I am coming up on a year of being a podcaster — that’s right, almost an entire year of hosting How I Made It Through. On top of having the honor of having met and interviewed amazing guests, I have a few take-aways that I wish I knew before I got started. Of all of them though, trusting in my own natural curiosity is the most important lesson of all.Here’s the thing, I hate when people tell me to “just be myself” when I try anything new. It’s so unhelpful. So with this in mind, I want to provide you with more specific advice …Before I lay out my advice, let’s knock out some essentials first. Now, hear me clearly, when I say “curiosity beats planned questions”, I am not saying don’t plan at all. Absolutely do the requisite planning: research your guest, write an intro (or better yet, have them send you their written bio that you can read), and then give yourself about fifteen minutes to focus only on what you would really want to learn from this person if you were on a long car ride listening to them being interviewed. From this place of curiosity, write down every question that pops into your head in an unfiltered way — and without any order. Maybe you have ten questions, perhaps fifteen? Now read what you have written and put the questions in the order you imagine you might ask them, reminding yourself that it is not a script and that your list does not and should not dictate the flow of the interview. The real purpose of your list of questions is to serve as your back-up. Put the list down and know that it is available as your best little friend in the event that you simply cannot think of one more question to ask. You probably won’t be referring to it a lot, but knowing it’s there can help to calm your nerves and keep you on track.Speaking of calming your nerves … Curiosity requires being present. Being present means exactly that: you are not thinking about the past (crap, I just stumbled over my words) and you are especially not thinking about the future (what the hell should I ask next?). Instead, you should be solely focused on your guest and what they are sharing. In order to do this, you need to find a way to be calm, so that you can be present This requires two things;Practice a breathing technique to calm your nervous system prior to the interview: here are two I use: ratio breathing and 4-7-8 breathingStay focused on your guest and don’t interrupt (nothing bugs me more than listening to an interview and the guest is about to share something that I have been dying to hear and the host interrupts and takes the conversation somewhere else!)Here’s the cool thing about bullet point number two: when we are calm and fully focused on our guest, we become more calm and more naturally curious. We are only nervous when our focus is too much on ourselves; a focus too heavily on ourselves also kills natural curiosity about someone else. Pretty cool, right? Here are a few more tips to encourage guest to share more openly and to keep your curiosity engaged;After they finish a sentence or complete a thought, force yourself to pause before jumping in with another question. Sometimes when we pause for a beat, they start to share something we never would have known to ask them aboutAsk open ended follow-up questions like:“What was that like?”“How did that feel?”“Why was that so meaningful?”“How has that changed you?”“Share more about that.”“What happened next?”Natural curiosity requires a level of trust in yourself, your guest and in the organic quality of meaningful conversations. The above open-ended questions are always at your disposal in order to help you put your curiosity in the driver’s seat of organic conversations.Speaking of organic conversations…What I began to notice in the beginning of my almost year long journey into podcasting was that the minute the recording was over, I would start to talk with my guest more naturally. It was as if the “podcasting mask” was off and I was myself again. And guess what? When I did this, the guest would start to talk more naturally too, but now we were no longer recording! As much as you can, imagine that even when that record button is lit up, it’s just you and them. So yeah, I guess I’m saying “just be yourself”.