My first profound TV interview 

The below was my status feed a year ago on Facebook. I thought I’d share it so people can either laugh or learn. Both are very important. 

Today was my first TV interview. I think I’m supposed to pretend that it’s all in a day’s work and I’m blasé about this kind of stuff… Lots of people I know seem to do this regularly. For me it was my first time and I wanted to share the experience so that everybody else knows it is ok to get nervous and you survive and learn as you go. 

Here’s how it went:

1. 3 visits to the toilet in the hour leading up to it

2. “Better with jacket on or off? Or on? No, off… On? Off” – that lasted about five minutes 

3. There is a large amount of unusable footage where I’m caught out by hugely difficult questions like “What does HR do?” and “What is your job?”.

4. I use the word “profound” about 17 times. Everything is a profound change or has profound impact or is profoundly interesting. 

5. I imagine anyone watching in HD will be able to see my lip becoming increasingly sweaty. SD viewers will be OK. 

6. I’m pretty sure I broke every guidance on position offered to me by our PR team, but it was such a blur I can’t quite work out if I managed the whole set. 

7. At one point they asked me “What are the main employment trends currently?”. I couldn’t manage one trend. After a pause I said… “Self employment is going up which is good and….not good” 

That’s how it really went. 
#Failoutloud folks, as the very wise Marco would encourage me to do.

4 thoughts on “My first profound TV interview 

  1. David,
    As an advocate for ‘learning from failure’, I love that your post uses humour, it’s punchy (bullet points noted) and is in the first-person. I doubt I’ll ever be on TV, but everyone could immediately relate to and learn from this approach. This is a generous example of learning from failure – the antithesis of a dry ‘lessons learned’ report. Thanks for sharing. Gary

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