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You’re listening to the Get a 6-Figure Job You Love Podcast. Thanks for coming back every week. This is episode 62, Minute-to-Minute Interview Energy. 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, hello, and welcome back this week to the podcast. If you’re new, welcome, welcome, this is a good episode if you are preparing for an interview or you have been going on interviews and are improving your interview skillset, this is a really good episode, no matter what actually, it’ll be applicable for any interaction that you have with another human being. So, pretty useful, I would say. But we’re going to dive in specifically to something that has been happening with my clients that I really pinpointed which has been very useful to shift their mindset in order for them to be able to stop getting thrown off, not get so caught up in their heads about things, and generally be able to have a better experience for themselves which in turn gives the interviewers a better experience and then results in the job offer.
So, something that happens, and not just in interviews but mostly it happens in interviews because it’s a situation where we’re just meeting somebody probably for the first time, maybe we’ve talked to them on the phone or maybe we know of them, but we’re meeting people generally for the first time over Zoom or what have you and you don’t know what to expect, you have no idea what to expect, right? And so, there’s a lot of unknowns that come up, and the problem is not these unknowns but it’s in your handling of the unknowns. For example, they ask you a question and you didn’t know the answer to it. You didn’t prepare for it, you weren’t expecting it. That’s an unknown, that’s probably going to happen. Or you answer a question and they don’t give you the acknowledgement that you expected. Maybe they don’t nod, they don’t say anything, they respond in a way where you start to feel insecure or unsure of what they’re thinking. Or they ask you to expand on something, or clarify something, or provide some details and you don’t have them.
And so, any of these things can be unknown, and we know that it’s going to be a problem if it triggers you, right? This is what’s been happening, this is what happens to my clients all the time. They’ll get something that happens and it’ll trigger them, and it’ll be this moment where they have a chance to respond in a certain way and they normally don’t know how to respond and so they’re kind of all over the place. And so, this is what I work with on. We have a whole module on this in my program and we talk about exactly how to deal with these unknowns, right, because they’re always going to happen no matter what. Because we’re in a completely unknown situation, people we don’t know, company we don’t know. We’re there to find out more. It’s totally normal. The unknowns are normal, they are expected. But for most of us who were really good students, if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably a good student and you like to study and know everything beforehand and have everything planned out beforehand, so the unknowns kind of freak you out.
This happens because we have the expectation of ourselves that we should know everything, right? So, it comes back to that high expectation of ourselves, having already thought through everything, being like, “Well, if they ask me this then I’ll say this.” And then, when we do get that unknown, when we get the unknown because we’re going to, we start by having a negative thought about ourselves. So, it’s normally going to be something like, “Oh crap. I should know this, I don’t know this.” Immediately, your brain goes to panic mode and you’re like in a combination of beating yourself up for not knowing and frantically searching for the answer in your brain. At this point, your brain has probably already kind of checked out. You’re really searching for the answer but not from the right place. And then, since you
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haven’t prepared for it and you don’t have notes to say what you should say, your brain kind of goes into this, “Get out, compute. Get out, compute.”
And then, it goes into a spiral of not performing as well as you’d like. So, it doesn’t show up and it goes, “Cannot compute, cannot compute.” And then after that, it kind of wanes off and it doesn’t really come back to the confidence, strength that it had coming in in the beginning. This happens because we choose a negative thought about ourselves in the moment. But we don’t know we’re doing it so we immediately go to, and I don’t know what your negative thought is, but this is something to pay attention to as we immediately go to, “Oh crap, I should know this. I don’t know this. This is going to be a problem. This isn’t going to work. They’re going to need to ask me this again, I’m going to need to come back to this. Oh crap, uh-oh, I should know. Uh-oh, ah,” and your brain freaks out. So then, it’s layering judgment for not knowing, so then you’re judging yourself for not knowing. It’s like saying, “Oh, I don’t know and I should know, and now it’s worse because I don’t know.”
And it’s using mental energy to feel panicked, scared, beat yourself up for not knowing the answer and then kind of starting to resign in your head that you probably blown it, at least this question. And instead of focusing on the thousand different ways that this could be handled, you’re focusing in that perpetual place of, “Ah, I panicked. I don’t know.” After you’re there, that’s very difficult to come back from because that’s where your brain has gone. So, the automatic response is what you want to notice. And so, at this point, the energy shifts. The energy shifts within you, which means it shifts towards the people you’re interacting with. And this is the case in any situation, interview or whatnot. So, what we do is we panic, our brain goes all over the place trying frantically to search for that answer, but we’re trying to find it in the wrong place in our brain. And so, it’s hard to find.
