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You’re listening to the Get a 6-Figure Job You Love Podcast. This is episode 58: Taking the Pressure Off in an Interview.
Hey there. Welcome to the Get a 6-Figure Job You Love Podcast. I’m your host, Natalie Fisher. I’m a certified career mindset coach who also happens to want to skip all the BS and get to what it really takes to create real results for you and your career. On this podcast, you will create real mindset shifts that will lead to big results and big changes in your career and your income. No fluff here. If you want to get a six-figure job you love and create real, concrete results in your industry and make a real impact, you’re in the right place. Are you ready? Let’s go.
Hello. This podcast today is called Job Interview Fun. So this is something that I was doing without even really noticing it, just because of the way that I thought about interviewing. So I want to share that with you today and if you, right now, think interviews are something to avoid, something to fear, something that feels like pressure, something that you don’t want to do really, then just be open to thinking that maybe they could be something different if you’re looking at them in a different way.
My goal is to help you take the pressure off yourself for an interview because there’s no upside in putting a lot of pressure on yourself for the interview, because it won’t help you get the job; it will only hinder you in getting the job, because when you’re feeling pressured, you’re not going to be showing up in the best way you can. You’re going to be looking down for answers, you’re going to be all over the place, you’re going to be searching in your head for those answers that you can’t find, and then you’re going to ramble, say something that was less than ideal. I’ve heard it before so many times, and this is because we’re putting so much pressure on ourselves. We’re thinking thoughts like, “Oh my God. What if this is the only opportunity that’s going to come up in a long time for me? And I can’t blow it.” Like, oh, that feels heavy.
And I want to challenge that that’s probably not true – that can’t be true in the world that we live in today. It’s not the only opportunity. It might be the only one in your company that comes up for a while. It might be a great opportunity, but it’s not the only one that’s going to come along in a long time because first of all, you don’t know what’s going to happen. There might be another one tomorrow, but there for sure are more that you won’t be able to see, and if you have the belief that opportunities don’t come along very often, then they probably won’t.
So be open to the fact that you could be wrong about that – it’s probably not the only opportunity – and focus on what you have right now because, really, putting that pressure on yourself seems like it would be helpful – it’s like, “Well, if I tell myself that I have to do a good job in this, then I will.” But the truth is you create such an unpleasant feeling in your body that you end up not showing up as the fun person that you are.
I talk to so many clients and they’re such fun people. They’re like the coolest people and then, in interviews, they just turn different because we have this idea. There’s so many limiting thoughts that people have about interviewing and it stops them from showing up how they need to show up or at their best – totally just crushes that spirit that they have because they’re like, “I can’t blow this. I can’t blow this.” And I always talk about, if you have a child and you’re telling them, “You can’t blow this, you’re going to be in big trouble,” how are they going to feel? They’re not going to be able to have fun. If they’re playing a game, say they’re doing something really important that they really want to succeed at. But it’s something that should be fun for them, like playing soccer or performing in a talent show or something. And you’re like, “Don’t mess this up.” “If you mess this up, you’re in big trouble.” “You’re never going to be able to do this again. This is your last chance.” How could anybody have fun when they’re hearing that narrative?
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So today I wanted to talk about having fun in interviews because it really helps you get the job if you can have fun in an interview, and I’ll explain why. The problem is we often have these limiting thoughts that really stop us from even having the chance to have fun. What we do is we don’t notice it. For most people, the word, “interview” and fun doesn’t go together in a sentence. It’s totally out of the picture. However, when you’re interviewing with people, you’re going to be working with these people. You’re going to be, every day, interacting with them on some level. You’re going to be around them, they’re now going to be in your sphere. If you don’t see them as people that you could have fun with, or people you want to work with, it’s probably going to be a different environment for you if you’re not going to be really engaging with your coworkers and stuff like that, so it depends on what kind of job you’re interviewing for.
But generally, human connection can come from you having fun, and you can create that fun in different ways. I’m going to give you some examples. So why it doesn’t work when we’re putting so much pressure on ourselves is, we just can’t access any fun things to say, any funny things to say, even if that’s what we would do if we were with friends having beers; we’re probably really fun and have lots of funny things to say and just having a completely different experience, perhaps talking about how good you are at your job or what you did, but just in a completely different environment.
