Selling Yourself in Confrontation and Media Interviews 97
- Be positive.
- Give information rather than denials.
- Be explanatory. Don’t succumb to the temptation to argue.
- Take lots of time. Let your opponent rush, shout, or run
off at the mouth, argue, yell, and scream. By taking your
time, you’ll infuriate him or her even further and make
your opponent appear irrational to the audience you’re
trying to win. - Be the voice of reason.
- Be the good guy, Mr. or Ms. Nice.
- Make intellectual love to your audience.
How do you do all this?
I can hear you saying, “That’s easy for you to say.” Well, there
are certain techniques that I’ve found that really work. You’ve
learned how important it is to please the audience with your face,
your body, and your voice. But even if you’re doing everything
right, there may be some members of your audience you cannot
please. Obviously, the hostile questions or the confrontational
remarks are not going to come from you supporters. Those who
have not yet made up their minds will usually remain silent. So,
you have to learn how to handle your adversaries. And here are
the techniques you can use to do that.
Remember to pause
The most important technique is the pause. It’s also the hard-
est to accomplish in taking control of what might otherwise be an
uncontrollable situation.
We naturally react and want to react quickly—don’t. It’s un-
natural to stop and think before we speak. In fact, it’s so unnatu-
ral that we’ve developed a whole vocabulary of spoken pauses—
audible pauses—pauses filled with the strange extraneous sounds
I talked about in some detail in Chapter 2:
- “Uh.”
- “Ya know.”
- “Like.”
- “And so.”
- “Know what I mean?”