If you are a newly qualified therapist, or more experienced, the nerves associated with interviews can significantly affect your performance and stand in the way of a dream job. You don’t have to let this get in the way! First off, Occupational Therapy interview nerves are normal. Everyone has them. As interviewers, we should be doing all we can to help you manage them. Remember we are interested in who is going to be a great therapist for our team. It is really hard for us to judge that if we don’t see the real you. Not the one experiencing the Occupational Therapy interview nerves! Therefore we should do all we can to put you at ease. SO, start off by giving yourself the best chance and stop beating yourself up about feeling something that is perfectly normal AND expected.
So how can you manage Occupational Therapy Interview Nerves?
Here are our top 5 (and a half) tips to take the sting out of your interview, and remember:
“It’s normal to have butterflies in your stomach … The trick is to get them to all fly in the same direction. ”
1) Reframe
Reframing is all about seeing a situation differently. Our perceptions are constructed from a multitude of beliefs, memories, experiences, and expectations about the future. Not all of these are true or accurate, and not all of them are directly transferable to the situations we find ourselves in.
How would you feel about the interview if you didn’t need the job. What if you were going solely to give the new panel members experience of interviewing? What if the questions you thought you might be asked were ones that you were asked socially by a friend? Often it is the fear of looking stupid or failing that is more anxiety provoking than the process itself. From an interviewers perspective, we expect people to be nervous and I consider it is our job to help put you at ease so that you can show us the very best bits of yourself to help us choose the best candidate.
2) Plan for the disasters
Usually our brains are excellent at highlighting all of the things that can go wrong when we are nervous. They are so good in fact that they keep doing it over and over and over again. Meanwhile we are trying our best to ignore everything it is telling us. However, if you think about it differently this could actually be helpful. If we paid attention to the potential pitfalls rather than trying to block them out.
Write out the list of things that you are worrying about happening or going wrong at the interview. Use this list to make a plan for what actions you could take to prevent or manage them.
For example:
Worry : I will get lost and be late for the interview
Solution : Plan my route and do a trial run, make sure I leave in plenty of time and borrow a sat nav, make sure I have a contact number for whoever is coordinating interviews in case of problems.
Worry : I won’t be able to understand the question
Solution : Ask the interviewer to rephrase it and I can check if I have fully answered it.
3) Be mindful of where you are right now.
As one of our previous clients told us. ‘When I get Occupational therapy interview nerves everything feels a bit unreal.’ At times our brains can race away with us and take us somewhere we really had not intended to be. If you find your mind is racing immediately before or during the interview try one of the following to refocus on that fact that right here and right now you are OK and all you are doing is going for an interview.
- Pick a colour and try and spot all of the items around you that are the same.
- Notice the texture of the chair you are sitting on and really concentrate on how it feels as you move your finger over it.
- Pick an everyday object like a pen and try to think how many creative uses you could imagine using it for, the wilder the better. How about a miniature snorkel?
4) Buy yourself some time.
Quite often giving just a few seconds for the question to sink in and be processed by your brain is enough to get you back on track and use some of the other strategies we list. Remember that it is more important to give a structured full answer than an immediate response. Using some stock phrases like …
‘that’s a really interesting question’
or
‘I need to think about that one’
… can buy you enough time to process and construct your answer. Any silences or gaps that you leave will be feeling a lot longer for you than the panel. Use this time to fall back on your strategy and structures for answering questions, or to think of your examples. Alternatively take advantage of any water that is provided or make sure that you have some to take a swig from whilst you are thinking. Finally asking for the question to be repeated will buy you even more time.
5) Don’t fake it till you make it … fake it till you become it.
Most of us are aware that our body language affects how others see us. For e
xample, the perception of ‘niceness’ that observers develop of clinicians after watching just a 30 second soundless clip of them interacting with a patient is able to predict the likelihood that they will be sued. The defining factor seems to be not how good the clinician was but how nice they were seen to be by the patient. However according to Amy Cuddy a leading social psychologist our body language directly affects how we see ourselves. So striking the right pose even when we don’t ‘feel’ confident can directly affect our body chemistry and alter our testosterone and cortisol levels. It may even impact on our chances of success.
Striking a ‘power pose’ for just two minutes before going into your interview can raise your testosterone levels by 20%, and lower your cortisol hormones by 25%. Exactly what you need to increase your confidence and reduce your stress levels. As crazy as this sounds she has even tested this out in interview situations and amazingly … the power posers were much more successful at getting hired, than their non posing colleagues.
So as crazy as it sounds spending 2 minutes making like Wonder Woman in the bathroom before your interview really could change your life.
Have a look at her 20 minute TED talk here:
Lastly, consider desensitising yourself to the whole interview experience. This works well if you are in the fortunate position of knowing that you want to change jobs but have not found the perfect new career yet. It is also great if you are just leaving college and there are lots of Band 5 posts out there. Many of us fear the unexpected and unknown and if we are honest very few people would actually choose to go for an interview for fun. This means that 99% of people go through their lives never experiencing more than a handful of interviews. How can we expect to be comfortable in situations that we just don’t come across that often. Think back to the first initial interviews you did on placement. How did it feel? Probably pretty clumsy, nerve wracking and particularly if your supervisor was there checking how you were doing! The same applies to your interviews. One of the best ways to overcome Occupational Therapy interview nerves is to do lots … and lots … and lots of them. Just apply and apply and apply for any posts that you think you won’t be interested in but would have the basic skills so that your application will secure yourself an interview. Go to as many interviews as you can and treat them like free training and practise sessions. Make notes of the questions you were asked immediately after them. Try different approaches of how to manage your own nerves and work out exactly what works for you. Test out the other strategies that we talk about to see if they help or not. If they do, do more of it next time if they don’t try something else. So that by the time you are ready to go for the one that counts you will be so used to attending an interview the process itself will not phase you at all. Your Occupational Therapy interview nerves whilst not being completely destroyed at least the butterflies are pointing the same way..
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