Sometimes people like to interview. They used to like to interview at some of the companies I worked for. They’re like, “Let’s take them for a coffee. Let’s see what they’re like outside of the office. I want to get to know the real person. I don’t want them to feel like they’re sitting in a stuffy meeting room.” But the environment isn’t as important as your mindset, so when you go into the interview and you’re like, “These are my coworkers. I’m going to be working with them. I wonder what they’re like. I wonder if I could joke with them. I wonder if they’ll get my humor. I wonder if they will appreciate who I am,” and just loosen up a bit and just pretend like you’re talking to a group of friends – if you could get to that point, combining it with genuine curiosity and being like, “Oh, this could be fun. I wonder who I’m going to meet. I wonder what these people are going to say,” it can be really fun. And I’ve had the experience so many times.
For example, one time I was interviewing for a position where it was internal, so I was already working for the company and I was interviewing for a promotion, and they asked me, “What don’t you like about your job?” They asked me, “What do you like and what don’t you like?” I had trouble coming up with what don’t I like because I didn’t want to say something that was going to incriminate me. So I’m like, “Oh,” and there wasn’t really much, I could honestly think of because I was in a pretty positive mindset about my current position. I was being up for a promotion and having this opportunity, so I was feeling pretty good about everything and I didn’t really have anything that I didn’t like.
I did say, “Can we come back to that one? That one’s a good one. I’m having trouble thinking about something that I don’t like, honestly.” They were like, “Of course. Yeah, that’s fine.” So I did come up with one and I said, “To be honest, my desk is just really, really far away from the printer, and I don’t like that I have to walk that far every time when I print something.” Everyone’s burst out laughing, they’re like, “Seriously? That’s what you picked? That’s hilarious.” Then they’re like, “Maybe we’ll just get a little robot to bring your papers back for you.” And we made a joke of it.
So that’s how jokes can kind of start to happen, and if you can start to have fun in the interview and you can start to listen up and you can make them laugh about something, you’re going to be having so much more fun, they are going to be having so much more fun, and they’re going to start thinking, “Hmm, this is someone I could really work with.”
Now don’t worry if your humor is a bit different. I know some people have really dry, sarcastic humor, and some people have smart, funny humor or unconventional humor, so don’t worry about that. You just want to kind of explore and see and be open to the fact that you could have fun, and there might be
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an opportunity there for you to make a joke or to reveal something about yourself that’s kind of funny. One of my clients, Danetta – she was on the podcast – she embodied this super well. She just went in there, all herself, talking about her. She has a 25-year-old son, I think she has an older son that’s grown, but she knows she still looks pretty good for having a 25-year-old son. She’s like, “Don’t let this face fool you,” or something. I don’t remember what it was that she said, but she really embodied the spirit of having fun in her interview. If you go back and listen to that interview, she nailed it. She got the job because she was having fun, she was showing up as her authentic self, and she was adding value because she had worked with me on those underlying beliefs. She really did know what she was doing, she really was meant for this position.
So all that coming together, which is what I teach in my 6-Figure Curriculum, is what needs to happen for you to be able to be successful when you go for these interviews. What we try to do, again, we go back to, “I hope they like me. What if they don’t like me? What if they don’t think I’m fun?” That completely blocks you from being fun, so we get very into corporate speak and we think like, “I might ask, what are your top qualities?” And they might be like, “I’m flexible, adaptable, and I’m a team player.” And it’s like, “Yeah, so is everybody else? They’re just words.”
We want to bring out that personality of yours, so what are some fun things about you? Maybe you like to play table tennis on the weekends and you’re really good and you won a championship award or something. Things about you that you can kind of recall that not everybody knows about, that kind of bring that fun vibe into you so that you can then be fun in the interview. Because I know I’ve worked with a lot of clients and we’ll have fun on our calls. Coaching, to me, is fun. I think that’s why I love it so much and I’m so good at it because I really have fun on our calls. Even when sometimes we’re doing some tough coaching, there’s always somewhere to lighten up.
When we do that, we really make other people feel better, too. We’re like, “Let’s just not take this so seriously.” And it opens up this completely different version of you and you get to walk out of that interview instead of feeling so much pressure, instead of beating yourself up over it, instead of being like, “Oh, I should have said this. I should’ve said that.” You’d be like, “Yeah, you’re a human and you did a good job. You did your best, you put yourself out there and whatever happens, happens.” That’s your only job, it’s to show up as your best self and part of that includes having some fun once in a while, especially when there’s an opportunity. It includes being your whole self, being honest, being happy, being excited to embrace something new.
