I once media trained a woman and she was panicking before we even moved to the second question. My opening query was as simple as “Tell me about yourself and your organisation”,

She thought I was asking something dreadfully personal. She wanted to know why I’d need to know about her rather than her business. Actually “My name is XX, I’m a product manager and I’ve worked here for five years” would have been fine.

As you’ll gather from the video, just a minute and nine seconds, she’s not the only one. Have a look at it and let me know what you think!

“No Comment” is something people often say when they don’t want journalists to write anything.

It doesn’t work. When lead trainer Guy was a very young journalist the chair of a major technology company told him he didn’t want to comment on something and he didn’t want to see that coming out as “NAME declined to comment” either.

At the tender age of 24 or so, Guy allowed himself to be pushed into this and didn’t put it in. Which was wrong as stating that the chair had declined to comment would have been a perfectly accurate statement of what took place in the conversation.

The chair in question was presumably savvy enough to realise that “no comment” never sounds completely neutral. Here’s a short video with another example – seriously, try never to say it. It really doesn’t work.

So many people think media trainers will help you to become fundamentally dishonest but lying rarely works. No good media trainer will help you to do so and here’s why.

You know when they told you at school that in an exam you should include the question within the body of your answer? Here’s why it works in media interviews too.