It’s there, we know it’s there, we know you’re capable, we know you have the answer, we know you have, even if you don’t know the specific answer, you have a perfectly eloquent way to handle not knowing but you’re not going to find it when you’re in panic mode. It’s kind of the difference between somebody who is really good in a crisis and somebody who’s not. I am really not good in a crisis. This is something about my ex-partner who I was with, he was very good in a crisis. We would have situations, one time, we stopped on the side of the road because he saw a motorcycle accident, and I saw the accident and I was like, “Ahh! We need to call the police right now.” My immediate thought was, “We need to phone somebody else to deal with this,” right? Somebody was already phoning. There was one car sitting there, they were already on the phone getting the ambulance to come. But he was just right in there.
He was supporting the guy’s head, talking to the guy, telling other people to move their cars in a certain way so that traffic wouldn’t come. There was a woman on the motorbike as well and she had fallen off and she was in the middle of the road. Anyway, he kind of saw the situation and he knew or he just decided, he knew what to do and he just did, right? Meanwhile, I was sitting there in the car like, “Ahh, ahh, what do we do? What do we do?” Like trying to be helpful but not being helpful and just not knowing, right? I was telling myself, “Ahh, I don’t know what to do.” The only thing I know how to do is call somebody else, right? So, in an interview situation, that’s kind of what your brain does. It does what I did in the motorcycle accident scene. And then, of course, I wasn’t going to be useful at all in that situation.
And so, I observed him, and anyway, just so I close the story so you guys know how it ended, the paramedics came, we waited a while, they came, they actually told him to keep doing what he was doing because he was helping support the guy’s head and he was talking to the guy and keeping him awake and everything, it worked out fine. He helped and then we went on our way and everything was good. But anyways, in an interview situation, your brain normally is going to go to that response as mine did in that motorcycle accident situation. And as I can see and I can look back, I was not being helpful in
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that situation, right? I’m not an idiot, I could have definitely used my brain in a better way to figure out what I could have done to contribute to that situation.
After I saw what he did, I was like, “Oh, obviously, yes of course, that looks, that was obviously a smart thing to do, yes.” And so, rationally, thinking it through, I was like, “Oh, of course, yes, those would have been really good moves to make.” But what ends up happening is we don’t see that because our brain immediately goes into panic mode. This all comes from self-judgment and self-criticism, and it feels bad and we end up not showing up the way we want. In my situation, my brain automatically went to, “Ahh, I don’t know what to do. I’m not good in a crisis, I’m not good in these situations.” That’s what my brain told me and so, of course, I believed that and then, of course, I was useless. And so, that’s what happens in the interview. You panic and you have a negative thought about yourself. Like, “I should have known this. Crap, I don’t know this. I’m done. The interview’s blown,” whatever your thought is.
And then, that’s the moment where we want to be proactive about that and see that that’s happening. And normally it happens and then you don’t know what’s happening and a lot of people will just reoccur the same situation with the same thought. But that’s the pivotal moment where your energy shifts. And in an interview, it’s very important to notice these moments because we can expect them. We can expect opportunities for these moments to happen all the time but we can be proactive about how we handle them if we know they’re coming. So, why it doesn’t work, obviously, we don’t show up in the way we want, we don’t get the result, we don’t get the behavior that we want because we know how we want to show up. However, the answer is not knowing the answer because that’s not a realistic goal.
We can’t ever know everything beforehand. I keep saying that. You’ve probably heard me say that before. So, when we make it mean that we’re inadequate or not good enough, we perpetuate the problem. There’s no upside to saying to ourselves, “I’m inadequate, I should have known that.” You’re basically being mean to yourself. Because panicked thoughts during or after the interview never create a confident energy in you, which means you’re less likely to be able to project that to anybody else. And you influence more than you think how other people feel about you. You have a lot more influence. You’re basically instructing other people how to think about you by the way that you think about yourself. And so, the energy that you give off by how you think is very strong, a lot stronger than you know.
I’m actually using another example here of my ex, and he would always be angry, so one of the reasons why I chose not to be around him anymore, he was a very angry person and he had a very, very strong presence. When he was angry about something, it was very difficult for me to control my energy even if I was having happy thoughts, I was having a happy day, I was in a good place. Him being angry and in that angry energy around me, even though I was hyper aware of what was going on, even if it had nothing to do with me why he was angry, which was usually not the case but that’s a side note, it’s very difficult for you to be able to not feel that, right? Because we’re humans and we’re very intuitive about how other people pick up what we’re feeling. We just do that. So, you might be able to relate to that.
Like if you know if one of your family members or someone that you’re close to is angry or feeling something, you know you can pick up on that. You know how somebody might be like, “I’m fine, I’m fine,” but you know they’re not fine, it’s because of the energy that they’re giving off, right? So, beating ourselves up and telling a mean story about ourselves to ourselves is never going to create a confident energy. I have another episode on this called Being Your Own Worst Self-Critic, and it explains why that doesn’t work. So, having the insanely high expectations, trying to know everything, maybe you’re continuously trying to know more and more puts you into the headspace of, “I’m not good enough, I don’t know enough, I haven’t done enough,” right? And so, it doesn’t change your energy and it doesn’t prepare you for when this happens again because you’re trying to solve the wrong problem, right?
