One failed interview doesn’t make you a failure… unless you let it.

You can indulge in self pity, argue about injustices and attribute blame wherever you want but it won't change anything.

What's more until you deal with it you’ll you'll carry that same feeling of 'pissedoffness' into your work, your home and your relationships, as well as your next interview... and the longer you carry the unresolved experience around with you the harder it is to resolve and move on.

None of us like rejection, we’re hard wired for approval from our peers and superiors so getting that rejection notification can hurt.  Just like getting things wrong and falling over as we get older it happens less often (until old age hits) and we get less accustomed to dealing with aftermath. We get more fearful of making a mistake, or failing, and most importantly of being seen failing. Somewhere deep inside there’s that belief that ‘at my age’ ‘at my stage of life’ ‘with all my decades of experience’… ‘I should have done better.’ “I shouldn’t have failed”

Which is complete nonsense of course, but if you’ve ever fallen over in your 40s or 50s after decades on not hitting the floor, believe me falling over is not only scary, it hurts!

And it’s the same with failing a test, making an error with a new software program or being a rejected at interview. We feel we should have stopped getting things wrong by now. Our minds go into protection mode to prevent us experiencing future pain and we decide not to do any more tests, training or interviews. We rationalise that avoiding the source of the pain is the best way to avoid future pain… but of course that’s broken thinking.

One failed interview doesn’t mean you’ll never pass an interview again and it certainly shouldn’t mean you never apply for another job!

If you’re struggling to get over a particularly painful and humiliating (in your eyes) failure, the best step is to fail better. Yes, you read that correctly, you need to get better at failing, or more specifically, recovering after a fail. I don’t mean you should put less effort in to interview preparation, or not care about the outcome, but you will interview better when you don’t equate your sense of worth with a pass/fail result and are able to both look objectively at what happened and learn from it as well as put it to one side so you can step into the next interview/test/training with confidence.

This ability to step into desired states such as confidence is exactly what I had to learn to do during my motorbike training. I came off my bike on 4 occasions while having lessons and have come off twice since. Each time I’ve learnt something new from the experience and each time there has been the temptation to not put myself in that situation again. But it’s a temptation I’ve had to resist because it would have meant not riding at all.

It’s the same with ‘failed’ interviews. If you’re still in shock from the last result, you need to let it go so you can go into the next one stronger… and that’s a lot of the work I help my clients with. Finding the courage and confidence to keep going, not under force or distress, but with ease.

If you'd like to hear more from me join my mailing list here