TJ Walker shares a story from a reality-show pilot where he was asked to stage a fake debrief with Miss Universe. He uses it to warn against compromising your authenticity for cameras, arguing no one can force you to say things you don't believe.
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Let me take you behind the scenes of reality shows. Now, I'm no reality TV star, but there was a time when I did shoot a bunch of footage for a particular reality show pilot. I was conducting a day long media training with a very newly minted Miss Universe. Following her was an entire TV crew because they were shooting pilots and episodes for a reality show about being Miss Universe. So she comes in, the producer says, hey tj, we gotta leave in a half an hour. We're not gonna be able to be here all day, but we need something for the show that talks about what happened after the training. So I need you to sit here with Miss Universe and have a debrief as if it's after the training and you're talking about what was learned and the experience of the day only hasn't happened yet. And you're surrounded by all these people and everyone's nice and professional and they've all got a job to do. And it's human nature not to want to slow things down and to be a bother. So I did it. Now, I don't think I did anything horribly immoral or tawdry, but I did kind of go along in this fake thing where I talked to her about. So here's what we learned today, and here's the. It's a little bit fake and phony. Now, the only reason I point this out to you is you are in charge of. You. You're in charge of your own messages, your own brand. Don't let anyone talk you into saying things. They're going to come back to haunt you. You could be stopped on the street by a late night comedy show and they want you just to spout gibberish. Maybe no one ever cares. But it could come back to tarnish your reputation or your image. So whether it's a reality show producer or mad woman on the street interviewing you, remember, no one can force you to sing anything you don't want to say. No one can force you to be inauthentic. That's going to come from you. Okay, so why do I say that story? I tell that story for a couple of reasons. The main thing is I just want people to realize other people can be nice and try to shape you in a lot of different ways. You still have 100% control over what comes out of your own mouth. The other thing is just it kind of gives people a little bit of an interesting flavor of their trainer or their speaker. Today has kind of been involved with a lot of different interesting things at varying levels of show business in media just gives them a little better sense that I've seen a lot of different media from different perspectives, and therefore that experience might be able to help them.
