Three is the Magic Number

Aim for all three messages in every single answer. Let me say that again. I want you to aim for all three message points in every one of your answers. Yeah, some of you are going, wait a minute, I didn't hear that right. I think what TJ said was I should aim for one message in each answer and over the course of the interview hit all three message points a couple of times. That must have been what TJ said, right? Right. No, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is the best practice to increase the odds of you getting the messages you want into the final story. The best practice is to answer every single question and bridge to 1, 2, all three message points in every single answer. So how do you do that without sounding insane? The key is you're not doing it in a memorized way. It's not word for word the same. It's not the same order. You're going to use different words, different examples, different levels of abstraction. You're going to mix it up thematically. You're going to hit the same three points, but the examples may be completely different. The wording will be different, the order will be different. So it's going to still sound conversational. This is why your goal when you're in an interview is not to give concise answers. People come to me all the time and say, tj, teach me to be concise with the media. I want to give concise answers. My question is always, why? Why do you want to be concise? Your goal should never be to be concise with the media. Your goal is to get the messages you want in to the final story. I don't have any evidence, and neither do you that being concise helps you do that. I have a lot of evidence that if you hit your message points and you have good messages and you say them in different interesting ways, especially as we'll talk about in the next section, you package them with sound bites. I have a lot of evidence that that creates dramatic results of you getting exactly what you want. This is hard to do. It feels awkward. Again, relative. It's not hard to do, like all of a sudden becoming a world class violinist or dunking a basketball. Those are hard things to do. But answering a question and bridging back to all three message points every time feels awkward. You want to think, oh my gosh, how can I do this? They're going to laugh at me. It feels weird. But it's not. If you do it well, again, for you, it seems obvious. You know what you're doing to the reporter who's trying to figure out quickly, in the midst of perhaps doing 10 other stories, how can I get the information that's most interesting to my readers, viewers, listeners on this story? It can be very helpful if you came up with good messages and you're fleshing it out in different ways. Quite often they'll want to ask follow up questions about one of your message points. Even though it's the fourth time you've said it, it's the first time it really resonated with the reporter and made them think about it. So they're now going deeper into one of your message points. Let me stress, this is not public speaking class. Today I teach people public speaking. In fact, some of you have been in my public speaking masterclass. 550 lectures just like this one, longest one on this platform. This lesson does not apply there. If you do this when you're giving a speech, a presentation, talking to family, friends, colleagues at the office, they will think you're crazy. They will think you've lost your mind. This is specific to the world of media interviews, especially edited media interviews where you could be talking to someone 5, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 40 minutes. If you only get a couple of sound bites pulled out, well then you're not repeating yourself because the people who really matter, the audience, aren't seeing the other times you said it. Here's the thing, even to a reporter who's hearing the whole conversation. Remember when a reporter is talking to you, they may have a phone like this. They're typing their editor, their boss is yelling at them. Other text messages are coming. They have distractions. So when you hit certain themes again and again, it's not necessarily annoying or obnoxious to them. Now this doesn't work if you have bad messages. This doesn't work if you are refusing to answer other obvious basic messages, questions the reporter has asked. It only works if you've answered questions and you're satisfying the reporter at some level for all the issues brought up. But if you do that, going back again and again, hitting all three messages every time, it increases the odds that you get what you want. Because if you have 20 questions in the interview and you've said all three messages 20 times, at the end of the interview, the reporter looks around a stack of messages and notes and they're all your messages. There's only a total of about three or four messages there. But if every single question, you answer it and you just try to educate the reporter as thoroughly as possible, even if you hit all three message points at the beginning or the end, you've hit 30 or 40 other message points. So you now have a 3 and 40 chance of getting what you want in the final story. Are you happy with those odds? I didn't think so. So that's why I stress hit all three message points in every single answer.