My first time being interviewed on television about my profession was seven years ago for a morning TV show on the Hallmark Channel. I was petrified. I became hyper sensitive to all the details around me. The air in the studio was cold enough to hang meat. The host had on so much face make up, I thought surely it would translate oddly on air (it didn’t). Their make up artist put bold, red lipstick on me, something I never wear, but I timidly trusted this whole foreign process. (It really did look awful). The countdown to “action” felt like a count up to new heights of anxiety levels. I was so caught up in my “script” that I was thrown by one of her unplanned questions and never recovered. Watching it later on air, I was my worst critic and said, “This TV thing is not for me”.
What I didn’t see at the time, was this appearance – however bad I perceived it to be (trust me, it was bad), was actually an open door to so many new opportunities that would soon come along. A producer/host of another show saw it and asked me to be a correspondent on her growing cable show. Which led to my hosting television segments that still air every Saturday morning. Recently I have been asked to join another media company to do segments for them. When I focused on being in the moment and interviewed a stress expert or a top gardener or talked about design, Feng Shui, healthier homes or wellness, the more I became less conscious of the looming cameras around me and the better each segment became. The segments where a producer wanted me to stay on script, word for word, felt the most contrived. The ones where I was encouraged just to talk and they’d “edit whats needed later” became, I thought, much better. More real. While doing a segment with Nate Berkus I had to demonstrate a “no-sew” project like a pro (producers taught me how to do it only an hour before). I found that I was answering his spontaneous questions as if I really knew what I was talking about because I was in the moment.
When I think back to that day in the cold studio so many years ago, I wish I could tell my younger self to take a deep breath and just be more focused in the present, not in what I think I should say next. I guess that’s good advice for nearly every moment in life. The more present you are in the moment, the better your flow and the more authentic you are. Which is still something I have to remind myself quite often. Deep breath. Be in the moment.