And whenever you’re in high-pressure situations, there are people who can sometimes lighten the mood. Those people really help us all to calm down a bit or to be like, “Oh, okay. Cool. It’s not so bad.” You don’t have to be one of those people. It’s okay. I don’t always have a quick, witty, funny thing to say; I wouldn’t even consider myself a funny person. But I think that I vibe really well when I’m in a state of curiosity, openness, and just being human and at home with myself would be the goal for me. It wouldn’t even be to be funny or make them laugh or have fun on purpose. It would just be like, “Let’s just see where this goes. This could be fun.”
They probably have hobbies outside of their work, and I got some really good answers sometimes when I’d ask them, “So what do you love to do? What is it that drew you to this company?” Or, “What do you like to do in your spare time?” Sometimes interviews have a little time for that, sometimes they don’t, so use your judgment. But sometimes they would ask me, what do I do in my spare time? And I started talking about Netflix or something, I was watching Netflix. And then, the guy who was interviewing at the time – he was the head accountant or something – he started talking about the shows that he was watching on Netflix and he’s like, “Yeah.” And he’s like, “I wish I could get American Netflix because I can’t stand that I can’t get such and such on Canadian Netflix.”
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So they asked me what I liked to do in my spare time and we got into a fun conversation about his gripes about Netflix and what he liked to watch and stuff, and I was like, “Oh, yeah. Me, too.” You can just be open to having these fun conversations with people and you can really connect on a deeper level, and that’s what gets people thinking, “You know, I can really work with you. I could see myself totally working with you,” and that’s what you want. That can never happen when you’re putting so much pressure on yourself because you’re not open to having fun. You don’t have access to fun ideas or fun stuff you could do.
And there’s unlimited ways to bring fun into interviews; it doesn’t have to be by funny comments or cracking jokes or anything like that – although it can be. If they say, “Do you have anything else you want to share with us?” You can say, “I’d like to tell you a joke.” I actually had an interview once where they asked me if I had a joke at the end and it was like a trick question because I had a joke. I’m like, “Okay, come up with one,” and my dad’s always telling goofy jokes and he’s always sharing them, so I’m like, “Okay, just tell the first one that comes to mind.” I told it, but it wasn’t even that funny – the point was that I had one. So he kind of giggled and he was like, “Okay.” And then he wrote on his notes, he’s like, “She actually had a joke,” because they ask people that and nobody has anything.
There’s lots of ways. And they actually want to see because that’s indicative of, they would ask you that like, “Oh, do you have a joke?” Depending on what kind of culture you’re looking to work in, depending on what kind of environment you want to be in, it’s going to be indicative of how you interact with them. And you want to do that so that you can find out for yourself if you’re a good fit, if you feel like you’re even relaxed enough with these people to have fun, interview aside. Assuming they would be your coworkers, do you want to be with them every day? Or do you enjoy interacting with them, aside from whether or not you do get offered the job or not?
Because that’s where the pressure comes in. You’re like, “Oh, well I have to do this or I’m not going to get the job.” It’s like, “None of that, we don’t need any of that.” Your job is just to show up as your authentic self, and part of yourself is a little bit of fun sometimes in one way or another and even if you’re like, “I can’t do this, I’m not funny,” don’t worry about it. Just be open to the fact that that could happen and you can access more of those opportunities in your brain and you don’t have to hold back so much.
What’s ultimately created is the fun experience of interviewing and then you’re not afraid of it. You’re like, “Okay, well, whatever happens.” You meet these people and you make a great connection, maybe they pick someone else who had more experience so you need to go back to the crossing the bridge that I talked about in the previous episode on how you will cement those planks in better next time and do an evaluation, which I teach you how to do in my 6-Figure Curriculum. And then, at least you’re like, “I met some really cool people and I had a good time.” There’s no upside in the pressure. When people come to me and they’re like, “I need to do this, I have to get this immediately.” I’m just like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”
How does that feel? Probably not too good. And when you’re not feeling good, when you’re feeling like that, you think it’s going to help you, but it’ll just take you so much longer because you keep putting pressure, building pressure up on yourself for each interview, it’s going to take you longer to get the job. The more frustrated you get, and the more pressure you put on yourself, you’ll explode versus getting hired. So it just doesn’t work. There’s just no way that it works.
