Ep #205: Why You Don’t Have to Prepare

Welcome. This is the Get a Six Figure Job You Love and Thrive podcast. This is episode 205, Why You Don't Have to Prepare. Welcome to the Get a Six Figure Job You Love and Thrive podcast, where I, Natalie Fisher, I'm teaching you weekly how to land your premium role that you love and thrive in it. Let's go. All right. We're taking a little break from the Maximum Impact series this week because I have my mother-in-law and my brother-in-law and his wife staying with us. And I wanted to get this other episode ready for you, but that'll be coming next week. So we'll get back to the Maximum Impact series, but we're going to take a little break. I'm going to talk to you about why you don't need to prepare. It was basically a Q&A that I had from one of my clients who— I get this a lot. Clients will be like, okay, I need to prepare. I have an interview. I don't have a lot of time. What should I do? And so I wanted to record an episode on that. I think it'd be really helpful for you if you have an interview coming up, or just to challenge your thoughts on preparing and when it is necessary, when it isn't necessary, and just making sure— my goal is for you not to have to stress out if you don't have time for it. Because if that's the case, if you don't have a lot of time to prepare, then we don't want that to get in the way of you showing up with the best value that you have to offer, because your value was always there whether you prepared it or not. So this episode's really gonna give you some tools for why I don't think preparing is always necessary, the kinds of preparing you can do, and some of the coaching that I offer inside my community on this topic. So enjoy, and I will see you back next week for continuing on with the Maximum Impact series. Hello and welcome to an episode of the Get a Six-Figure Job You Love podcast. Why you don't always need to prepare. What? Okay, so there's a lot of talk that comes up in my community about preparing and how people think they need to prepare. And when they don't have enough time, quote unquote, enough time to prepare, they get really panicked. So the thought is, I don't have enough time to prepare. Feeling is nervous, panicked, unsure. And then that state of mind can really impact you when you go into a room to discuss something with someone, because in your mind you're thinking, I'm not ready for this. I don't have the things I need to say at hand. I'm not prepared. I'm not prepared. Right? And that could be a total lie. And the fact that you're focusing on that could be a really big blocker for you that doesn't need to be there at all. So I want to propose that maybe you don't need to prepare. So the reason I'm like, why do we think we need to prepare anyway? Right? It's like this construct. It's this school mentality that we've been trained on since we've been little is like you need to study for the test. That means you need to memorize all these things beforehand. Okay? And that means you're prepared. That means you're well studied. Right? Or if you're giving a speech, or if you're giving a presentation. You need to have everything laid out perfectly and prepared. And, you know, some instances, I'm not saying never prepare. I'm not saying you never have to. I'm just questioning when it's helpful and when it's not. Okay. So in interviews specifically, it's very different, right? So let's say you are preparing to give a speech or a presentation that is different than trying to prepare for an interview. Here's why. Because when you're doing a presentation, you are the one speaking, right? You have control over what you're going to say, when you're going to say it, and how long you're going to be speaking for. And you might want to prepare that so that you know how long it's going to take you to go through the material you want, to make sure you're hitting on the points you want. That makes more sense to prepare for something like that than it does for an interview where you have no idea about any of it. You have no idea what questions they're gonna ask you. You have no idea what they're gonna be thinking. You have no idea what they're gonna be expecting. You have no idea what to prepare for. And so the problem when you stress yourself out trying to prepare for this is that you will never be as prepared as you want to be because you can't ever know Right? So the mindset of, I don't have enough time to prepare for this interview, often can derail people unnecessarily. Okay? So what I think, and my philosophy here for interviews, is that you don't need to prepare information about yourself very often. Like, you just kind of need to know, oh, I want to tell them about this story, or I would like to touch on this story. I want to tell them about this, or I want to tell them about that. And you can write those notes down, right? Just like as a one sentence, like, oh, I'm going to tell them about the time I moved the office, right? So the thing there is like, I just have one note, one thing that I'm like, oh, I want to make sure I cover that, right? That's different than saying I need to map out a script for all the answers that I might need, because you can never know what they are, right? And So if, say, you want to tell them about the time you moved the office, that's one of my signature stories that I would tell at interviews. You might think to yourself, okay, I'm going to work that in. And if there's no place to work it in, at the end, when they say, oh, is there anything else you'd like us to know? Or are there any questions? You could say, oh yeah, I really wanted to share with you something that I did that I felt pretty proud of that I think would be relevant here. And it was the time I moved offices. You can plan to do that if that's something really important that you wanted to communicate to them. And that might change during the interview. You might end up having the perfect opportunity to answer the question. Maybe they asked you, tell me about a time you handled a challenging situation, and you thought, oh, that's the perfect time for me to tell my moving story. So maybe you don't need to tell it at the end. You can prepare for those kind of scenarios. You can say, I want to tell them this, and If they ask this, I can answer with this, but nothing so concrete that you would know everything before it happens. And I think that our problem is that when we are going into an interview, we treat it like a test. We think, oh, we need to have all the answers ready. We need to know exactly what we need to do or what we need to answer before we even go in there. And that, my friend, is a losing game, a completely unrealistic expectation, and is going to just set you up for failure every time. So what I recommend is for your preparing, I have a document called 6 Core Stories, and I recommend more than 6. I recommend like as many as you can, but I have a document that shares examples of stories and stuff. So basically you just want to get familiar with your own stories. Okay. You want to get familiar with your own stories, what you want to talk about. So I have one where I made a mistake, right? And I think about it like, The bus story. 