Before I get too much deeper in this, let me address the elephant in the room time. Your clients, your customers, your colleagues are going to lie to you. They're going to say, oh, wow, Sally, we'd love to rehearse but there's no time. baloney, do not listen to them. Human beings are biologically programmed to fear public speaking Well, speaking to someone like you or me on camera in rehearsal is a type of public speaking and that's nerve racking. So people are going to come up with all sorts of flimsy excuses as to why they can't possibly do a training or rehearsal.

Ignore them, they are lying to you and they're lying to themselves, not for any nefarious purpose. It's just a defense mechanism. There's always time for anything that's important. Now, I'm giving you strategies here that will work whether you have eight hours, two days to rehearse with someone Or even five minutes, you can expand and contract. But my recommendation my single biggest recommendation on time is don't waste time. Talking about the interview spent every second possible, brainstorming message points, narrowing it down to your top three brainstorming on sound bites, narrowing it down to your best ones rehearse on video, critique, every second needs to be focused on those activities.

Because in my experience, those are the activities that pay the greatest dividends in terms of results. Your client, your colleague, your customer, getting the exact messages they want in the final interview. Here's the question I have for people all the time when they say there's no time. I say How often would you tell somebody in your organization, someone in public affairs or some executive just dictate a press release? And telling assistant send it out as is to the whole world. Don't spellcheck it, edit it, review it, send it to legal or public affairs or Investor Relations.

Just dictate it once. Send it out as is because there's no time to run spellcheck. How often do you do that? People will hell? Of course I'd never do. So why not?

Because that's exactly what you're doing. If you ever do a media interview, whether it's TV, radio, or print, and you haven't rehearsed on video where you can see and hear your answers, you're sending out your rough draft. Because it doesn't matter how many times you write and rewrite a press release or message points. What you're putting out to the world is what is coming out of your mouth for spoken interviews. So if it's coming out of your mouth for the first time in the interview, the actual interview itself, you're throwing out your rough draft garbage to the world. That's a horrible thing to do.

So when you frame it that way, you'll quite often get your customers, clients, colleagues, even those who think there's old busy to allocate the time necessary to do some kind of prep. Maybe it's not a full day. But it can at least be the five minutes in a car ride or a walk over to the TV studio. absolutely essential that you have some time management plan and you get rid of this ridiculous absurd notion that there's no time to rehearse