The second biggest flaw that most people have when they're trying to help someone prepare for an interview, is they waste way too much time, brainstorming on questions and then brainstorming on answers and they don't package and systematizing organize possible message points. So what happens in corporate boardroom, after corporate boardroom all over the world is there's an interview coming up. Maybe it's later today, maybe it's tomorrow, the PR person will sit around with the principal to be interviewed. And they'll say, Well, if this question is asked, What do we say, and someone will give a nice, intelligent five minute answer that's got 189 messages. And then someone else will say, Well, this is gonna be a tough question. And someone else in the room will talk for two minutes and there's 10 or 12 message points, and they do this and that's for hours.

Guess what? It's all a complete utter. Waste of time, because you're not helping the person who's getting ready to do the media interview, actually process and prioritize messages. And you're continuing to stay in this context of live speech live presentations, where you can string together lots of lots and everything is heard within context. Okay with most media interviews, not only can you be quoted out of context, you have to be quoted out of context, the reporter is going to interview you or your colleague for 510 20 minutes an hour, and then pull just one thought. Out of all the conversations and put that is perhaps the only quote in the whole story.

If you know in advance, the reporter can isolate one idea, then you need to help the person you're prepping for a media interview to isolate one idea at a time. So what I recommend is when you're in the messaging process and you're brainstorming, you let people know, let's just brainstorm everything. Let's not debate ideas. Let's just go into a pure brainstorming mode, but then isolate one idea at a time, toss out a question, and then give an answer, but stop after about 10 seconds, someone's got to write it down you a colleague, someone's got to write it down on paper or computer and isolate that one idea. If it has the word and in it, therefore, however, or a comma, guess what? You've already failed.

You have not isolated one idea at a time you're stringing together two ideas, three ideas, you're synthesizing all signs of intelligent thought. All things that are helpful in every other aspect of communication, in business and in life, but things that are absolutely destructive, when you're prepping Preparing someone for a media interview. So that's the first step is you've got to use your time wisely because it's easy to blow for hours just talking about what you're gonna say in the interview. Here's what I have found over the years and working with public relations persons, communications counselors, public affairs officials, and CEOs, top spokespersons for organizations all over the world. What people say they're gonna say in an interview, and what they actually say in an interview. Completely different things.

So just don't waste time talking about what you're going to say your first step is you've got, brainstorm on every possible message, narrow it down to your top three messages right away that requires judgment. Sometimes it requires a force discipline because People want to say, Oh, my question is this I want to tell them everything I know about that. Big, big mistake. So for starters, brainstorm on messages, one idea at a time, narrow it down to your top three.