Interview nerves and anxiety is a key factor when it comes to messing up your job interview. Why would an employer recruit a nervous, shy or ‘blank expression’ applicant, especially for high skilled positions?
The reason nerves are at the forefront in the job interview situation is down to the simple fact that many of us rarely attend job interviews. Repetition is often the key to becoming more skilled and more confident at a task. The lack of job interviews career professionals attends to make the job interview a scary and unknown environment.
Interview anxiety can be crippling. If you could swish away your interview nervousness and replace this fear with confidence, would you be able to perform better in the job interview? Would the confident you more likely to be offered a job?
Job interviewees become fearful because they will often imagine themselves in the job interview situation performing badly, prior to the job interview. This negative movie seems real, increasing anxiety and fear.
The Swish technique, taken from NLP enables you to quickly dissolve the negative feelings attached to a job interview and allows you to access a state of calmness and confidence. This is achieved by setting up a system to instantly move away the negative image you create when you think about your forthcoming job interview, replacing this with a positive movie.
These 8 Steps will allow you to change your nervousness to confidence, your anxiety to excitement.
1. Identify a Cue image for this situation that triggers the response (this could be receiving the interview letter, waking up on the day of the interview itself or walking through the door of the company you could potentially be employed with). When exactly do you feel nerves?
2. Decide how you want to feel, what level of confidence you require for a job interview.
3. Imagine this new confident you, how confident do you feel? See the world from this confident perspective. Imagine yourself as a new you who is free from interview negativity, you don’t have to know how you got this way, just enjoy this new positive feeling of being confident in job interviews.
4. See this image of you of a large film, make the picture bigger, brighter and turn up the volume. Make this image as compelling as it can be; make it brighter, louder, faster. Once the image is really compelling, shrink it so it ends up around the size of a postal stamp (it will now be small and dark)
5. Put a frame in front of you and put your original CUE image in it (the interview letter, company front door). In the corner of this frame place the resourceful image
6. Now you want t make both images change simultaneously, so the large cue images becomes small and dark, and the resourceful image becomes big and bright. This happened very quickly, making a SWISH noise.
7. Repeat the swish around 10 times, between each swish make the frame go blank. Each time you swish, speed it up until you are swishing within a second.
8. Test to see if you can restore the Cue picture, if you find it either won’t come back or the image is dark and dim, then the swish has worked. If not repeat this process.
