There is a very particular kind of person who walks into my coaching room feeling like a fraud: the person who runs meetings, manages teams, solves problems all day long, and then falls apart completely at the words “so, tell me a bit about yourself.”
It doesn’t make sense on paper. These are capable people. Some of the most incredibly capable people I work with. They negotiate, they present, they make decisions that affect other people’s jobs but then an interview turns them into someone who trips over their own name.
If this is you, I want to say something clearly: it is not a confidence problem in the way you think it is. And it can be solved. I promise.
The Mismatch Nobody Names
Here’s what’s actually happening. Your everyday competence is built on years of context. You know your team, your systems, your history with the people in the room. You know what “good” looks like because you’ve been quietly defining it for years.
An interview strips all of that away. You are, often for the first time in a long time, being asked to perform competence to a stranger, in a format you don’t control, under time pressure, while being actively judged on criteria you can only guess at.
That’s not a test of your ability. It’s a test of an entirely different skillset – the skill of selling your value out loud, on demand, to someone who owes you nothing. And here is the important part: almost nobody is naturally good at this. Therefore, it has nothing to do with how good you actually are at your job.
Why “Just Be Confident” Doesn’t Help
If you’ve ever been told to “just be more confident” before an interview or have received feedback afterwards that they wanted to see more confidence then I’m sorry, but that advice is close to useless. Actually – I am not sorry as it is awful advice as it doesn’t mean anything to the receiver.
How are they to understand what confidence is or looks like to the interviewer or panel? It’s a bit like being told to “just relax” during an intimate medical examination with a doctor you have only just met. It names the destination without giving you a single step toward it.
Confidence in an interview doesn’t come from psyching yourself up beforehand. It comes from something much less glamorous: knowing exactly what you want to say before you’re asked, so you’re not inventing your own value in real time under pressure.
The people who seem naturally ‘good at interviews’ are very rarely more talented than everyone else in the room. They’ve simply done the unglamorous work of translating their experience and value into language ahead of time, so their brain isn’t doing two jobs at once; thinking and performing, while a stranger watches.
What Actually Knocks People Sideways
In my experience, it’s rarely the big, obvious questions that cause the wobble. It’s the quieter internal narrative running alongside them:
- What if they think I’m not senior enough?
- What if my honest answer sounds boring compared to everyone else’s?
- What if I say the wrong thing and it’s the reason I don’t get it?
That narrative has almost nothing to do with your actual capability and everything to do with the story you’re telling yourself, in the room, about what’s being judged. And it’s exhausting to fight those two battles at once – answering the question, and quietening the voice telling you that you’re about to get it wrong.
This is where most interview preparation goes wrong. People rehearse answers. They rarely address the noise underneath the answers, which is usually the thing actually costing them the room.
What’s Coming This Month
Over the next few weeks, we’re going to take this apart properly: the difference between nerves and self-doubt as they are not the same thing, and treating them the same way is why so much interview advice doesn’t work.
We’ll explore the cost of trying to be the candidate you think they want rather than the one you actually are, and because I know some of you want the practical toolkit, not just the reframe, I’ll provide you with a proper, usable interview preparation that builds you up rather than winding you tighter.
If any of this is resonating a little close to home, you’re not alone, and you’re not doing anything wrong. You’ve just been trying to solve an unfamiliar problem with tools built for a familiar one.
A Foundation Session is a good place to start if you’d like to talk through what’s actually going on for you before your next interview. Warning – this will not just be a list of generic tips but rather an honest look at what’s really getting in your way.
