Interview advice is full of scripts, but interviews are not exams – they are meetings between nervous systems. Yours will be read as much as your resume. These seven practices help the confident, likeable, competent person you are at your best actually show up in the chair.
1. Rehearse the feeling, not just the answers
Practise two answers out loud, standing, at interview pace. Notice the state that arises – rush, tightness, performance. Getting familiar with that state in rehearsal makes it boring on the day, and boring is good.
2. Arrive fifteen minutes early, spend them orienting
Find the building, then a cafe or lobby nearby. Let your eyes map the area, feel your feet, watch people. Orienting marks the territory as known. Walking in rushed and lost spends your composure before the handshake.
3. The bathroom shake
Before you go in: ninety seconds of shaking your hands, arms and shoulders in a bathroom stall. It discharges the charge that otherwise leaks out as a shaky voice or jittery knee.
4. Three long exhales in the waiting area
Sitting outside the interview room, breathe in for four and out for six to eight, three times, while feeling the chair under you. The longer exhale turns waiting from a threat-vigil into a settling.
5. Enter through the feet
Walking in, feel each step. Sitting down, feel the chair arrive under you before you arrange your face. Grounding in the first ten seconds sets your physiology before the small talk tests it.
6. Pause is presence
When a question lands, take one breath before answering. A breath-sized pause reads as thoughtfulness; instant answers read as rehearsed. Feel your feet during the pause if silence scares you.
7. Resource on something real
Before the interview, recall one moment you did something genuinely well – and let your body relive it for thirty seconds: where you were, what you felt. This is resourcing, and it brings the evidence online in a way affirmations cannot fake.
Afterwards
Walk before you analyse. Let the adrenaline discharge first; the debrief is more accurate on a settled system. Whatever the outcome, you practised staying yourself under pressure – that skill compounds.
Presence under evaluation is exactly what our training builds, for facilitators and for life.
