Our recruiters will tell you that controlling your nervousness during an interview is one of the most important things that one can to increase your performance. Though, this is something easier said than done. To ensure that you are more confident and produce better results, here are 13 ways to overcome nervousness during an interview:
1. Controlling Your Actions and Not Worrying About the People Around You – If you’re sitting in a room with other candidates, don’t pay a bit of attention to them. Focus on reading a book on your iPhone, focus on anything else but the other people.
Sometimes, our recruiters have seen that younger job applicants get very competitive and will try to intimidate you, but rise above it. That’s their issue and they are probably more nervous than you are trying to compensate for their insecurities by attempting to throw you off your game.
2. Don’t worry about anything else, but the interview. Leave everything that doesn’t have to do with the interview outside of the room and do nothing other than focus 100%.
3. Instead worrying about not getting the job, be happy thinking about how it will feel once you do get the job offer. Have faith in yourself. Your greatest weakness is lack of self-confidence.
4. In your head, start reinforcing all the good traits you have. This may take repetition after repetition, but don’t let your mind focus on what you perceive to be shortcomings. Focusing on what you don’t have is highly counterproductive, it wastes energy and, usually your thought process is not based in reality.
5. Have faith that the interviewer will make an intelligent decision by hiring you. Just because an interviewer rejects you doesn’t mean that he made a smart move. There are plenty of unintelligent people out there and you just have to have faith that this person is going to make the right decision.
6. Focus on your chief aim in life. If we focus on outside goals rather than internal shortcomings we are going to be more energized and engaged in the interview. Our headhunters suggest that you ask yourself as to what is your goal? Is it to get a PR job at a major firm? Focus on that.
7. Don’t base your self-worth on whether you get this job. Your value as a person and your job are entirely mutually exclusive and if you spend your life letting money and your job title dictate your happiness and confidence, you’re going to be perpetually unhappy.
8. Take a deep breath and relax your muscles. You’re not going into a life and death situation. Do your best to relax. Take a few minutes to clear your mind while waiting.
9. Be 100% focused on what the interviewer has to say. When we are 100% engaged in a conversation, psychologically we can’t be nervous. So, if you find yourself getting nervous just focus more.
10. Realize that your competition is not as strong as you fear and they are just as scared of you as you are of them.
11. Don’t phrase your answers based on what you think the interviewer wants to hear. Mind-reading is often misleading and people who do it come across as not authentic. Tell the truth. When you speak from a place of honesty, you are taking the right chance and, thus should not be nervous by telling it the way it is.
12. Don’t worry if other applicants have a better education than you. Thomas Edison had only 3 months of schooling in his entire life, Henry Ford had less than a 6th grade education.
13. Don’t think about the times you didn’t get a job offer. Those times have absolutely nothing to do with this interview. You’ll get it right, eventually. Thomas Edison “failed” ten thousand times before he perfected the incandescent light bulb.
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