Today’s modern technology provides breath-taking opportunities for individuals and companies to convey their messages digitally to the world.
Some use it well, while others use it badly.
My observation is that no one has ever done it quite as atrociously as the shortest-serving British Prime Minister, Liz Truss, is doing it now.
‘The Liz Truss Show’ is a kind of comedy-horror production you can watch online.
Unlike the best of mainstream media – which Liz Truss rants Trump-like against – the aim appears to be to generate impact at the expense of truth.
The show seems designed to enhance the reputation of the person whose name graces the programme title – apparently aiming to take it above the depths it fell to while she was in office.
The result so far appears to be the opposite, with dismal Truss credibility levels dropping even lower than the fleeting period when she was occupying 10 Downing Street.
Liz Truss is fostering a range of dramatic conspiracy theories to explain her fall from power – as an alternative to facing up to the uncomfortable truths about what really happened.
As a result, The Liz Truss Show is bizarrely entertaining because of the ineptitude of its conception, the laughably fictitious nature of much of its content and the lack of self-awareness involved in its execution.
The show exemplifies Liz Truss’s characteristic absence of concern for – and lack of awareness of – the economic pain experienced by all those who lost possession of their UK homes because of the massive hikes in interest rates triggered during and immediately after her time in office.
The only seriously good thing about The Liz Truss TV Show is that it’s an overflowing treasure chest of ‘how-not-to-do-it’ communications lessons for all of us who seek to convey messages online.
In order to tell you about the Liz Truss Show, I’ve invested 46 minutes of my life watching it.
This is so that you don’t have to do the same if you can’t spare the time or can’t take the pain.
But you still can get a firm idea of how tragic the show is by spending less than 60 seconds watching the over-the-top promotional video for it here:
Among the communication lessons you can pick up from the video promotion are:
Liz Truss Show Communication Lesson 1:
Avoiding responsibility for problems you have caused, will always undermine your message
The promotion line to notice is the one referring to the disastrous Liz Truss mini-budget which led to her exit from 10 Downing Street after just 49 days in office.
The Truss Government’s mini-budget contained massive un-funded tax cuts which understandably spooked markets and sent interest rates rocketing.
Liz Truss claims: “I was blamed for a market crisis that was not my fault”.
This approach is less than heroic and less than responsible.
It highlights Liz Truss’s continuing refusal to accept – and perhaps even the inability to understand – the reality of her mini-budget’s failure.
As a result, anyone who lived through her brief period in office will be rightly wary of the continuing gap between what Liz Truss does and what she says.
Anyone seeking to communicate effectively online and beyond needs to be aware of any potential gap between what you do and what you say.
You can be reminded of this gap every time you step into the London Underground train system.
Liz Truss Show Communication Lesson 2:
Embracing unsubstantiated conspiracy theories saps your credibility
Within the promotion video are false Liz Truss claims relating to her rapid departure as prime minister.
She claims to have been “deposed”.
The truth of the matter is that Liz Truss actually resigned as a result of rapidly plummeting support from her own Conservative Party MPs who had helped put her in 10 Downing Street a short time before.
If you need a reminder that the announcement about her resignation from office was entirely voluntary, here is the moment when she made it – without any reference at the time to her being “deposed” by anyone.
As it unfolded, the truth was very different from the Liz Truss claims of her losing the prime ministerial position due to mysterious forces she refers to as the “Deep State.”
Remember it was even deeper dissatisfaction with her own performance in parliament which later led her constituents to finish off her parliamentary career.
At last year’s general election, it was voters in her seat of South West Norfolk who overturned Liz Truss’s 26,000 majority and chose a replacement parliamentary representative from the Labour Party, as you can see here:
But in the promotional video – 3 years on from when she announced her prime ministerial resignation – Liz Truss paints a very different picture about her exit from high office.
She now claims that the United Kingdom is in a “doom loop”.
If we were to assume for a moment that this theory might be true, her failed prime ministership and the disastrous mini-budget it thrust upon the nation, could well be regarded as an early contributing factor to such doom.
Liz Truss has never understood economics.
She continues to avoid admitting – to herself and the public – that giving unaffordable and unfunded tax cuts to the population in a free market economy will naturally disturb things.
To seek to blame her parliamentary departure on what she calls the “Deep State” is nonsense.
To market a TV show on this false premise sets up her broadcasting enterprise for inevitable failure.
Liz Truss Show Communication Lesson 3:
Unjustified overconfidence in your communications can be dangerous
Liz Truss has long had a serious problem with unfounded overconfidence in her communications approach.
This is a very different to the problem from which many people typically suffer: a lack of confidence in their communication skills.
I routinely spend much time in presentation and media training sessions seeking to build participants’ confidence to help them perform beneath the spotlight of TV or in face-to-face presentations.
Building genuine communication confidence works when it’s underpinned by people’s abilities, achievements and understanding about that which they’re speaking.
Liz Truss’s overconfidence in her communications is largely unsupported by abilities, achievements and understanding.
So when she is conveying things in a way that appears supremely confident, it seems to be based on a kind of unsustainable “confidence trick” that she plays on herself and on her audiences.
It worked when she won over enough Conservative Party members casting around to choose a replacement for a discredited Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
But it did not work with the markets, or Conservative MPs massed behind her in parliament during her Prime Minister’s Questions or with her own constituents.
Alas, speaking falsehoods in a confident manner is not a substitute for imparting real truths with well-founded confidence based on genuine understanding about that upon which you speak.
If you want to subject yourself to further evidence of the three headline communications lessons identified, they are played out repeatedly during the first episode of the Liz Truss Show.
You can tune in here:
The good news is that communication training is available – for you and your team – which helps you avoid these Liz Truss Show headline communication problems.
Successful communication training is based on authenticity, respect for truth and building confidence that’s underpinned by participants’ abilities, achievements and understanding.
• For information about sessions on talking straight to the camera, click:
https://www.michaeldoddcommunications.com/talking-to-the-camera/
• To learn more about Presenting With Confidence, Impact & Pizzazz, go here:
https://www.michaeldoddcommunications.com/presenting-with-confidence-impact-and-pizzazz/
• To find out about sessions on “Give Great Answers To Tough Questions” click here: https://www.michaeldoddcommunications.com/give-great-answers-to-tough-questions/
• And there’s information about media interview response training sessions at:
https://www.michaeldoddcommunications.com/media-master-classes/
There’s every reason spread good news about your organisation in a way that’s credible, persuasive and effective!