I asked my clients this question all the time if you're going to the fanciest black tie ball in your city, your town, fanciest event of the year. Would you feel comfortable getting dressed in the dark? Not looking at a mirror once going into the ball going into this castle or this luxury hotel, and just asking a friend on the way in. Hey, it's my hair. Okay, is my tie straight? Is my dress straight?

It's my makeup strip. Would you feel comfortable with that? And as long as someone said, Oh yeah, it looks fine. Most people say well, no, TJ I would be nerve racking be crazy. I'd never do that. How do you prepare for a big fancy event or for that matter, just going to your office on a Monday morning.

You're like most people, you get up you look at a mirror. You get out of the shower, you look at me or you get dressed. You look at me or you shave or put on makeup. You look at him here. You go through many, many stages. Dress review.

After breakfast, you may look in the mirror before you leave, you want to make sure you don't have coffee on your shirt, as I sometimes do, or grape jelly spilled down, you want actual evidence that the way you've presented yourself to the world is how you want to come across. So by the time you walk into that ball on a Saturday evening, or you walk into your office on a Monday morning, you're not worried that your hair standing up funny or you have coffee stains on your collar, because you already have evidence that you look the way you want. You've looked in the mirror a whole bunch of times. All I'm suggesting, when it comes to practice and rehearsal is you do the same thing with your speech. With your media messages with the ideas you're going to be communicating in front of the TV camera or the reporter.

And it's not about looking at words on a piece of paper or a computer screen because that's not the final product that's not what's going to get into the story. It's you It's us speaking how you come across. So that's why it's essential that you see what you're putting out there. If you don't practice on video again and again, to the point where you love what you see and you just wing it, or you're speaking for the first time in front of this reporter, you're essentially giving your first draft of your messages to the reporter and the world. The first drafts What do they call that? They call it a rough draft?

Why? Because it's rough. You want to do your sanding your polishing before the interview takes place. And that's why you have to I'm begging you have to rehearse your interview on video, even if it's a newspaper interview, to make sure you love your messages and your sound bites. Do the practice again. Again and get on video until you love what you see.

That's the ultimate way of having true confidence for the actual interview and that is how you practice and rehearse on video for media interviews.