops a very comfortable rapport with his guests. The more comfortable they are, the more they open up.

There are a number of techniques you can use in interviewing. There isn’t the time here for much of a discussion on them. However, neuro linguistic programming, also known as NLP, offers very practical strategies for developing rapport.