200 people were waiting for the bus and it was my fault, right? That's one of my stories where I talk about a mistake. I announced something in public that I shouldn't have announced. That's another mistake story, right? Or I have moving offices. That's like a hero story where I did a really good job of it and I added in some humor. Or I have my stories about difficult coworkers, right? I have a story about how somebody How I was being difficult and how this person won me over. And I tell that story and then I say, I learned so much from that and we ended up becoming good working colleagues. And so I just have it in my mind, right? I'm like, in my head I say, the story about Laura. Laura's the girl who stopped me from being difficult, or the story about the bus or the story about the move, right? Or the story about the receipts or whatever, right? Just a little mechanism for you to remember, oh yeah, these are the things I talk about. These are the things that I can easily share with them. That will be relevant and valuable and interesting and fun for me to talk about, right? So that's the way that you can prepare, right? But they also might ask you something completely out in left field, like, what if you were going to be an animal, what would you be, right? And you're probably going to be stumped on that. It's just not going to be avoidable. Like, maybe if you listen to a ton of interviewing podcasts for years, you will have Built up a lot of little tidbits of knowledge, but you don't have to have the answer to that to have a successful interview. You don't have to. On a side note, if they ask you about that, it's not really about the animal, it's about the reason why. So, if they ask me that now, I might say, oh, I'm like a squirrel because I hide nuts everywhere and then I go back and dig them up. So, I'm good with distractions because I can hide something or I can put something aside and I know where I put it and I can come back and dig it up later and finish it. Right. I might have a funny little anecdote like that to tell, but it's because of the why. It doesn't matter if it's a squirrel or whatever, or you could be like, I feel like I'm a leopard because I'm really fast, or I can adapt. I'm a chameleon because I can adapt to different situations or whatever. But you might not have the answer to that, and that might be fine. If they ask you, oh, how many golf balls fit in a Boeing 747 airplane? It's like, you're not going to know the answer to that. So you might say, oh, I would, Measure the circumference of the aircraft or the— and I would do the math of like how much each of these golf balls takes up in volume. And then I would do a calculation, right? Like you would never know the answer to that. So you can always think of it like, if you don't know the answer, what would you say in that situation? What would you say? And sometimes you just don't know and you can confidently say, honestly, I don't know that. I haven't been in that situation before. So here's what I would do. I would put on my thinking cap and I would start thinking about how to solve for this. And this is how I would go about it. about it, right? And just in real time, answer the question as you would think of it in the job, right? Hey, so if you've been listening to this for a while and you've been really enjoying what you hear on the podcast and it's been really helpful, but signing up for my program and diving into the material in there, getting personalized coaching is going to literally 10x the results that you get and the feelings that you feel from already listening to this podcast. If you're interested in upleveling, in getting a new job, in earning some more money, and making a change and you want some support with that, I would love to get to know you a little bit better and see if we are the right fit. So please go to www.nataliefisher.ca/application, and that's just the word application spelled out, and I'll ask you some questions so that I can get to know you a little bit better to see if we would be the right fit for you to get the best results possible inside my program. I can't wait to see your application come through. I read it personally and I'll get back to you. And also interviews are so unrealistic because in the job itself, you're never going to be expected to have these answers right off the bat, right away. You're not going to be expected to know exactly what the answer is. You're going to have training. You're going to know how to get to the answers. You're going to have a support system. And if you don't, it's not going to be a very good environment, right? Everybody needs a support system, right? Even me as an entrepreneur, I've needed to reach out to coaches and like other coaches who are building businesses and coaches who are farther ahead of me and like mentors. And I've needed that. Like everybody needs that. We are never completely on our own required to come up with every single answer ourselves every day, right? And so that's the pressure we put under ourselves and that feels terrible and it's an unrealistic construct. So I want to invite you to think in terms of, I don't need to have everything. I don't need to know everything. I can have some stories that I know I want to talk about, and I can, like, if you're in my community, you can come to me and I can help you figure out what those are and help you build confidence around those. I'm really good at that. Or you can just have these in your notes and be like, hey, these are the things I would like to talk about, I think are going to be really good and were really successful and bring a lot of value. And then you can do some research about the organization itself. That's the only research that I think is the Part where you can go do before. It's like you can say, okay, what's the company? What's their products? What do they sell? What are their goals based on what I'm seeing here online? What do I observe? If I was a consultant coming in to help this department, what would I be thinking? What would I be doing? Right? You can think about it in terms of how you apply your brain value and knowledge onto that company. And that's a different type of preparation. That's just you thinking about it. But I'll also tell you, If you're in a good state, like in a really good mood, you're just excited to be there. You're excited to meet them. You know nothing about the company. It's actually like you can