Your Public Best - Lillian Brown [89]
Specialized seminars can also be very useful—for candidates for political office, for example. In such seminars, you can receive valuable information on how to conduct and organize your campaign, funding and finances, polltaking, defining the issues, campaign rhetoric, and direct-mail solicitations. All this is in addition to improving your media appearance skills. Experts from diversified fields are brought in as instructors and lecturers.
Other worthwhile workshops deal with professional or management skills, becoming upwardly mobile, leadership, assertiveness, and public speaking.
Another option is to seek individualized and personal consultation. You may find—often to your surprise—that you need only an hour or two with a capable consultant. Such consultants can be hired for voice and diction training, personal appearance and clothes analysis, and applying makeup for television appearances. You can find such a consultant through recommendations or public relations firms.
Just remember to choose your consultant carefully. Make sure that she or he is fully qualified to help you. There are many money-hungry, unqualified people out there these days billing themselves as “media consultants.” Just because a person once had a job for a year writing press releases or speeches for an association or congressman doesn’t qualify him or her as a media consultant. Ask for references or a brief, oral outline of his or her experience (not just his or her opinions) over the phone. In this way, you can quickly judge the consultant’s qualifications.
I once knew a young woman who had landed her first job as an anchor on a local TV news program at a station where makeup services were not provided to the anchors. Before she went to her first day on the job, she decided to get some advice about makeup and clothes colors from a consultant. Unfortunately, she chose the wrong type of consultant. Instead of going to someone in the television industry, she went to a friend of hers who sold makeup at a cosmetic counter in an upscale local department store, whose advice in a nutshell was to “look dramatic.”
When she showed up for her first broadcast, the fledgling anchor was wearing eyeshadow in three colors, too much black eyeliner, ruby-red lipstick, and blush that nearly outshone the lipstick. She was also wearing a bright red jacket over a white blouse with a shiny gold necklace. Needless to say, she got noticed that night—not only by the viewers, but by the executives who had hired her, one of whom was at the door of the studio as she exited. He complimented her on her job of giving the news and gently told her that they were going to send her to an expert consultant on TV makeup and wardrobe.
As she told me this story later, she said she didn’t have the nerve to tell the executive that she had already received makeup and clothes advice. All she could think about was the $100 she had spent buying makeup from her friend and the cost of the new red jacket.
You may be given questionable advice from a trainer or consultant, which does not relate to your own personal needs or circumstances. As an intelligent person, you should evaluate the worth and application of the suggestions given.
For example, when a prominent scientist was appointed president of his national scientific association, he knew that his main weakness would be as a public spokesperson for the association. Whenever he was interviewed or addressed the public, he tended to come across as stiff and formal. He ended up going to a well-known consultant on public speaking, who advised him to “force himself” to use gestures, at first exaggerating them, and later refining them until they became a part of his speaking style.
This seemed like good advice, except that the scientist ended up using wide, wooden gestures, that never became refined and a part of his natural speaking style. After a couple of speaking engagements, his staff talked him out of following the advice of that consultant.
In the end, the counsel of a second consultant