| on interviewing and speaking |
[Feb. 1st, 2010|01:41 pm] |
Bargh. Stupid brain. Because I cannot go a day without writing something tedious about school, here is something about admissions interviews. This is just as good for job interviews, presentations, and public speaking engagements.
I am never nervous about interviews. I see people stress and over-prepare and freak out but that is all unnecessary. The interviewer wants to like you. Forget all about having made it past rounds of resume culling and committee reviews. Those are valid reasons to be confident but they are needlessly cerebral. Fundamentally, the interviewer wants to accept you or hire you or whatever because, if they didn't, they would be admitting to themselves that they are wasting their time and their lives. Nobody likes futility. The foundational assumption at the start of every interview is that something great could come of it.
The same rule applies to public speaking. I love public speaking because, by and large, people want to like you. Nobody wants to believe that they are about to waste an hour of their life listening to some idiot ramble on about tedious bullshit. In order to tolerate even being in the same room with you, every member of the audience has rationalized to themselves that they are going to benefit in some way from listening to you speak.
You don't have to sell the unsold. All you have to do is give a room full of desperate people some crumb of justification for believing that their lives, in that moment, don't suck. |
|
|
