So now we're making progress. We've gotten your client customer colleague to the point where he or she is comfortable with how they look has seen progress, they might not think they're perfect yet, but I let them know we're going to keep practicing and keep practicing until we get it. So again, it's different. If you have a half an hour in the back of a car to prep someone on the way to a TV studio versus a four or eight hour day or even two days, you have to expand and contract using your judgment here. But we've gotten to them to the point where they've seen specific improvement, and it's early in terms of the percentage of time we have for the day, if it's an eight hour day, it may take us an hour to get there. If you only have 45 minutes.

You've got to do all this in the first five or six minutes. So that's a little more challenging. And then I let them know, okay, you look comfortable, confident, relaxed, but you're not here to be a pretty talk show host or a handsome talk shows you here to communicate messages. And that's what I'd go over the basics of how to come up with a message. And as you saw earlier in this course, I can talk about it for a half an hour if need be. But you've also got to be able to summon up in 30 seconds or so and it really comes down to on this topic, what's important to you, that's also going to be of interest to the report and of interest to the audience.

And let's eliminate anything that isn't in that intersection, draw Venn diagram that can be helpful. And you got to help them get rid of the boring self serving messages that is in our marketing plan. And you have to get them to realize just because reporters interested in it doesn't mean it's their message. So that's critically important. And you've got to spend time, as I've already talked about, brainstorming these messages and narrowing it down to the top three, and sometimes it requires Real discipline and they'll say to you? Well, it depends on the question.

No, it doesn't depend on the question. Not because we're going to dodge questions, but the message that you care about the most on this topic for this media outlet never depends on the questions. It depends on your strategy that you've planned in advance before the interview even started. And that's what you've got to do relatively quickly, is forced them to narrow it down. Now the tricky part. So I've talked about brainstorming on messages, isolating one at a time not thinking in whole paragraphs.

But then at some point, you have to say, Okay, that's it. We're not going to accept nominations for more messages. We've got 20 or 30 or 40. Now we got to quickly look at each one in isolation. And debate Thumbs up, thumbs down, we keep it or get rid of it. And maybe you go from 30 down to 17.

That's Okay, you'd like to go from 30 to three in one swing, but from 30 to 70, now just go through those 17, you're down to 12, and then the nine, and then the five, and then two, three. And some clients or colleagues will balk at all, I don't want to dumb it down, you have to remind them, it's not dumbing it down. It's actually using your intellect to put things in a strong sense of priority. As Mark Twain, and a lot of other famous writers have been credited with saying, I'm sorry, I wrote you a long letter, I didn't have time to write you a short letter. It takes more intellect to narrow it down to three than to just have 10 or 20 ideas that reminded me that people like that quote, and regardless of where you live in the world, there's probably somebody famous in your culture, who has a quote, just like that, and that gets people to think you can kind of see the lights of recognition going on.

Ah, yeah, that does make sense. So that's the next thing you got to do is to Really make sure they are comfortable and they have written down on a piece of paper or a computer screen. Literally. Three ideas 10 words or less, something they can say in 30 seconds or less