Job interviews seem to hold a particular place in people’s hearts. And it’s not a good one.

A client came to me recently who had been out of work for a little while. They’d been applying for quite a few things and getting invited for interviews but that’s where it ended. It was becoming a disheartening routine.

Most of the time you can work out what you need to do if you hit a roadblock at work. Maybe you talk to people you trust and this helps you find a way forward or maybe you reach for a solution that’s worked for you in the past. Sometimes though you can get stuck with an issue at work that you can’t seem to resolve using your tried and tested methods. This is when coaching can help.  

We humans love a story. We love telling them, we love hearing them and we certainly love watching them on TV. In fact, we tend to think that everything has to have a story behind it, it makes us feel more comfortable.

Feedback is something that’s essential to increasing our self-awareness so we can make more positive choices about how we behave or respond to others. Whether it’s about the report we’ve written, the way we handled a meeting or the meal we just cooked. It helps us to gauge what works, what we’ve done well or what we could improve on. But often when we get feedback, we don’t hear it, or don’t want to hear it. We’re often too distracted by an emotion or the way we are reacting to it to listen properly. And in doing so, we’re missing an opportunity to be better.

There is a lot of advice out there these days about preparing for a job interview but how do you stand out from the crowd? For example, we all know these days that you should have a look at the company’s website, see what news articles come up when you Google them, and of course to have a few questions for the panel at the end of the grilling. It’s all good advice.

But I’ve found that if you’re not careful you can prepare so hard, you forget to be you.

I guess it’s a sign of the times but just lately I’ve worked with more clients looking for a new job. They came to me for help, not because they were having difficulty finding the roles they wanted or getting shortlisted but because they found themselves falling at the final hurdle: the interview.