So you have an interview coming up? Need a little bit of advice? Getting nervous trying to cram right before? Thinking about what you should wear? What to bring?
There certainly is a lot to think about as soon as you begin to prepare for any interview. Everyone has a piece of advice for you. It seems like there are more books and blogs than you can even count.
And the trick is, you need to make sense of it all in time for your first interview. Not a problem, right?
A long time ago, someone gave me a piece of advice that has stuck with me to this day. At first, I laughed because it seemed so simple, almost to the point of being trivial. However, the more I thought it over, the more that it seemed to resonate and actually make sense.
The advice was simply to operate within yourself.
When I heard this piece of advice, my first reaction was to clarify it's meaning. When pressed, it was related to me as trying to control the things that you can control, and let the rest fall as it may. It sounded almost a little bit zen like.
As I mention, when I initially heard this advice I brushed it aside, thinking that I knew better. How could something so simple and obvious actually help someone succeed in an interview?
Then I had my first interview after getting "the advice". To my surprise, about half way in I found myself struggling, wondering what other questions the interviewer had for me, thinking about how my answers would be interpreted, even wondering what the interviewer thought of my tie.
After a about 30 minutes of these negative thoughts, I came back to the simple advice that I was given and it all made sense. There were many things that I couldn't control in my interview, and as such, no matter how much I thought about them nothing could change that. It doesn't seem logical, but every second you spend thinking about something that you can't change in an interview is a second spent pressing on a brick wall. It might feel like you are doing something, but in reality you are still exactly in the same place you were before.
After having my moment of realization, I began to shift my focus to the things that I could control, things like how I presented myself, how I chose to engage with my interviewer, and the answers that I was presenting to the questions that I was being asked. Now that my focus was off all the annoying things that confounded me previously, I was able to give more thought to the actual interview itself and a much better interview.
No comments:
Post a Comment