Embrace Interview Stress

20 October 2015

Long term, chronic stress is undoubtedly unhealthy, and too many people in our modern workplaces experience it.  Stress can lead to hypertension, heart attack, strokes, and poor performing immune systems and if you experience chronic stress please put mechanisms in place to reduce it.  But one off, occasional, short lived, situationally appropriate experiences of stress are not bad for you - let me say that again, slightly differently - short term stress is actually good for you.  In fact our natural stress response helps us perform better and can be very beneficial in interview situations.  But for many people experiencing the increased arousal of stress leads them to thinking that the situation they are facing is going to demand more from them than they are able to give and they won’t be up to the task.  This in itself is unhelpful thinking.  Stress doesn’t mean you can’t do something, or will perform badly doing something.  The purpose of the stress response is to bring you to higher levels of alertness, arousal and better performance.  These are all things you want in an interview situation.  There are specific benefits that you can harness for your interview from the stress response.  For example when you experience short bursts of stress you notice more in your environment, you learn quickly, you are more vigilant and perform better - You will interview better.

The problem is that many people stress about the stress they think they are going to feel in interviews.  Interview stress though can be beneficial.  Research has shown that the way you think about stress changes the impact that it has on you.  If you think that stress will be bad for you – hey presto, it is.  If you think that stress is beneficial – again it is.  When you reframe your interview stress as something that is preparing you to perform at your peak the more likely outcome is better performance.  Stress is actually your body helping you perform at your best by making you more alert to the resources you have available to you.

People who are able to reassess their stress as being beneficial are also more able to overcome a mental phenomenon that I have seen bring people undone in interviews – attentional bias.  Attentional bias is our natural predisposition to continually scan our environment for things that are threatening, and to have the belief that when things are a little different to normal they pose danger.  How this plays out in interviews is that we are super sensitive to the words and body language of the interviewer and we interpret any small discrepancy in what they say or do as proof that we are not doing well in the interview.  For example in a recent conversation I had with someone about their fear of interviews they told the story of their last interview - how they just knew they were not doing well because a woman on the panel kept coughing into her handkerchief!  I asked if she thought that the woman might have just had a cold, but with a belief that her stress was bad and a heightened attentional bias for negative information the cough grew to be, in the mind of the interviewee, a “secret signal” to the other panel members that the interviewee (i.e. herself) was talking 'crap'.  The more you are able to reframe short term stress as beneficial the more control you gain over your attentional bias and the greater your ability to not just see the bad, but also see the good.

Here are some actions you can take to start stretching your ability to handle more stress and embrace stress in interviews:

1.     Watch a very engaging talk by Kelly McGonigal on How to make stress your friend.

2.     Give yourself regular short-term hits of stress inducing experiences to build your stress response muscles.  Especially beneficial are experiences that have you present in front of others.  For example:

• Give a presentation to co-workers
• Speak up at a meeting
• Take an opportunity to talk to a senior leader in your workplace (if you don’t regularly do that anyway)
• Publically congratulate someone at a workplace celebration…

3.     Start a courage challenge and for 3 months give yourself something to do each week in which you will need to use courage.  Get a friend to join you and keep you accountable to your actions.

And for those of you with a more academic bent this article is worth a look.

As always wishing you a flourishing career.

Katherine