When we lose everything or even one thing - marriage, career, home, whatever - we often realize how much of our identity was wrapped up in stuff, or money, or other people.

So in order to navigate the loss of that thing or lots of things, it takes time to reshape our identity.

What I’ve learned about asking others about some of the most painful moments in their lives is that they finally figured out their relationship to the universe. And for some guests, they decided that - after years of wrestling with or denying the existence of God - they were looking at a Creator through the lens of some pretty jacked up people who didn’t much understand God either.

Reboots are part of life. Unexpected changes. The consequences of poor decisions. We never see it coming, do we? How can we prepare ourselves so we’re ready for the unexpected?

It’s a scary thought, right?

I’m Tracy Winchell, co-creator and host of the Reboots Podcast  at Reboots Podcast.com.

This is lesson 05 in Series 2 of Tracy’s Tiny Reboots.

We’re celebrating 12 months of podcasting and interviewing more than two dozen people about their life and business reboots.

During May, every day, we’re sharing a lesson learned from our experience.

If you’ve studied writing or any sort of creative endeavor, you know the importance of studying the works of the artists you want to emulate, right?

I don’t know about you but sometimes in the process of immersing myself in the techniques of my favorite interviewers - Buster Olney of the Baseball Tonight Podcast and Krista Tippett of On Being - I forget that I’m supposed to be learning from them and I get frustrated because I’m not like them.

Do you ever stop to wonder what’s fun for you? Are you surprised when the thing that was fun last week is nerve-wracking today? That happened to me in March of this year - sitting down for three different interviews.

Turns out, the answer was right under my nose, provided by Andy Traub, the interview that made me so uncomfortable.

Does the idea of launching a podcast intrigue you? Do you *have* a podcast but can’t seem to “find time” to publish regularly? Are you searching for the “secret” to podcast success?

Stick around for the next 6 minutes and I’ll tell you what I’ve learned about shipping long form episodes twice a month for a year.

Do you have high expectations for yourself? Sometimes too high?

Yeah, me too.

And while this is one of our thirty lessons learned from a year in podcasting about life and business reboots, I have a confession. I’m still not very good at executing the principle of, “Do what you can.”

It’s our podcast birthday! Every day in May on Series 2 of Tracy’s Tiny Reboots we will share a lesson learned from a year of podcasting and asking people about their life or business reboot.

Previewing Reboots Episode R023

I read a lot in the winter months. In this episode I run down what I read in February, as shared at RebootsPodcast.com/Tracys-2018-reading-log - favorite this month was my friend Steve Austin’s From Pastor to a Psych Ward.