You can read about best job interview practices for days: Interviews are something everyone needs to do, and many people feel like they can never be prepared for. But there’s just one trait that goes the farthest: confidence. Here’s a quick list of things to consider as a way to boost your confidence:
1: Power Poses
Confidence comes from the inside, but sometimes changing your outside can help you make the inner change. Power poses are super cheesy, but can easily work wonders. Look up a few.
2: Stop Fidgeting
While we’re on the topic of body language, one big one is the tendency to channel nervous energy into rapid, useless movements that wind up making you look just as nervous as you are. Or, if the energy is just from adreneline, fidgeting will make you look nervous, even if you’re not.
Worse, you can easily fail to notice a nervous tic. There’s just one solution, as one Muse article explains:
“If you think you don’t have any fidgety habits, you might want to think again—most people aren’t aware of their own nervous tendencies because they’re such an ingrained part of their natural behavior. To double check, try doing a few mock interviews with a friend who can call you out on any fidgeting. Once you know exactly what to avoid, you can practice controlling it.”
3: Breathe
So you can’t fidget? How can you get rid of the energy? By breathing it out. Take five slow breaths, hold each for a few seconds, and then breath out even slower than you breathed in.
4: Practice
“So much of a successful negotiation boils down to feeling comfortable and practiced.
This doesn’t mean you have to have years of negotiating under your belt, but it does mean your actual negotiation should not be the first time you’ve delivered your pitch. Find someone to listen to your proposed so you can feel the cadence of your speaking points out loud in a conversational setting.”
5: Know Your Worth
Confidence comes from knowing that, at the end of the day, you will unaffected. You know that your skills qualify you for the job. Two things can help you crystalize this to yourself: Write a list of reasons why you’re qualified and capable, and focus on identifying and shutting down any inner voices that tell you the opposite. Here’s an Inc.com article on that second method:
“Low self-confidence is often caused by the negative thoughts running through our minds on an endless track. If you are constantly bashing yourself and saying you’re not good enough, aren’t attractive enough, aren’t smart enough or athletic enough, and on and on, you are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. You are becoming what you are preaching inside your head, and that’s not good.”
Be prepared and know that you’ll enjoy the job. And if you can’t be reasonably sure that you can walk into that interview knowing it should be a good fit, move on to a better option.