Vanderslice Media Coaching
What to do When Your Interview Crashes
By Roberta Gale Vanderslice
A few weeks ago my hard drive crashed. I was on pins and needles for a seemingly endless day, hoping against hope that it could be fixed. I turned in to a basket case when I found out it was so fried that data recovery would be impossible, even if I was willing to spend the thousands of dollars that service usually costs.
Like most people, I thought it could never happen to me, and also like most people I had failed to back up my computer. I stewed and steamed and blamed everyone from myself to my husband to the UPS guy. I worked frantically for days, trying to find “hard” copies of some material, begging people I knew to e-mail me back articles and proposals I sent them, and trying to rebuild my address book and data bases from scratch. Yes, I even tried restoration software.
But it was only when I relaxed a bit and began to take orderly stock of what I lost, that the true rebuilding process started coming together. I mourned my hard drive and the mountains of work I would never see again, and then moved on to the task at hand. I methodically listed what I remembered I had, what I needed to get, and how I would get it. I then took steps to ensure that a hard drive crash would never knock me off my feet again.
How does my little sob story relate to you? For those of you who have experienced a horrible interview, you may have felt like your emotional hard drive crashed. You thought you were ready. Confidence was coursing through every vein. But somehow, when you finally went on the air with the host, nothing went right. You didn’t say what you meant, you didn’t mean what you said, your voice sounded horrible, you looked like a homeless person, you stuttered, you got confused, you went blank, the host didn’t like you. Somehow you managed to pull off the worst interview in the history of the media.
Like most people, you never thought this could happen to you, and like most people, you had no contingency plans to deal with the situation. You’re angry with yourself, the host, the audience, your phone, anyone or anything that you can frantically grab on to and blame for this verbal and/or visual catastrophe. Sound a bit like me and my hard drive crash?
Now here’s where the rebuilding begins.
Allow yourself to be as angry or upset or humiliated as you want to be for a few days, during which time you will NOT listen to that painful interview or view that horrific video tape.
Have an objective friend, co-worker, family member or your media coach listen to or watch the interview and give you their honest assessment. It may not have been that bad, and it’s possible that you were too hard on yourself. Or it may have been awful. You are not always able to judge your own performance, and an outside opinion is needed to get some perspective.
Then, take some time to write down absolutely everything you remember about the interview, no matter how inconsequential. Include the following: Time of day, weather, your pre-interview state of mind, any outside or family issues you were dealing with at the time, your feelings about doing the interview, how nervous you were, how well you were feeling physically, where you did the interview, any transportation or traffic hassles getting to the interview, phone quality if applicable, any distractions during the interview, how prepared you were, what types of notes you had, what the host was like, your feelings toward the host, the type of station, the state and city of the interview.
Now let’s rebuild your emotional hard drive one folder at a time.
Take a look at or a listen to the tape again, keeping the list you just made in front of you. As you watch or listen, check off anything that may have affected any part of your performance. For example, if you stumbled and stammered after one of the host’s questions, was it due to nervousness, or were you truly unprepared? If you looked horrible on camera, was it because you did your own makeup, or because you had a bad cold that day?
Once you connect each part of “The Universe’s Worst Interview” to a specific cause, you can begin to correct the problems one at a time and let go of the parts that were out of your control. Rather than thinking of your interview as a big, ugly monster that can never be tamed, you will begin to see it in more manageable pieces that can be worked on in baby steps.
Making mistakes is not a crime, but not learning from them is. I look to the following definition to encourage you to work on and critique each and every interview. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
Roberta Gale Vanderslice spent 27 years as a talk host in the New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Miami, Baltimore, Atlanta, Washington DC, and Cleveland markets. She was nationally syndicated by Westwood One and has hosted shows for the ABC Radio Network. Roberta has interviewed thousands of people from Cher to Jesse Jackson, and is co-owner of Vanderslice Media, which offers an individualized program to develop or improve the on-air skills of authors and experts, and provides supporting promotional material. www.vanderslicemedia.com
Contact Vanderslice Media Coaching
Follow Vanderslice Media Coaching on Twitter