Go For The Gold: Your Olympic Media Manual, Week 3

Week 3: Be Irresistible

We are off and running. It’s day six of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Welcome to week three of Go For Gold: Your Olympic Media Manual. If you missed week one or week two, please check them out because these five weeks are designed to be cumulative.

This blog series is your Olympic viewing companion. It provides the strategy and skills to maximize your Olympic viewing time and create your own spotlight that grows your business.

This week we are talking about a quality that Olympic athletes have in spades. It’s a quality that generates media attention. And it’s also a hot topic this Valentines Day week.

What is it?

Passion!

One of the reasons we are drawn to Olympic athletes is that their level of passion is through the roof. We want a piece of it. We want to be close to it. So we watch. And keep watching.

Passion is a powerful aphrodisiac and you must project it if you are seeking media or any kind of public persona.

Just look at Olympic Gold Medalist Jamie Anderson. She displays pure joy and love of snowboarding.

Or how about skating newcomer Jason Brown. He exudes happiness. It makes me happy just to watch him! I am not the only one. The YouTube video of his long program at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships has been viewed over 3.7 million times.

No matter who you are, if you want to get and keep an audience’s interest, you must convey a love of your topic whenever you speak.

Producers are looking for this critical quality. What you may not know is that they can sense if you have it within a few seconds.

For instance, let’s say I call you to vet you for a booking, I can tell within moments if you have the passion and energy it takes to be a strong presence on TV. It’s not a formulaic conclusion. It’s a gut instinct based on years of experience.

Let’s go a step further. Perhaps I get your voicemail. You may not know it, but your voicemail says a lot about you. I can read your energy with a high degree of accuracy just from that recorded message. You want your passion to shine through even in voicemail because you never know who could be listening and what it could mean for your career.

Some people are naturally engaged and passionate. Others are less demonstrative and I want you to know that with deliberate practice, you can improve. You need to find that passionate place in yourself and actively work on bringing it out.

How do you up your engagement? Two steps:

1. Change begins with awareness. To gage how people react to you, share your voicemail with three people. Try to ask folks who do not know you well because they won’t already have a preconceived idea of you. Ask them to HONESTLY rate your passion on a scale from one to ten. You want to be eight or above. To be clear, I am not talking about bouncing off the walls. I am talking about an appropriate level of engagement that makes the listener feel excited about hearing you!
2. Conscious focus on your tone will make a huge difference. If you score below an eight, don’t despair. Every time you speak, work on allowing your emotion about the topic to rise up and bubble to the surface. Keep in mind that sometimes a higher energy level is more appropriate than others.

Even if you are reserved by nature, you can do this. There is a fire burning in all of us. Release it!

When you exude passion, you are one step closer to irresistible.

Stay tuned for next week’s installment of Go For Gold: Your Olympic Media Manual where you will learn another game changing trait that’s key to Olympic success and success in every area of life. You don’t want to miss that.

If you found this blog helpful, please email it to a friend or share it on Facebook and Twitter. And please share your passion in the comments below. I can’t wait to hear it!