2025 August 26 Exciting changes coming

You can view the original Facebook LIVE here.

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7everyminute.com, the podcast website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me today to talk about some exciting changes that are coming. So let's get started. If you like what you hear today, please leave a like, subscribe, tell your friends, send me a message.

Tonight we're going to be talking about some format and content changes that we're going to be doing to our weekly lives to better accommodate things like having guests on the show more often again. We've been getting together as a Facebook Live now for a number of years—I think it's actually about seven years. And while it's a lot of fun and often exciting since the content can sometimes be a little fluid, it isn't always the most effective way to tell you things that are important to all of us.

One of the issues is that it's difficult to schedule and promote guests on a show that happens live like this. You may remember way back when we actually started by doing guests on the show. That's how we started out a long time ago. There were some monologues and some guests both. However, another problem is that even when I do manage to stay on topic, which is kind of the hazard of being a free thinker, I tend to wander a little bit.

But honestly, some of the shows weren't as good as I really wanted them to be and could have used a bit of editing. As my editor often reminds me, which obviously you can't really do with a live broadcast. It's live TV, as I always say. And what you get is what you get. You can change it for YouTube and stuff later on, but I really want to give you a little better quality on the main show.

For those of you who don't realize it, almost every single broadcast that we do, every episode is available both as a video and then the more traditional audio podcast. And it also appears on YouTube, usually about a day later. Plus my assistant manually transcribes each episode. Yes, we do it manually because we tried all the AI services and while they do some neat things, she actually goes through and really edits things and cleans things up for me. So then those are posted as a blog post on the website. And that's really there for people who, like myself, really prefer to kind of scan a podcast and then look up what they want to listen to rather than listening to the entire audio.

In the future, we'll probably also try and be adding the transcripts to the RSS feed so that if your player supports it, your podcast player supports it, the full transcript will be available most places where you find the show as a podcast. But enough about the mechanics. What about the content?

This is where the biggest changes should be happening, and we're pretty excited about it. We'll be transitioning to a prerecorded format to make planning and recording episodes more efficient, but particularly more consistent, both in publishing time and in content from week to week.

This will also allow us to schedule and promote guests in advance so we can have more guests back on the podcast and so that both our audience and their audiences will know when to look for the interviews with a particular person. We have a couple ready to go right now, but we really wanted to get them lined up so we could do a better job promoting them, not only for ourselves, but particularly for the guests because they put in a lot of effort. They take the time and their schedule to talk to me. And then we edit and record it down and they listen to it and give us feedback. So we want to do the best thing for them that we can.

We already have interest from a number of interesting guests. Very interesting guests. I told you about some of them last week and met more after the podcast—considerably more after the podcast from last week. But there's a lot of people we talk to already. They say there's many more to follow and they're all people with great insight and they're fun to talk to. They have an interesting worldview. They have great humor and more so, I'm really excited about having them back on the show. They were fun to talk to in person. A couple of them, of course, once we got done talking, we realized we should have recorded this and used it for a podcast. But sometimes you remember, sometimes you don't.

We'll also be talking more about the webinars and courses and such. The courses you may remember, we've been talking about those for quite some time now, actually. And I've used them privately for a few years, just one-on-ones and small groups. But it's time to really formalize them, get them ready so that we can help more people. And because we talk about things I think you'll find interesting and things that'll help you, but if you're going to do that, it is a very different thing. If you're going to talk one-on-one with a person, you can take a second and look up notes and things like that. If you're spending time to actually watch a course or learn from an online course, then people kind of expect a little more, understandably and deservedly. So we're going to clean those up and get those ready so you can watch those as well.

All the courses and all the material and all the content is still about re-envisioning your life, living with that vision and living into that vision, and setting goals and overcoming life's challenges and making the most of your time in whatever way feels important to you and living your fullest life with fewer worries about money and all the other things that go along with it, and all the topics that we've covered over the years. So the core content's not changing.

I've previously mentioned that we have set up a membership site, and that's basically ready to go. We just haven't actually turned it on, and that's where like-minded people can hang out and exchange ideas and talk about things that happen, talk about things that excite them. And so that's going to finally be open probably in the next couple months. It's, like I said, been ready, it's been waiting, it's been waiting on me, frankly. And so that's ready to go. And that'll be coming along at the same time the courses are launched.

We also have some fun things like a custom deck of cards. I think I mentioned that. Right now it has 54 ideas of things you can do, just things for either little or no money, just fun things to do with either yourself or with your friends. There'll probably be another hundred. Right now I think we're around 108, so there'll be three times as many ideas all told. And we'll post those on the membership site. More on that in the coming weeks, those are ready to go, just have to get them printed. So there are a lot of things in the works.

I'm also considering doing a second weekly or perhaps twice a month podcast or live stream for topics that we'd like to cover. Things like the Hall of Shame for ageist remarks and websites or unusual social situations and all those other relevant topics in a way, but they don't really fit into our primary focus.

