How to Win the Job by Communicating with Confidence

Fearless Interviewing

From my evaluation of the résumé she sent me, neither her qual-
ifications nor her education were the problem.
When Christine came to my office for an appointment, she
told me that she had been out of work for several months and
added emphatically that interviewing had been “torture” for her.
She said that she felt timid at the interviews she had gone to and
that she felt intensely uncomfortable about being asked questions
that required her to call attention to herself and her skills.
Though perfectly well qualified for just about any financial
analyst position, Christine suffered from what is sometimes
known in psychology as the imposter syndrome. The imposter syn-
drome presents itself as the feeling that, even though we have
accomplished something, we somehow feel that we don’t deserve
the recognition or prestige that goes with it.
According to Christine, “I’ve never had a problem talking
about a friend’s accomplishments, but when it comes to my own,
I find it embarrassing.” She reports, “I’m afraid that others will
think I’m arrogant. I feel that if I boast about myself at an inter-
view, the company might hire me and then find out I can’t do the
job at all.”
At first, as Christine learned the techniques of fearless inter-
viewing, she told me that she felt uncomfortable relating her
strengths in such a straightforward manner. “It feels like brag-
ging,” she said. But as we worked together to reframe her notion
of “bragging” into one of simply “reporting the facts,” she began
to relax and handle questions about herself more easily.
When Christine built her skills arsenal and constructed her
Q statements (as you’ll do in Chapters 2 and 3, she realized that
her strengths were not just fabrications; they were real. Further-
more, they could be provenby citing examples of what she had
actually done in the real world!

Her accomplishments, she soon learned,

were not exaggerations at all; they were simply

statements of facts.

Christine’s next interview was with a Fortune 500 financial
organization for a job as a financial analyst. I heard from her