My Very First Interview by a Reporter

It all started with this:

Hello Tishia!

I’m a freelance reporter working on an article for PayScale.com and AOL about moms who successfully work from home. My editor suggested finding a virtual assistant — which I’d never heard of before! — and I found you via Mary Lutz’s blog (via ShowMomtheMoney.com).

Are you available for a phone interview next week? I’d be asking you about how you started working from home, the challenges you’ve faced along the way, the reaction of friends and family, etc. If you’re not interested in participating, perhaps you know of other moms I could contact.

Thanks so much for your help!

And it just ended with a 20-30 minute interview! I love how she found me too – isn’t it awesome how links point someone to you?

I’ll be honest. My first reaction was to tell her no thanks and give her some other VA’s to contact. I’m always so nervous with things like this. Actually I’ve never been interviewed by a reporter before – I’ve done a couple interviews with Kelly for Wahm Talk Radio and things like that but never by a reporter.

Instead of letting fear and lack of confidence make me pass this opportunity up I bit the bullet and decided to step out of my comfort zone and do the interview. I mean hello how could I honestly turn it down?

She sent me great questions ahead of time. I thought about them, wrote notes and felt prepared, as prepared as I could be. I knew there would be things that would come up that weren’t prepared ahead of time (and that’s something else that freaks me out – on the spot type answers, etc) but I told myself I’d be just fine.

I was fine…until about 20 minutes before the interview. That’s when the nervousness set in. But as soon as we got on the phone we chit chatted for a few minutes and she totally put me at ease. I didn’t feel like I rambled. I felt like I finished my thoughts. I felt good. Other than my hands were shaking, face flushed and heart racing LOL.

She told me that the article is for a series of articles that are being put together titled Confessions of _______. So mine will be Confessions of a WAHM. I think that’s kind of cool.

Now of course I wonder when and where the article will be published – of course I didn’t think of asking her that while we were on the phone!