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You’re trying to solve the problem of, oh, and it’s totally good to go back and be like, “Next time, I’m going to know how to answer that really well and I’m going to answer it.” I teach that as well. Inside my program, I’ve got the evaluation portion and we go with very, very thoroughly through the evaluation so we know exactly what went wrong in that interview. However, that’s only part of it because you have to deal with the root problem which is how you’re going to think and show up and how your energy is going to present itself when you don’t know something. And it has to be not from a space of, “Crap, I don’t know and I should know and this is bad,” right? It can’t be from that space. We slip into it so easily and so automatically that we don’t know that we’re doing it. So, you might not even be able to identify those thoughts that you’re having.
But I can tell you right now, it’s going to be a negative thought about yourself. You know you’re getting panicked, you know you’re feeling nervous, so those feelings are an indicator, right? And so, what normally happens is you’re going to freeze, you’re going to ramble, you’re going to say things you don’t want to be saying, you’re going to just reach for whatever’s there, you’re going to just spit out everything that you can think of in the moment. However, your panic response shows up and then afterwards, you’re probably going to feel ridiculous. Now, this is quoted from one of my clients. But the good news is is that when this happens once, you get to learn this lesson really internally, but my goal is to help you prevent it. But I’m sure that most of you have already been in a situation like that even if it wasn’t an interview, right, where you’re having a conversation with somebody and you say something and you’re like, “Oh, I shouldn’t have said that,” or whatever the case, right?
And I always like to ask people, “Are you going to allow for human error in your life?” The answer obviously has to be yes or, “I don’t think you can be on the planet. I don’t think you’re allowed because we’re human and that’s kind of the definition where we’re going to make errors and it’s okay.” So, what ultimately ends up being created is that we get scared of interviewing. We get fear beforehand and all sorts of different ways that you might respond. Some of my clients, they want to hide and they never want to do it again. Some people, they keep going and if they’re not aware of this and they’re not working with somebody to help them guide them through this, they just keep going and repeating the same things over and over without knowing it, and then they’re basically, start lying to themselves. So, they’ll be like, “It’s okay, it’s okay. I got this, it’s okay.” But they don’t really believe it so then it doesn’t work.
And then, they don’t get to the truth of what’s going on and what the real insecurity is there. And so, they start repeating the same unconscious patterns, they try to fix the wrong problem by consuming more information, preparing for more, trying to learn more to make themselves feel more worthy and make themselves feel better when that’s not where the problem is coming from at all. What I suggest and what I teach is to get, first of all, step one, get clear on what you want to make this mean. For example, let’s say, you didn’t know the answer to something they asked you or they wanted you to clarify on some specific thing and you weren’t able to do that, what are you making that mean for yourself? For most people, if they haven’t really thought about it, they’re on autopilot making it mean that they’re not good enough, that they should have studied harder, that maybe they’re dumb and they’re never going to get the job they want.
They’re suddenly making it mean that they’re probably never going to get the job. Like in the interview in the moment, they probably are like, “Uh, I blew it.” And that’s how you end up behaving. You end up behaving after that like somebody who isn’t confident and who doesn’t think they can do it, who knows they’ve blown it, somebody who knows they’ve blown it and then is going to show up completely differently than someone who’s confident and keeps that belief that they are the best person and can offer tremendous value, right? They don’t show up like that anymore after one of these moments or one of these shifts happen. Instead, so step one is getting clear on what you want to make it mean. And so, I
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have a lot of material on this and it’s just about making it mean that it’s okay, that you don’t have to know everything and stop putting impossible expectations on yourself.
Step two is get curious as to why you were triggered by that specific thing. Like why was it a problem for you that you didn’t know? Why was it a problem at all? Why was it a problem and why should you have known? Because you are not going to know everything even on the job, right? You’re going to have training, you’re going to have people to ask questions to, you’re going to be able to have resources to figure things out, the interview is a situation where you’re just not going to have that, so your test is not to remember everything and know everything, but it’s to handle an interaction when you don’t know. Step one, get clear on what you want to make it mean for you. Step two, get curious as to why it was such a problem for you that you didn’t know or why it was such a problem for you whatever the circumstance was, however they looked at you funny or they didn’t acknowledge or whatever the thing was. Why was that a problem for you? And is it a realistic expectation that you’re putting on yourself?