still, and I'll give you an example. I got away with this. It was quite incredible. I went and I tried to research, actually, I tried to look it up. They didn't have any information online that was very clear right now. I know because I've lived around here for a while, but a few years ago, I went for this job at this office and it was called West Hills. And honestly, I didn't know what West Hills was. I did not know what they did. It was just called West Hills. And I went in and the first thing they asked me in the interview was, what do you know about us? And I didn't know anything. I had no clue because I had researched, but I couldn't figure out exactly what they did. All I saw was, landscapes of beautiful houses, beautiful lawns, and like a beautiful community feel with these neighborhoods. That's all I saw. So visually, that's all I could see, but I couldn't depict in the words what it actually meant. Like, do you do building? Do you do sales of these houses? Do you do— like, I didn't know. So in my— and I was just in such a good mood, like my state was just Open, like curious. And so I don't even know. I did not know what they did. And I responded with when they said, "What do you know about our company?" I said, "I know that it's really beautiful here and that I would love to aspire to live here one day." That's what I said. And so they were they were laughing. They were flattered. They were feeling good, probably feeding off my energy. And they were like, "Oh well, that's great. We do we do quite appreciate the surroundings here as well." And like just you know. Responding back. They didn't demand any more of an answer than that. And it's funny because I still don't know what exactly they do. So, I know that there's houses being built there and that they sell these houses and that they are very nice, but that's it, right? So, it's like my mindset, my state, my feelings had so much more to do with the performance in that interview than anything I researched. And also, I did get offered that job and I turned it down. Because in the end, when I went in there, the office was pretty dark and dingy. It was going to be more about accounting than I wanted. And so I did not accept the offer. And I remember they wrote me back and the lady there, Megan, who was one of the people who interviewed me, she's like, I'm really disappointed that I'm not going to be able to work with you, but I do understand. Because at the time I had other offers and I just, I just knew, I was like, this is just not a place for me. I'm going to be miserable. I'm not meant to be sitting in a dark Dingy room at a desk. That's not me. So that didn't work out, but it wasn't because I didn't know the answers, right? It wasn't because I— you cannot know the answers and your mindset and your energy can be so open and strong and curious and magnetic that it doesn't actually matter. So that's just one concrete example of how I could never prepare, how I couldn't prepare, how I had no way of knowing, and how I still managed to be— say an honest, congruent answer. Because what I And I, I like, it is beautiful. You look at those, like you drive through that area, it is beautiful. So I'm like, yeah, that's true for me. That's what I said, even though it doesn't actually say anything about what they did. So you don't always have to prepare in the way that you think you have to prepare. So what I recommend is instead preparing your mindset. Think thoughts over and over and over again that allow you to feel how I was feeling. In that interview, when I entered, I was open, curious, excited, looking forward to meeting these people. I wasn't pressuring myself to do perfect. I wasn't pressuring myself to do amazing things. I was just like, hey, what do you got here? How can I help? And when they asked me, oh, what questions do you have for us? And I would be like, oh yeah, I'd really love to know what you love about working here. Honestly, coming from, I would love to know Why do you love working here? How long have you been here? Right? Like, and so they'll start telling me like, oh, I really love my relationship with my coworkers. It's really fun. They're actually really nice people. Or one person, we started talking about Netflix somehow. Oh, right. It was like, what do you do in your spare time? And I was like, yeah, I like to binge shows on Netflix. And we started a whole conversation about Netflix and what shows and just a good chat with the, with the, with the guy who was the controller and I was supposed to be I would, I would've been working with him. But anyways, I didn't end up taking that opportunity. But just to give you an insight of me getting that offer had nothing to do with me preparing. Okay? So I want you to get, I'm not saying don't prepare. I'm not saying never prepare. I'm saying don't feel like you have to do it in the way of a test, like studying for a test where you cram all the information and then you regurgitate it back because that will never work for an interview. It will never be successful. Not unless they actually give you the questions beforehand, which is not unheard of. I have a colleague on LinkedIn, Jess Ramos, and she just hired someone and she said she gave them the questions upfront. And I said, you know what? That's amazing. I'm like, cool. More people should do that, but they don't do that, right? So it's not about that. It's not about the questions. It's not about having the right answers. It's not about having the perfect answer to everything. It's about having a conversation, being in an energy where you feel like you are being of service to them, you're being of service to yourself. You're thinking about both them and you in order to come to the best agreement, the best deal, or the best is— might be to walk away sometimes. And that's really important to know as well. So that's what I have for you today. That was a quick episode, and I will talk to you next week. Thanks so much. Hey, have you left me a review yet? If not, leaving me one now comes with an awesome bonus perk. I'm gonna give you access to my $97 course. It's titled 8 Reasons Why You Get Interviews But No Job Offers. This course is normally $97, but when you leave me a review as a thank you, I will give you access to it for free. And it's helped many professionals like you land their premium job offers and make more money just by simply going through this 4-day training that I did. I received so much feedback on so many of the results just from this $97 training, and I'd love to gift you that for free. So all you have to do is leave me a review on your favorite podcast platform, preferably iTunes, screenshot the review, email it to me. The details are in the show notes of the episode, and I can't wait to read your reviews and send you access to that course. Thank you so much.