The skills that you’re going to need are, you’re going to need some openness and some willingness to be open to the fact that interviews could be fun. Then, you get to create the result of having your personality come out, feeling proud of how you showed up in the interview, instead of holding back and feeling like you didn’t know what you needed to say because you always know what you need to say. That’s one of the tools that I’m going to teach you, as well, in the 6-Figure Curriculum Mastermind is
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knowing what to say. And yes, I give you a ton of examples in there and you can see all the answers that I’ve given, all my stories, I make light in some of my stories that I tell. I joke around.
One of them, for example, was where they’re like, “Okay, tell me about a proud moment in your career,” for example, or, “Tell me about a successful project you worked on,” or something. One of the stories that I would tell was I moved our offices. I moved 70 people, all the IT, all the stuff. That was my job, to move everything: The furniture, the IT, always make sure no operations were down for customers. My job was to make sure that that happened, so I joke about it because I had never done it before. I did not have experience moving an office, so I was like, “Okay.” So I’m just going to, my first thing was, I’m going to order some books on how to move an office and I’m going to gather some information, I’m going to start Googling and researching all the things that need to be considered because there was a lot of things. There was a huge list, like the mail and changing the address and everyone’s furniture, communicating to everyone what they needed to do. There was a period where we were going to be working from home and the offices weren’t going to be available, so much to do.
So I was like, “Okay, I’m going to order the books from Amazon. The top-rated books on moving an office and then I’m going to Google.” So anyway, I joke that I opened up the first page on the first book and it said something along the lines of the person who’s often tasked with moving the office either is very inexperienced and has never done it before and usually ends up in a less responsible position or out of a job by the time the task is complete. I thought that was pretty funny that it was the first thing I opened to read, and then I go on to say, “Well, that freaked me out quite a bit. So I made sure I was extra prepared and these are the things I did.”
And then, in the story, I kind of crossed the bridge from how I got them to point A to point B – vetting the movers, making sure they all had reviews, talking to them, basically interviewing them and asking them how they would handle things. Anyway, I would kind of cement all the planks on the bridge as to how I moved the offices. So that bridge technique that I talked about in the last podcast can be applied for telling your stories, as well. I just tried to infuse little jokes in there sometimes, and they’re not always planned. Sometimes I’m like, “Oh, yeah. This is how I tell this story. And I tell this little joke here.” It’s not hard to remember, it’s just part of it.
So if I could tell you anything, it would be loosen up, release the pressure. There’s no point in having that pressure on you. I was recently coaching a client who was interviewing for an internal position, and he’s like, “I know these people.” He’s like, “I’ve been working with these people for years and they’re interviewing me now.” And he’s like, “I just feel so pressured. I feel like, oh my God, what if I don’t get this?” He’s the obvious choice in line for it, but he was still putting this pressure on himself, thinking, “Oh my God, this opportunity won’t come up again. What if it doesn’t? What if I don’t get it and it won’t come up for 15 years again?”
That line of thinking isn’t going to serve him, isn’t going to have him accessing any of his fun personality. He’s already been working with these people, so whether it’s new people, whether it’s people you’ve worked with, don’t let the word, “interview,” don’t let the paradigm of, “This is an interview,” make you feel so much pressure that you end up not even showing them who you really are because when you’re not having a good experience, neither are they. It’s going to be harder for them. They pick up on your energy, so if you’re not having fun and you’re feeling really pressured, they’re not going to be able to loosen up and have the dynamic with you that they would like to when they’re going to be working with you. They want that from you just as much as you want that, so you’re not doing anybody any favors by putting a bunch of pressure on yourself.
All right, so that’s what I have for you today. I hope you take this to heart and start to look for different ways where you can have more fun, talk about how you’ve had fun, make some more jokes if it’s your style. If it’s not, totally fine. And yeah, that’s kind of my rant for today on fun. So I hope you got that.
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Make sure you check out the page to sign up for the workshop where I go through the entire process in my 6-Figure Curriculum Mastermind. That page is www.nataliefisher.ca/6figures – “Six” is the number six and then figures, the word, “figures.” You can sign up for that workshop where I’m going to take you through the whole process that my clients have gone through to be successful, getting their unreasonable results. I hope that you will join me in the 6-Figure Curriculum Mastermind, where we will be celebrating your success very soon. Have a great week.
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