So, you want to give it a more empowering meaning and you want to learn as much as you can from it, you want to get curious about it, and then you want to go inward to see what there is there for you. Because it’s normally going to be a layer of self-compassion that needs to be uncovered. And so, a lot of you I will talk to and you will tell me that you are telling yourself it’s okay and that you are being compassionate towards yourself, but the way that you talk is showing otherwise. And so, I think it’s one of the most challenging things that we have to do as humans, is learn this skill of self-compassion. That’s another thing that I always want to talk about is that when you’re being human it’s okay because other people feel more like they could be human because we all go through this. We all feel not good enough, we all feel not smart enough, we all feel like we’re not doing enough.
So, there you have it. Why it works so well is I can tell you that self-compassion always wins and that’s where this always comes from, the lack of it. You know how I know? Because I always feel better when it comes from a self-compassionate place. And then, you can take better action. You can always think in a different way, you can always think in a smarter way, you can always think in an upleveled way, you’re going to think so much more expansively when you’re having self-compassion first and you’re not immediately beating yourself up and putting up ridiculous expectations on yourself. The necessary skills that you need are, first, the awareness. You need to practice the awareness and you need to get curious about why things are triggering you. And the ability to change your habits. And so, what ends up getting created is that you get to relax knowing that if you don’t know something, you are totally fine. You are still totally worthy, you still have value, all of that is still the same.
You get to relax into who you are, not what you know in that specific moment. You get to become comfortable with what you don’t know yet because that’s always going to be something. And that’s the goal for you, my friend, is not to know everything but to become comfortable with what you don’t know yet. Since there’s no way and because we’re not Google, we’re not going to have the ability to know everything. So, becoming comfortable with what you don’t know yet is the most important thing that you can do and it’s more important to be comfortable with who you are. And so, that’s what I work with my clients to do, and that way, you learn the skill of being the person who always figures things out, including the time when you’re asked something that you don’t know right away. You’re someone who’s resourceful and always finds answers. You’re someone who has the ability to problem-solve on a dime.
At the end of the day, that is more valuable than any one answer that you may not know or even a hundred answers that you do know. Because that’s what’s actually going to be required for any kind of success on the job, is your ability to figure things out, your ability to be resourceful and find answers, and being somebody who can problem-solve. The ability to keep going until you produce the result is what is more important than any one interview question. So, stop beating yourself up for what you don’t know, instead, get comfortable and start reflecting and reveling in who you are as a person and
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hang out in the warm bath of confidence for who you are, not what you may or may not know in any given moment when you have no way of knowing. It’s a lot less important than we think.
And you get to create the desired response that you want in yourself, which is what I teach you how to do. You get to decide how you’re going to respond when you don’t know something and you’re going to be able to decide to respond in a very, very productive way even if you don’t have the answer. So, when the energy is right, what you say is a lot less important, not having the answer is a lot less important. In fact, I told a story in an interview once that after I told that story, I regretted telling the story. I was like, “That wasn’t a good story. I should not have shared that.” They hired me anyway. Because I noticed as I was speaking, that the story wasn’t what I wanted to be talking about and I steered away from it. But my thoughts continued to be positive. I thought, “That was the truth, that’s what happened. And next time, I’m probably not going to share that, but this is still going well.” And I still kept the energy and the vibe where I wanted it to be.
So, what coaching is is we dive in and we uncover each one of these minute-to-minute energy shifts that you’re doing, whether you’re conscious of it or not. And then, I pull them out from you, like in my program, we reframe them in a way that no matter what, you can show up confidently no matter what they say to you, no matter how they look at you, no matter what they’re doing, no matter what tone of their voice or how slow or how fast they may talk, no matter what, I show you how to be in control of your energy, therefore, how you can project the energy that you want to be in the interview, no matter how they respond, no matter how they sit or how they talk. We break it all down in the minute-to-minute shifts in your brain.
We’re always having these shifts, right? We have 60,000 thoughts a day. Every single one of these thoughts cannot be watched at every moment, it’s not possible. But what I do is I will show you how to think in the most productive manner that you can in order to create the energy and the result that you want in the interview. With that, I know that I can help you achieve the job you want because that is ultimately what it’s going to take. And in every interaction, you have a lot more control than you think. So, with that my friends, thank you so much for listening and I really hope to work with you one day. If you’re hearing and resonating with what you hear on this podcast, then you are probably a fit for my program. So, I encourage you to stay on, listen to how to get to that link, and I will hopefully meet you soon. Okay, talk to you later. Bye.
Hey there. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, I want to invite you to something very special. And as you know, you know I’ve been coaching one-on-one for years and you’ve heard me talk about all my clients and you’ve heard them come on the podcast. And from these experiences and from all these hours that I’ve done coaching, I’ve created the ultimate program where I take you through the steps that I walked everyone through to achieve the unreasonable results that they’ve achieved. And I don’t just mean getting a job, just getting any job, or making things a little better here or there. I mean, life-changing results, doubling salaries, switching industries while doubling salary, getting six-figure positions with no official paid experience, and just creating a life that they didn’t imagine was possible.
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