Fear Of Failure In A Job Interview (How To Overcome The Fear Of Interview Failure)
All right, we’re talking about how to overcome the fear of failure before a job interview, and how you can really build your confidence up so that you’re not afraid of failing anymore.
Wouldn’t that be great if you weren’t afraid of failing?
Imagine what you could do.
Stay tuned.
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So I talked to a lot of people on the phone every day, and I know that a common thing is that if you failed in an interview in the past, or you failed at 10 interviews in the past, or you failed at 20 interviews in the past, you probably don’t want to go on another interview.
And of course, you don’t.
I totally don’t blame you, it’s normal.
Your brain is like, why would I want to do that? That sucks. I’m just getting rejected all the time.
So I’m going to offer you today some tips on why you might be failing, and what you can do to succeed. What you can actually do differently to succeed.
And then why the willingness to fail is important.
So if you’re one of those people that’s been on 20 interviews first of all pat yourself on the back, because you are getting closer.
I know it doesn’t feel like it, but lots of people haven’t been on any interviews because they’re afraid to even go, which is called failure ahead of time.
Don’t beat yourself up over that because there is a lot to learn, and it is showing you as a resilient person. So it just goes to show that you don’t give up, and I’m going to make sure of that in this post.
Failure ahead of time looks like this.
You’re saying things like I need to prepare better, I’m not ready yet.
If I go to another interview I need to prepare all these things. And you’re making it very big in your head. You’re saying I need to go over all my stories.
I need to look up the 35 questions I need the answer to. I need to study more, I need to practice more, I need to prepare more. That’s failing ahead of time because you’re not ever going to know all the information.
And I know that that makes sense, right? It makes sense.
You’re like well, I didn’t pass the other ones so I must be doing something wrong, I just need to prepare more.
But you could practice 70 times and still go and do the same thing if you’re not changing how you’re thinking about interviews. The reason why you keep failing is because of the thoughts you have about interviews.
Failing ahead of time means that you’re postponing going because you think you to practice, but really that’s not the problem.
The problem is you need to change your mindset.
And sometimes that can be very difficult to do on your own.
So that’s why I help clients every day to change their mindset so that they can go back even stronger to those interviews and use however many failures they have to their advantage instead of to their detriment.
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We don’t want to use those past failures as evidence that you can’t do it.
We want to use those past failures as fuel and evidence that you can do it because you keep going. And most people are going to use them as evidence that they’re never going to succeed.
And our brain is going to do that automatically and it makes sense than it would, but it doesn’t serve us in the end, and it doesn’t get us the job, because if we don’t go we can’t have that opportunity, right?
We can just stay in a cave preparing, getting ready, but really we’re scared.
I just want you to know it’s completely normal, and it’s what happens with most people who keep going, and if they fail a bunch of times that’s what’s going to happen.
But there is a way out of this. And every success is built on a pile of failures, and I want you to remember that. So that’s what feeling ahead of time means.
And it can show up in all sorts of different ways.
So it could be that you’re practicing, preparing, need to get ready, afraid that you’re not going to be able to do it, so you don’t even apply, afraid that, you know, oh, they’re not going to pick me anyway because they didn’t pick me last time, or they didn’t pick me the last, however many times you went.
So I’m not even going to bother.
This is what our brain starts to do. And it makes sense that it would I totally get it, but it doesn’t actually help you get to the result you want, and instead, you end up giving up for a short amount of time, a long amount of time, or for your life, right?
And then you don’t get what you want.
You’re like okay, I’ll just stay wherever I am. We’re in a mediocre job. I want to encourage you to know that there is a way out of this.
If you failed in the past that’s okay, it doesn’t actually mean that you’re going to fail in the future, even though that’s what your brain is going to tell you.
Now I want to talk to you about how failure is part of the process.
Some people might fail twice, once, five times, some people might fail 100 times.
It’s part of the process. And I want to ask you, how many times are you willing to fail until you get your dream job?
So at your dream pay, your ideal situation, the job where you’re excited to get up and go in the morning, where you’re super stoked to go work on these projects, you feel fulfilled, you’re getting paid what you’re worth, you’re excited.
