Practice and preparation = perfect interview confidence. Being confident in a job interview means you believe you have the right skills and knowledge for the job. Confidence affects your body language – the employer will pick up on this and, if you lack confidence, they will notice it and begin to doubt whether you have the skills for the job.

Preparation

If you are well prepared you will have interview confidence. Simple. Make sure you prepare, check out these articles Do your Research and Prepare for Interview Questions

Stay in control

It’s understandable that you’ll be a little stressed – but you need to stay in control. Again, the best approach to beat stress in job interviews is by preparing. Preparation allows you to take control of the situation and reduce interview stress because, you are confident that you know the processes involved, you have done the research, you have a good idea of the questions you will be asked and that you have prepared an excellent set of thoughtful questions which show your intelligence and knowledge.

The interviewer will ask you questions and you’ll need to answer them clearly and calmly. Use breathing techniques, below, to slow your breathing down, making you calmer.

Breathing techniques

If you are prone to panicking when stressed, try these out:

Breath in through your nose but out through your mouth
Place a candle 30 centimetres from your lips – you can pretend if you don’t have one – and slowly breath in and out making sure you move the flame without blowing it out.

Practice these so when you become stressed during the interview, your interviewer won’t notice it – furtherincreasing your interview confidence.

Ask confident questions

A great example of a question which would make the interviewer think you are confident – without appearing arrogant or cocky – would be to ask something like:

‘Do you mind if I could have a look at where I’d be working?’ or ‘Could I meet the people I’d be working with?’

If for some reasons the employer were to say ‘no’, simply ask, ‘may I ask why?’ and tell them youd really like the meet your potential colleagues or see the workplace – this question further asserts your confidence by demonstrating that you are in control.

Another question which shows you are confident is:

‘Where do we go next from the end of the interview process?’

With this question, again, you’ll take control of the interview professionally.

Negative thoughts

Don’t let the ‘you can’t do it’ voice win. To help change negative thinking check out How To Stop Negative Programming.

You need to have a strong voice in your head that constantly tells you, ‘you can do it!’ Think of a positive person in your life – a friend, a parent or somebody you look up to.

I’ve said this before; confidence is just another skill you can learn. It doesn’t matter if you are not confident you can learn it. Think of it this way, the employer thinks you have the skills for the job – they believe in you! This is a great thing to think about that should help you be more confident in your job interview.

Practice

Practicing can really help you be confident in an interview. If you have not been to many interviews or are worried, youll be stressed. Try this application You can choose from interviewers in a variety of fields – they’ll ask difficult questions and give you advise you how to answer them. Go through it, pick the interviewers most relevant to your field then choose some one which are not. Once you have spent a liitle time doing this, and youve read our aticle on interview questions, youll be ready for any interview and any questions asked.

Also, practice walking into a room where someone is sitting at a desk – shake their hand. Have you heard of muscle memory? Let me give you an example – your phone rings – how many times do you notice that your hand moves to pick up the phone without you even thinking? This is muscle memory. What you are doing by practising walking into the room and shaking the person’s hand is training your muscles to react – in case you get nervous and forget what to do as soon as you get into the interview room. This makes sure you know what you need to be doing to appear confident.