You have around 100 billion neurons in your brain. These neurons create pathways so we can respond quickly to situations; the pathways you use the most frequently become your preference and often your automatic way of responding to situations — Situation X means you respond with Y.
Your brain uses your five senses to ask how it should respond to situation X and then searches for the appropriate emotional response. This search only takes milliseconds and uses emotional memories to decide how you should react. For this, your mind needs a frame of reference and will search for the most appropriate emotional memory — You felt Y emotion in a past similar situation, so you will feel the same now.
This is why we feel nervous in a job interview — the original reference for job interviews for most people is nervousness. The mind recreates this feeling every time you have an interview, as this is our only frame of reference. Because we automatically react without thinking, we constantly replay “nervousness” in job interviews, creating a new, stronger emotional memory for our brain’s search term “job interview” — making a vicious cycle.
With each “nervous” interview memory, our connections become stronger and more automatic until, before long, just the word “job interview” recreates these strong emotional feelings.
These connections, habits and patterns happen in all aspects of your life — a certain smell reminds you of a childhood memory; when you get dressed in the morning you always start with the same piece of clothing (think about it); when you see someone who looks like someone you dislike, you feel the same dislike toward this complete stranger.
Often, interview articles explain how the interviewer makes an opinion about you within the first few seconds of meeting you. The reason for this unconscious decision is that the brain is searching for a frame of reference, an emotional memory to put you in a certain category to help them decide how to initially react to you. For our hunter and gatherer ancestors, this was a key survival tool. For us now, though, it can become an unnecessary roadblock.
Replacing Negative Interview Patterns
The neurons in our mind fire each time we do or think about doing a task — e.g. “I have an interview coming up” = “I feel nervous.” This helps make the process of responding to a situation simple and quick. Instead of asking how to feel in a given situation, your mind just feels the associated emotion, created by its only frame of reference.
But your brain is constantly learning, improving and changing. You can change your emotional response to situations. (Tweet this thought.)
If you think about a happy experience, you will feel happy. If you remember the last time you were excited, you will feel excitement. If you think about a time you laughed out loud, you will start to laugh. You can only access one emotion at a time — emotions can be felt rapidly in a particular order, but you only feel one emotion at a time.
When you require a new emotional resource for a situation, you can think about the state you desire and you will feel this state. Your brain will associate this new, positive feeling with the situation, and the more you associate the two — feeling good + situation — the stronger the association will become until your brain makes the positive emotion the search result for your query of “situation.”
If you want to feel confidence in a job interview rather than nervousness, you can break the old pattern and replace it with a new one, until “confidence” becomes the automatic feeling associated with “job interview.” Here’s how:
Step 1: Think About a Job Interview
In most cases this will be a negative memory where the interview is going terribly wrong — you can’t answer the questions, the look on the interviewer’s face is soul-destroying, you’re mumbling throughout the interview, you lack the ability to sell yourself, you realize your shirt is creased and you give yourself negative self talk, which results in strong negative emotions…
Label this mental video “Old Interview.”
Step 2: Distance Yourself
Replay the Old Interview, but this time turn everything into a cartoon. You, the interviewer, the room all become a painted sketch. Watch the interview as if it’s a cartoon on a TV screen. You are no longer in the interview — you now have the perspective of watching a cartoon version of you on the screen in front of you.
Step 3: Breathe
Before replaying the Old Interview for a third time, take 10 long, deep breaths. With each breath, notice how your body relaxes, how your breathing slows down. Replay the cartoon version of the Old Interview and continue to breathe deeply. As you see the interview playing out, you will feel more and more relaxed.
Step 4: Think Positive
Remember around 10 past events that are positive. Think of times when you felt confident, self-assured, at your best, when you felt full of courage, days that you could do no wrong. All of these memories have to be fully positive. Replay each event from your own eyes at that time so you can relive these powerful positive emotions.
Step 5: Anchor Yourself
As you relive each positive experience, wait until your positive emotions are at their peak and then squeeze your finger and thumb together, creating a positive anchor. Do this for all 10 events
Step 6: Create a Mental Video
Replay the cartoon Old Interview again and, as you watch it, squeeze your finger and thumb together so you remember the confident, positive and self-assured emotions. Once you feel good in the interview, rename this new memory “New Interview.”
The next time you feel nervous before an interview, replay the New Interview and you will start to feel more and more confident. Repeat the above until you start to feel more positively.
Parting Words
Your brain learns behaviors to keep you safe. Often, old emotional memories become outdated and unusable. If you need a new way of operating, if you need to feel a new emotion to an old situation or if you need a positive automatic reaction to a stimulus, your brain will make these changes through plasticity. By using these six steps, you can retrain your brain so you feel confident and self-assured at your next job interview.
What kinds of retraining would you like to give your brain? Share in the comments!
Image: Flickr
