The executive who sounded most like herself after forgetting her media training

She had done her preparation. The brief was thorough — key messages, anticipated questions, answers for the difficult ones, phrases to use and phrases to avoid. She had practised. She had the training behind her.

And for the first fifteen minutes of the interview, she sounded exactly like she had been trained to sound. Controlled. Measured. Every answer hits its key message. Nothing said by accident.

Then the interviewer asked a question nobody had prepared for. A small thing — something about a particular moment in the organisation's early days that she clearly hadn't expected to be asked about. She paused. And for a second the preparation fell away, and she just answered.

What came out was the most interesting thing she had said in the entire session. It was particular. It was honest. It had the quality of something she was remembering rather than reciting. And the interviewer, who had been professionally polite up to that point, leaned forward.

What preparation can take away

Media training is useful. I want to be precise about this: the ability to manage a hostile interview, to answer a question without being trapped by its framing, to stay on topic under pressure — these are genuine professional skills. They matter. And in the right contexts, they protect.

What media training occasionally takes away is the quality of unplanned honesty. The specific, particular, slightly imperfect response that could only come from someone who was actually thinking, rather than performing a well-rehearsed version of thinking. That quality is not the same as authenticity in the vague sense. It is a communicative signal: this person is present, not managed.

The executive who forgot her media training for a moment didn't give a worse answer. She gave me a better one. Not because preparation is wrong, but because the best preparation creates the conditions for genuine presence — not a substitute for it.

Authenticity is not unpreparedness

The point is not to skip the preparation. The point is to prepare in a way that keeps you available to yourself — that doesn't require you to disappear into a set of approved positions and stay there for the entire session.

The best-prepared people I have worked with are the ones who can move fluently between the managed response and the genuine one — who know their key messages and can also, when the moment is right, set them aside and simply be present in the conversation. That range is what training should produce. Not the removal of the genuine voice, but the addition of range to it.