Would you get your job the way you’re doing it?

In job interviews, we sell the best versions of ourselves — our best efforts, our best thinking and our best results. Even if we’re asked to talk about failures and the life lessons we’ve learned, we tend to underpin them with examples that show our best attitudes or where we responded positively to personal challenges and setbacks.

We sell our best like it’s our standard MO, a consistent approach that’s in play for nearly all scenarios. And we landed the jobs we do because of those promises.

This begs a question: is your working world still getting that from you consistently? Does your workplace or team experience it every day or did you bring it to the work you do over the last couple of weeks? If you described in an interview the way you’re doing your job right now, are you confident you’d still land it?

The way you and I actually do our jobs day by day is far more important than the occasional A-games we don’t manage to maintain. When it comes to performance and a personal working mindset, some of us are killing it, while some have let the bar drop low. Once our feet are under the table, we feel safe and more established; our surroundings are familiar and we too often stop trying to re-win every day the jobs we now feel comfortable in.

Re-interview yourself for the job you do today. Identify a few key words that really describe your performance and contribution over the last weeks or months and compare it with the impact you promised from the best versions of yourself.

Would you get your job, the way you’re currently doing it?

If yes, then great. You’ve got important work to do.

If no, that’s also great. You just built an action list and your priorities for the next few weeks are clear. You probably already know what you need to do.