3 Tips on Rocking Your First Impressions
Welcome to Career Transformed. I'm sharing tips to rock your first impressions in your subsequent interviews.
Many experienced interviewees stumbled on this straightforward question -- "Tell Me About Yourself!" How would you answer it?
Most of us, including marketers, are terrible at marketing ourselves.
Your inner self-critics can quickly derail you. Instead of focusing on growth and learning, your anxiety and negative self-beliefs dwell on past adverse events. As a Certified Coach focusing on Positive Intelligence, I am offering you three tips:
1. Don't share your suffering: This is about; telling me about your gifts, NOT your suffering.
Vulnerability and empathic leadership are hot topics in leadership. Don't focus on your flaws and dwell on the past. Tell your story in this storytelling formula:
Struggle + growth + learning
2. Find the gifts: What gifts and learning have you collected over the years?
True story. I was proud of an award-winning digital rollout serving 5,000 customers, but it failed spectacularly. What are the gifts?
Gift of knowledge to hire more resources to do better QA.
Gift of inspiration to experiment with a much larger project targeting a million customers.
The gift is that I can now teach my staff what NOT to do regarding the complex campaign. Now everything is making it straightforward, simple and simple!
So, how can you inject gifts into your (interview) introduction?
3. Avoid telling the story over and over: Bottom-line your story!
This is very typical. Introduction questions are supposed to be icebreakers, like an appetizer. If you spend more than 10 minutes on this question, you are dwelling on it!
How to stop scrambling and go straight to the point? Think about something that makes you smile. Pivot and bottom line!
The bottom lining is a specific trick I learned from coaching. Think about a headline or bi-line of an article or, in accounting, the TOTAL $ with a double bottom line instead of sharing the whole spreadsheet.
Remember, your job for your INTERVIEW is to convince others. It won't get your job (yet). Your goal is to get to the next meeting!
What do you think of these tips? Comment below.
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