What is it worth to you?
How many failures is it worth? Failure is part of it no matter what.
The amount of failures you have depends on how well you assess each failure, and how well you learn from each failure. Some people can go on 100, say 100 interviews and fail every time.
They’re probably not evaluating what they did, right? OR they’re not evaluating the situation properly so that they can learn from those failures.
They’re just doing the same thing over, and over, and over again.
And sometimes it can take a coach or somebody on the outside to kind of help you dig into that situation and see what you’re doing wrong.
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So that’s what I do.
And if you are in a situation where you’ve been failing a bunch of times, then it’s probably going to be helpful to have somebody help you.
And if you have failed a few times and you’ve got discouraged, then keep in mind that that is part of the process and that you’re probably going to fail.
So you want to keep in mind what your expectations were.
Did you think that you were going to go on one interview and get hired immediately?
Did you think it was going to be two? Did you think it was going to be five?
What were your expectations? Because the number one reason, people don’t achieve their goal is not that they’re unable, but because they underestimated what it took to get there, right?
So if I told you without a doubt, absolutely 100% certain you were going to get the job if you went on 17 interviews, you would be going on those 17 interviews, right?
And you wouldn’t have an issue with it. But if it’s unknown and you’re like, I don’t know if it’s going to happen, and then your brain starts to say well, it’s probably never going to happen.
Then, of course, you’re not going to want to go on any more interviews, right?
That makes sense. So I want you to remember those two key things, okay?
What were your expectations and failure is part of the process. Because you’re not entitled to one, or two, or five interviews and have the job.
You just need to keep going until you get there.
That’s called massive action.
What were your expectations? Ask yourself that, and then understand that failure is part of the process and that it doesn’t mean that it’s never going to happen.
It just means that success is built on a mountain of failures. And that’s normal. Ask anybody who’s done something hard. Of course, they failed.
They might have failed a lot. Maybe they don’t talk about it, but either way in some way they have failed. Because it’s very rare, or even impossible if the goal is big enough for somebody to succeed the first time.
If they succeed the first time it probably means the goal wasn’t very challenging. Like if I asked you to tie your shoes you could do that, right?
You failed probably when you were a kid a bunch of times, but now you could do it. OR if I asked you to walk up the stairs you could do that, right?
You’re not probably going to fall. You just have to assess that this is a challenging thing, and the payoff is really big.
So, of course, you’re going to have to fail a few times.
And the amount of times depends on how well you evaluate, how well you’re aware of your mindset, and your thoughts, and your actions that you take, and how well you come back, evaluate that and come back stronger.
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What should you do?
Well, the reality is that we do need to go on interviews, we do need to talk to people to get the job that we really want, okay? There’s no way out of that.
You can’t get the job you want by sitting in your room studying interview questions and practicing them to yourself, right? You have to speak to people.
You have to make a connection with those people. You have to get engagement from those people. You have to connect. You have to go forth into the world and have a connection with people, okay?
There’s no way around it. So I know that a lot of people try to avoid this because it’s uncomfortable especially after it’s been done a few times and it hasn’t succeeded.
But we can’t argue with the reality of this. So the more that we’re doing that the more our likelihood is that we’re going to succeed, especially if we’re doing the last things I talked about, which we’re evaluating and understanding that failure is part of it.
We don’t want to argue with the reality of it, which is what a lot of my clients want to do.
They want to be like well, I just need to practice, I just need to prepare, I just need to get more ready, I’m just not ready yet.
But that is code for saying, I’m scared, I don’t want to go back out there.
So catch yourself and realize that that is not going to move you forward my friend no matter how much you wish it would.
The next thing is, are you making the failure or the rejection mean something about you personally? This is a big thing that we do.
We make it mean something about us. We say, oh, we’re not enough, we screwed up, we didn’t know the answers, we should have known the answers, we really are smart, why didn’t we know that? And then we’re beating ourselves up, right?
And this is normal too. I struggle with this a lot.
We need to have self-compassion for ourselves, okay? I did it too. It’s a very subtle language, right? And you don’t even realize it.
