Went to the supermarket for lunch yesterday. Decided to go for French roast chicken.

Girl in front of me ordered, ‘I want this quinoa. Can you heat up the quinoa for me?’ She didn’t seem particularly happy to be there. Perhaps she was hoping to get back to eat at her desk asap.. Maybe catching up with emails.

Lady at counter said ‘no we don’t heat up salads.’

A little grumpy, didn’t even look at the attendant, she replied, ‘ok it’s fine I’ll take it anyway.’

So I told myself, ‘I will be nice to this counter lady, since it seems that her day must be not that easy!

I’m naturally jolly, so it wasn’t hard to show her my good vibe. I went up, looked at her, made eye contact, smiled, pointed at the menu, ‘this salad option – how big is it? Which ones can I have?’

‘You can choose 3.’

Pleasantly surprised at the number of options, I smiled again, ‘Oh nice!’

I already had my eye on the quinoa and couscous. I couldn’t decide between the red rice and potato salad, so I asked, ‘these 2- which one is better? I can’t decide..’

To my surprise, she whispered, ‘I’ll give you both. Don’t tell anyone.’ I even detected a little upturn in the corner of her lips!

I was really surprised!!! 😀

This shows all we need is common courtesy in our daily interactions with people we come across, even though they may be the bus driver, the cleaner, or the barista. It’s not about manipulating people. I about just being ourselves. We would smile at people we are close to, wouldn’t we?

It shows if we go to people with a good attitude, people will go out of their way to do things for us! The girl before me might have been able to go her quinoa heated up if she’d just smiled!

Today, in a job interview coaching session, client started saying ‘we brought in someone professional to do the pictures, we created templates for the app, we created prototype for the different interface…’

I couldn’t help, but honestly didn’t understand, who else are we talking about here? I asked, ‘who are “we”?’

‘Oh, “we”…! Eh.. I think.. I meant.. “I”‘.

‘Oh right! So please just say I! Coz it’s hard to understand when we start speaking like the Queen..!’

Then after one or two sentences, since she’s no longer allowed to use ‘we’, she turned to third person speech! ‘There’s an app for the client, there are hard-printed materials, there is a new Facebook page’. Well, where did these designs, websites, Facebook pages come from? She did them, of course!

‘What goes on in your head when you are telling these stories about what you’ve done in the past?’

‘It’s a bit boring isn’t it, to talk about myself? I’m bored just listening to myself talking about all these things that I’ve done!’

Ah, right. Sounds like we needed a bit of paradigm shift here!

We worked to give her a new internal dialogue, one that says ‘I tell stories to show my skills for the new job’, rather than ‘I am boring, my stories are not worth mentioning, and I don’t want to talk about myself’.

It seems easy to impress the interviewer – if you want to get the job, the minimum you’ve got to do is start speaking in first person (singular), rather than first person collective!

Got called up this week – new client seems to present a tricky case: ‘I have been doing lots of interviews. I get to the final stage, the last interview, but don’t seem to get pass that.’

‘What do you think happened?’

‘I don’t know..! They don’t tell you what’s wrong about you. I have tried asking for feedback but never got a response. The thing is, I never like job interviews.’

‘How do you feel when you have the interviews?’

‘I get very nervous. I hyperventilate. I even stutter. Sometimes I can’t say the words. My mind scatters. I read my notes. I get lost in them. I forget what I want to say.’ (That sounds super serious!)

It turned out to be true. He was the most panicky client I’ve ever had!

We worked on breathing, changing paradigms, identifying the story so it’s easy for him to remember.

I learnt a lot from this client.

It turned out that because he is super prepared, and writes down all his answers, completely scripted, I learnt that he would do his video interviews with her notes opened on the screen! He would look over and look for the answers during the interview! That obviously didn’t bode well! The disconnected eye contact might have suggested to the interviewer that he was lying, or that he was reading something else, quite obviously his pre-written answers, which might have been interpreted as planned, fabricated answers!

‘Please close all your notes and put away your notebook in the interview! Don’t assume that it’s a phone / video interview, that you can get away with your cheat sheet, as that would distract you, and take away your focus from the interaction!’

‘But I will forget..!’

‘We are telling our life story in the interviews. No one knows our lives better than we do. And no one will know we left out details and forgot, except us!’

‘But there are so many examples to remember!’

Then I realised that it’s good practice to just boil down each of our job interview stories into 3 key sentences: problem – action – result. So it’s easy to remember!

‘OK. Rather than remembering the 100 different points you’ve written down, just remember 3 things about what you want to say about yourself, the key messages, and have 1 story for each of these qualities; and when you go in and forget everything else, you would hopefully remember just one thing that’s special about you. And every one of us has our own special super power that is often enough as the unique selling point for getting the job. It’s quality, not quantity!’

P.S. I am glad to tell you that this client got the job! He also got much more calmer! I’m very happy to have helped!