Last modified on August 10, 2020 by Brad Phillips

How to Stay Positive When the Questions are Negative (Podcast)

As a spokesperson or subject matter expert, your mindset is a crucial element in the success of your media interview.

Some of the more important work you can do in preparing for your media interviews – particularly tough, adversarial, or hostile ones – is to anticipate how you react to questions, including challenging and negative ones. Do you get defensive? Do you become insecure? Does your anger get triggered?

Responding negatively to a negative question will only bring about – you guessed it – more negativity and could easily turn off the audience you are trying to reach. Is there a way to turn these negative moments into positive experiences? Yes.

positive mindsetChief Executive Throughliner Brad Phillips recently spoke with Brett Deister, host of the PR 360 podcast, about how to depersonalize and neutralize negative or difficult questions and provide answers that are authentic and honest, as well as effectively convey your message to your audience.

As Phillips notes during the interview:

“When you answer a challenging question well you’ve shown how graceful you can be under pressure … and I think that does more to earn an audience’s respect and confidence than simply answering easy questions. That mindset, too, of greeting challenging, hostile, adversarial questions as a gift rather than see it as a threat is really important for the quality of your response.”

Phillips also touches on other media training tips, including:

  • Identifying your target audience
  • Delivering a message that is meaningful to your audience
  • Knowing the written and unwritten rules of working with the media
  • And more …

If you’d like to hear the full podcast, you can find it here:

The PR 360 podcast delves weekly into the challenges that public relations professionals face, as well as the strategies and techniques that can lead to successful campaigns and responses to media crises.