This one concept will make you better at interviews and life
It’s interview season: for jobs, for MBAs, for this year’s performance review and bonus assessment.
In the fall, humanity faces the firing squad. Or at least interviews can feel that way, am I right? No matter how accomplished you are, there are probably few things in life that make you feel as insecure as interviews do. To the lizard brain, it might as well be a matter of life and death.
When I was interviewing for summer internships during my MBA, I struggled a lot to present a confident façade when inside the alarm bells were screaming: Impostor! Impostor!! Fraud!! Who do you think you’re fooling!!!?
Happy memories.
That was first year interviews. I did not get any offers.
Second year interviews went much differently. Because I discovered a secret or two over the summer that helped me be a better interviewer and a better person.
One thing I discovered was confident humility.
If you are in a job search right now or applying to business school, you are going to want to get familiar with this concept. It is one of the founding principles of the Berkeley Haas School of Business. Dartmouth Tuck wrote about it in their primary essays. It is a key quality Google seeks in its employees.
So let me expand.
Confidence is indispensable.
Without confidence in your professional life, you won’t speak up in meetings, ask for what you want, push back on unreasonable demands, or generally remain true to yourself. When you lack sufficient confidence in a given situation, it is nearly impossible to perform your best.
And in an interview you need to project confidence or you will fail to engender trust in your abilities as a professional. But…
Interviews = Confidence Killers
Interviews create the perfect circumstances for confidence implosion that is rarely replicated in adult life.
Think about it:
- It’s just you and one other person in a room (or even worse a panel of people!!) who is a relative or complete stranger.
- The person is tasked with making a yes/no decision about you — are you good enough?
- At stake is a job, a promotion, a raise, an offer for admission to school — something important to you that you really want.
- The only subject of conversation is you — your experience, your knowledge, your abilities.
You are being judged. And if you are judged insufficient, rejection shall be your sentence. Your self-confidence is in the guillotine and your fate is in the hands of the interviewer. Or so it seems.
All humans hate feeling judged.
Especially if that judgment results in rejection — one of the most crushing types of failure because it rarely allows for recourse and typically bars us from gaining something we really want: a job, admission, a new future.
But even without the possibility of rejection, feeling judged means feeling vulnerable and exposed. That goes double if you’ve danced with the devil of failure once or twice.
See, I fail at pretty much everything I do. At least once or twice. Sometimes many many many times before I succeed. As a perfectionist and someone who wasn’t brought up with a growth mindset, I find failure to be about as inspiring and enjoyable as oral surgery without anesthesia. I mean, it just sucks not to measure up to my own expectations. But it’s an experience I am doomed to repeat pretty much every day and even every hour of my life.
And there is no time when my internal “you suck” monologue rages so loudly as during interviews. I would imagine the other person judging even my most cherished accomplishments — never mind the failures — and finding them lacking. Maybe that huge project I completed that meant so much to me seems like a cake walk to this guy. And then there’s all those failures he doesn’t know about. Hard to feel like anything but a fraud.
This was my repeated experience in interviews. Until I discovered that I didn’t have to keep any of that stuff a secret.
That’s how I discovered Confident Humility.
There is a lot of emphasis on the importance of confidence in the professional sphere. Women especially seem to be on a quest for more confidence.
Know this: confidence happens in communication. (I am making this blanket statement without evidence, so try it on and discover if it feels true to you.) We have exactly as much confidence as we give ourselves through our self-talk, and exactly as much confidence as we allow ourselves to experience when we speak to others (even when we suspect they might be judging us.)
What we tend not to realize is that confidence without humility is fraud. It’s tempting to sugar coat life, put the spotlight only on the high moments, and sweep failures and struggles under the rug. But when you do that, you are truly vulnerable. Not only because you are hiding part of the truth, but also because the real secret to confidence lies in embracing and communicating your full humanity, eff-ups and all. That means you have to appreciate and celebrate conflict and then tell epic stories about it.
Understanding of the nature of conflict.
Let’s make this really practical. When answering questions such as “Tell me about a time you made a difference.” “Tell me about your greatest accomplishment.” “When did you lead a team?” you can’t just focus your response on the successful outcome. You also need to reveal the challenges you faced along the way.
Take the example of a big project you managed that was a huge success in the end. Take time to understand the ultimate impact of your work. How much money and time were saved by virtue of your ingenuity? Was there a positive outcome that would not have happened without your ideas? Were there other verifiable measures of your success such as praise from managers or clients or awards that resulted from your work? The “happy ending” is an important part of every story.
But then, turn your attention to the challenges you faced along the way
- Was there an interpersonal conflict on the team?
- Did you need to convince someone who didn’t believe in your ideas?
- Were there severe time or budget constraints that required extra creativity?
- Did you have to overcome a seemingly insurmountable learning curve?
In what ways were you challenged by the experience? Where did you struggle? At what points did things seem daunting or hopeless?
As you talk about your successes in interviews, be sure to include this part of the story — the obstacles you had to overcome to achieve your objective. Discuss how you strategized about those obstacles. Include how you thought and felt about them and how you decided on your priorities and your course of action. What actions did you take and how did they help you surmount the obstacles?
If you include the conflict in your own experiences, then you will be able to showcase even the most exceptional accomplishments with your humility intact. You’ll also avoid feeling like a fraud.
And that will in turn allow you to breathe a deep sigh of being yourself so you can just relax, enjoy the conversation, and shine.
That’s what I did in my second year interviews and that’s why that time around I was successful.
After that, I went on to study this incredible thing we call the narrative art form in depth. And I eventually went on to teach these skills to thousands of ambitious professionals far and wide.
If you want to know what my best tips are for crushing interviews, please avail yourself of my…
Free Interview Success Secrets Workshop: https://careerprotocol.com/interview.
I go deeper into some of the tools and tactics I’ve taught my clients to give them a competitive edge in interviews. It will only be live until November 3, 2017.
NB: for about a week there was a typo in the title of this article. It’s still in the article url. And yet I still live and breathe. I rest my case.
