There’s nothing more exciting or stressful than being on the radio.

On Friday July 3rd, I was on WGN Radio for the first time since June 29, 2011.  If you want to get really specific, I was hosting my first show on WGN Radio since June 25, 2011.

The call letters are still the same, and so is the Showcase Studio on Michigan Avenue.  But that’s where the similarities end.  With the exception of three news anchors and two producers, everything else has changed.  WGN moved into new digs on the seventh floor of the Tribune Tower.  Some new names (and some familiar names) were hired in the Summer of 2013.  The WGN that I left four years ago was long gone.

I couldn’t coast on the idea of being “Rob Hart, guy who used to work at WGN.”  My former job didn’t matter to the staff, or the audience.  It was no great homecoming, I was just a guy who was filling in on a Friday night.

As the show went on, I felt incredibly comfortable.  It was like trying on an old pair of shoes.  It just fit.  I carried that feeling out of the Tribune, onto the Red Line, and into my home on Friday night.  Then I went to bed.  When I woke up, I had an entirely different feeling.

Dread.

Every mistake I made, every poorly executed turn of the phrase, every fumbled tease started screaming in my mind with the volume of an SR-71 at takeoff speed.  I didn’t want to hear a tape of my own show because I was going to hear how awful it was.  Three months of lobbying flushed down the drain is how I felt.

When the .mp3 of the show finally arrived on Monday morning, I was afraid to open it.  I knew that if I listened to it all of my worst suspicions would be confirmed.  To make matters worse, I have spent the past two months writing a blog about how to be a good talk show host.  Doing a terrible talk show would be bad for my brand.

I gulped, and clicked DOWNLOAD on the .mp3 file.

….and….

It wasn’t that bad.  There were some things that were good (WGN reporter Ryan Burrow’s reports from the Grateful Dead show at Soldier Field, interviews with Jim Margalus and Jeff Katz), and there were some things that were not so good (tap dancing when a topic died).  But by and large I did a decent enough job.  I didn’t embarrass the station or myself.

That, in a nutshell, is a love/hate relationship many of us have with our own content. When we’re done producing a piece of audio, video, or text….we’re in love with it. Everything is great.  After all, why not?  We’re not that far removed from the creative process.  We’re in love with the thing that we made.

Step two is the harsh light of day.  Slight imperfections turn into major flaws.  The major flaws then turn into hideous disasters that should force you to drop out of your chosen profession as well as decent society.

Step three is acceptance.  Some things are good.  Some things need improvement. Hopefully, you’ll have the chance to improve the things that need improving.

The three-step love/hate process with your own content may seem like a recipe for mental breakdown.   Not exactly.  In fact, it can be quite healthy.

For example, believing that you weave everything into gold is a recipe for disaster.  Exhibit A would be former Channel 5 anchor Ron Hunter.

Hunter had some big shoes to fill when he arrived in Chicago 1976.  He was replacing Floyd Kalber, who had been promoted to news anchor on “Today.”  Hunter was Ron Burgundy before Ron Burgundy.  His square jaw and quizzical eyebrows rested comfortably under a helmet of hair.  But few of Ron Hunter’s co-workers shared Ron Hunter’s high opinion of Ron Hunter.

WMAQ-TV was the high point of Ron Hunter’s life.  His contract was not renewed when it ran out in 1979.  From there, it was off to Philadelphia…and ruin.

When Hunter arrived at KYW-TV in Philadelphia in 1978, he was trumpeted by the station as the savior who would resurrect its sagging ratings. So Hunter lived the life of the anointed. He reportedly was the highest-paid anchor in Philadelphia. He had Bunny, an adoring blond beauty 20 years younger, as his wife. He owned a rambling ranch house with a swimming pool in South Jersey, a collection of expensive French wines, a red 1957 Ford Thunderbird, and a 5-by-7-foot projection screen on which he would admire videotapes of himself reading the news.

His life would bottom out in 1996.  His money, career, and spouse were all gone.  His shabby treatment of co-workers on the way up meant no one was there to help him on the way down.  He was arrested for stealing food from a neighbor’s trailer.  Even then, he was convinced that his life would make a hell of a movie.  He died in 2008.

Proof that self-criticism is OK.  When we think that everything we do is great, we don’t listen to those who feel otherwise.  There is a tendency to replace critical voices with those who will tell us what we want to hear.  Ron Hunter happens when reality pierces the bubble.

On the other hand, you can spend all of your time being too critical of your own stuff.  Case in point?  David Letterman – who was on TV for 35 years and enjoyed none of it.

So I will go through my show on Friday, taking notes on the stuff that worked and the stuff that needs improvement.  If I get to do it again, I hope to apply the things that I learned from the first show.

And then the cycle will repeat itself.

By the way, if you want to hear some excerpts from the program, click here.