Finally, we'd be totally revamping our website to provide far more information, make it easier to find information both on the website and hopefully we're going to see if we can't get it so you can find information in the podcast episodes a little more easily as well. There's a number of them. We have a couple hundred episodes actually recorded already, and some of them are a little repetitive because they go over a number of years. And so we would cover a topic and then a year later come back to it. But there's a lot of things hidden in there that would be nice if it's a little more visible. And so we're going to work on that as well.

And as a bonus, we'll be working more with another website that's been around for a couple years serving you with even more great and relevant content. More details on that in the coming weeks. I met with them at one of the conferences I was just at. We're both excited about working together, so like I said, I'll have more information on that.

And finally, my video editor, with his wonderful skills, has finally convinced me to use a more proper intro and outro to the podcast so you can get a better idea of what's going to be coming in that episode. But it's really so that we can get just a little more consistent look and feel.

All my regular people, I thank every one of you who comes here regularly. I appreciate it. You know what to expect. You know what to see. But if somebody comes in off a Facebook ad or just happens on the site because they get directed there to the show, you have to realize that these days, depending who you listen to, you have anywhere between two to three seconds or like eight to 12 seconds to catch somebody's attention.

And so one of the reasons—this isn't a vanity thing, I don't want to just get more people to say, "Hey, I have more people looking at me." When we have more people, then that gets us more visibility on Facebook. When that happens, then we have the ability to do more things. We can get bigger guests, more important guests, because that's a metric. Guests, like I said, it's a lot of effort when a guest appears on the show. It's an effort for us, but it's also an effort for them. And so they want to know that a bunch of people are watching, understandably. And so when we get more people and we can attract more guests—and to be clear, the guests I've talked to over the past couple weeks are excellent. They're really fantastic people and they're appearing because I spoke to them personally. But when you want to get more exposure, more guests, more people to bring you more information, more insight into things you could do to have a life that's more fulfilling, that requires a little more traffic to the show.

And so that's the reason for getting things looking a little cleaner, a little more professional. And as I mentioned, I've been away for the past couple weeks and like I said, I was at some events. One of the things that became clear is this is really the best time to really focus on spending my time with you. I won't go into all the details. We'll probably do a podcast on it actually. But I realized that this show and spending time with you is really the highlight of what I do in my week. And there's a lot more I want to share with you. There's a lot more I think we can share with each other, and I think we can just have a lot of fun together. And I want to do that. And to do that, I have to be a little more organized on this end. So that's why a lot of the changes are coming.

This is great. I love doing it. It's fantastic. It's exciting every week. I think of things on the air that I hadn't really had in the script. It's all great. My poor transcriber. She has quite the job each week because she has a script and she has what I say, and sometimes the two agree, but they usually don't. And that's all fun, but that's a different medium than actually having a bunch of information I want to tell you about in a really concise way to get you the most information in the best way possible. And for that needs a little more organization and formality. So we're going to do that because you deserve the best and that's what we're going to give you more consistently over the next few weeks.

So if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, absolutely, please let us know. Write me, DM me, whatever. We're always happy to hear from you. So that's it for the evening.

Your homework tonight is really simple. It's basically what I just said: please comment or DM me, call me, talk to me, run into me at the store, whatever, and tell me the number one thing you'd like to discuss over the coming weeks. It can be on any topic such as retirement, health, net worth, self-worth, careers, kids, travel, finances, hobbies, your new life meaning—however, whatever matters to you, whatever is important to you, just please let me know and we'll make sure that either myself or one of our guests will be able to talk about it over the coming weeks.

So that's it for the evening, still the regular closing. Now remember, with everything going on in the world, UKR7.com is still there to help support the people of Ukraine, and even if it's not in the news as much, it's still very, very much there. I ask for your support on that. I'd really appreciate it.

And also, if you want to invest in the world in a different way, there's World Central Kitchen. They work in disaster areas, helping both with food and with infrastructure right after a major event hits. If you look up WCK.org, just an amazing group of people that do wonderful things throughout the world.

But as we always say, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. And you can do that. You don't have to do it on an international scale, you can do it locally. There's lots of local places, things like the Red Cross and all those people have things. You probably have a lot of other local organizations that can use your help and if you're just not in a mood or situation right now where you can donate the time or money, one of those things that just a simple smile to somebody can change their whole day. It makes a huge effect.

I actually started to do a little mini podcast. I'll do that this week and talk about the energy of positivity. And it has to do with the show, with the second show that I was at this past week, and then going back after it was torn down. It was pretty interesting, the before and after and the whole energy you pick up just by being around energized people. So be one of those people please that you just give positive energy off to other people. You can change the world around you and make a positive difference.

So that's it for the evening. As always, thank you so much for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along, like, subscribe, hit that like button, and if not, please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. It's your homework this week. Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dreamed up because that's the path to contentment, love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you.