By Katie Hornstrom
Sometimes revelations can happen at the most unexpected times in life. Last night, I was eating dinner at my sister’s house and it started raining. On a good day, it usually takes me a solid 45 minutes to get home, in the daylight. So imagine driving home at 9 p.m. on dark, winding country roads with deer around every curve… in the pouring rain.
I made an unhappy face at the prospect and my sister said, forcefully, “Hey! Don’t ever curse the rain!”
Suddenly, I was struck by how much the rain was like my job in Communications and like the PR profession in general.
Often in PR, we spend a lot of time preparing and waiting for events to happen, both good andpotentially bad, and they often seem to hit at the most inopportune times. Haven’t you ever found yourself thinking, “If I only had another (insert here: month, week, day, hour, minute) to get ready.” Or “If only that (insert here: event, incident, accident, situation) hadn’t happened today of all days.”
Like the rain, every situation has a positive and a negative side. It’s often up to us, and the work we do, to determine which side people see. As PR professionals, rather than cursing the randomness of life that always seems to happen when you just need one more minute, it’s our responsibility to turn that event or incident into a positive. More...