I'm going to talk about something now that some of you think will sound crazy. I'm going to talk about the idea of rehearsing your messages your answers your sound bites for crisis on video. But But, teacher That's impossible. There's a fire, there's an explosion. There's ambulances on the way. The Meteor coming.
There's no time to rehearse. I understand. You can't call me or some other crisis communications counselor from the other side of the country of the world, fly in, spend a full day with you then do the press conference. I understand that. That's not what I'm asking for. I'm asking you to rehearse.
Well, but DJ that's still gonna take an hour to a two hour rehearsal will take two hours. But even if you've got 50 reporters in the room right next to you clamoring for a spokesperson during a time crisis, you can still pull out your cell phone, deliver your three messages deliver your soundbite takes about 60 seconds look at it. If nothing else, you can do the 62nd rehearsal. 60 seconds to do it. 60 seconds to watch, boom, it only took two minutes. You can spend two minutes going in front of a video camera at your own before going in front of the real cameras for your own press conference.
It will help you measure but you'll get a lot more confidence. Also, you may realize something's wrong with one of our messages. We're not really addressing the most important issue reporters are going to want to talk about. So it's not too late to change. But it will also build your confidence if you do have good messages. Now what I recommend for a particularly contentious issue is to actually do a rehearsal with questions.
May only be five minutes, but get your opening statement out, hold your cell phone, have a colleague hold a cell phone and then have a colleague bombard you with tough questions for a few minutes and answer it on camera and look at it. So now we're talking about 10 minutes. In real life, people say they don't have 10 minutes, because they're so busy brainstorming on every possible question. And then trying to come up with three paragraph answers that check every legal box. But we'll never get into the final story. Complete, utter waste of time, everybody has exactly the same amount of time to prepare for a crisis.
Question is how are you going to use your time? And the big difficulty for most people is they err on the side of more and more information more and more facts, more and more messages for more and more questions as opposed to really Finding the messages they care about the most the sound bites they care and practicing those messages with likely questions. I obviously side on this position over here where Yeah, you spent some time coming up with messages, sound bites, but now we're going to spend a little time rehearsing again, not two days, not a day, not two hours, but a minimum one minute. That's not too much to ask, and ideally at least 10 minutes preparing and rehearsing on video. So when you go in for the real thing, you're much more confident you're much more prepared.