As someone who has been in the bulls-eye of a high-profile media-driven character assassination I know the importance of a good PR team. Shifting an out of control narrative, influencing SEO results, developing some friendlies in the press and building platforms for getting your own story out are all essential. But I also know from painful first-hand experience, that while all of that external work is important, it’s the internal work that can make or break someone going through a public crisis.
There’s simply no way to be fully prepared for the emotional and psychological upheaval the first time you wind up being described in the headlines as someone you don’t even recognize. This is especially true for people who are unaccustomed to continuous media coverage.
I fill a special niche in the PR world, specializing in working with people who are facing a reputation crisis and want to come out the other side healthier, clearer, more effective and empowered.
If you are someone who is in the midst of such a crisis I would love to help you heal, overcome and harness the trauma for powerful transformation.
The inner resiliency aspect of reputation management is just as relevant in the case of corporate crises as it is for high-profile individuals. When a brand or product comes under fire the CEO, president and even lower level employees can face intense personal trauma. Empowering the key people with strategies to heal and grow as individuals can enable the company not only to survive but thrive post-crisis in ways it wouldn’t have otherwise. I have worked with cases where early focus on the inner, personal coping strategies motivated organization leadership to choose calmer, more strategic reputation management actions that dramatically reduced the overall scale of the crisis.
If you are a reputation management PR firm I am here to help your team provide the inner growth and empowerment support to your clients, who are, after all, human beings in the midst of very challenging circumstances.
In the rapid-fire climate of crisis management it’s easy to focus the entire team on the urgency of reacting to media and each new development. And certainly that’s important. But in the center of the mayhem sits a human being, often deeply wounded. That piece needs attention as well. As Confucius once said, “We are so busy doing the urgent, we fail to do the important.”