You’re like, oh, I messed up, or I should have done better, or I should have known that. Very subtle little comments that you might say to yourself that make you feel crappy, make you feel bad about yourself.
But that doesn’t help, and there’s no upside to those comments.
What we need to do is have self-compassion for ourselves and say, okay, I didn’t know the answer to that question.
I’m going to go dig in and find the answer, and next time I’m asked that question I’m going to be so good at answering it that no one is going to argue with my answer.
And doesn’t that feel good? Because you can come back and control that. You can control that. You can’t control the past. The past is the past and it’s fine. How?
You are a human, okay? And humans are not perfect. We’re just not. If that were possible for you to know 100% of the answers all the time, then everybody would be getting 100% all the time on everything, and nobody would be failing.
But we’re humans, and it’s not easy to be a human. You have some self-compassion for yourself and understand that you can use that thing that you learned, that you didn’t know, that maybe you think you should have known to come back even stronger.
And I will say you shouldn’t have known it. You shouldn’t have answered it. You know why? Because you didn’t. And that’s fine. It just means you have more to learn.
On to the next point.
There’s no such thing as failure. We’re either winning OR we’re learning. If you’re either winning or learning, how would you look at it differently?
Learning is the only option. Failure is not actually a thing. It’s just a thing that we made up to make us feel bad about ourselves, but it doesn’t actually exist.
So winning or learning. Failure actually means failure, which means that we just didn’t get the result we wanted. And that brings me to my next point.
We always make failure a big-ass deal when it’s not, okay?
Imagine you just failed a bunch of times, and you just breathe through, and you were just like, yeah, I know I’m going to get there.
I know it’s happening. I just need to keep going.
The only reason you would fail forever is if you gave up. The only difference between someone who fails is because they gave up.
Someone who succeeds just stayed in it for longer. That’s it.
So if it’s that simple, why would you ever slow down? Why would you ever stop?
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Because the last thing is believing.
Believing means that you believe 100% it’s going to happen. And if you don’t, then you’re never going to take the action to keep in it to get there.
By default when you believe it doesn’t happen it doesn’t happen.
But it’s because you didn’t take the action to get there. You didn’t do what it takes.
And remember what I said, it’s not ‘cuz we can’t, it’s cuz we underestimate what it takes, right?
And it’s going to take something different for everybody. So it’s going to take something different for you, it’s going to take something different for me, right?
To achieve a certain result. But it is so worth it in the end, and that’s what I want to tell you.
So remember the following points.
Don’t fail ahead of time. If you’re failing ahead of time catch yourself and know that it’s not serving you and that you’ll never move forward.
Don’t argue with reality.
You do need to talk to people, you do need to keep showing up in order to make your result happen. Because if someone’s going to hire you, they’re going to need to talk to you in some way.
Are you making failure mean something about you personally? If you are it doesn’t make any sense. Not everybody likes everybody. It’s fine. You move on, you get to the next one.
Are you assaulting yourself verbally by telling yourself you should have known this, that was stupid, why did you mess that up?
Have self-compassion for yourself.
This is one that’s really close to my heart because I was doing it and I didn’t even notice. But when you do that, of course, you don’t want to keep taking action, because you feel bad, because you keep beating yourself up telling yourself that you suck and you’re stupid.
If you do that you’re never going to keep going, okay? And then the difference between those who are successful and those who fail and don’t achieve their goal is only that the failed people give up.
And then the breaks in between, because people can fail and it can be a little fail or a little quit.
And then they quit for a little while and then they keep going. And this takes forever. That’s why people spend years trying to reach their goals, right?
Need to keep going. Need to understand these points from this post, and you just need to keep in it. And if you believe 100% that you’re going to get it, in the end, you will keep going.
If you need some help with your belief, with your self-compassion, with your ability to fail, with your ability to use your failure as fuel, with your evaluating of your results, I can help you how to do that.
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And remember, the current system isn’t perfect, but you can outsmart it. I’m here to prove to you that you do have what it takes.
I’ll see you next time and I can’t wait!
In Work & Life
I’ve got your back
– XO Natalie
