How to Sell Yourself Without Sounding Arrogant

Selling yourself doesn't have to sound braggy, but you do need to know why you're the best person for the job.

Before we get into today's episode, if you're prepping for your interview, make sure you're signed up to our free 5-day email crash course. It breaks down exactly what you need to do to stand out, and you can sign up via the link in the description. And the Academy waitlist is now open. If you want structured support for your consultant interview, join via the link in the description. This week, we're tackling the fear of sounding arrogant when you sell yourself. We break down a mistake regarding a missed scan, and we look at how to answer a question about where your specialty is headed in the future. Welcome back to another episode. Hi, Becky, nice to see you.

Lovely to see you too.

Shall we get into it?

Let's do it. Let's do it.

Okay, first up, we've got a student question of the week. This is a question from one of our Academy students. And the question this week is, I find it hard to talk about myself positively in the interview without feeling like I'm bragging or being arrogant. How am I supposed to sell myself in my interview?

I mean, this is everyone's interview fear, right? Isn't it?

Yeah.

You just don't want to sound like you're being in any way, you know, the big I am. But equally, this is your moment to shine.

It is.

I think this is about being clear about what you're bringing to the team. You know, have a real think about why you're the right person for this job. What's your skill set? How does it align to this job and what they need? And just think about ways that you can demonstrate that to the panel in a way that's just completely factual. You know, you're telling them what you've done, being clear on the transferable skills, aligning it to what they need. Giving them evidence in terms of things that you've done and the outcomes that you've had already. That's not bragging, that's just a fact. You're being honest about it.

Yeah, and this is why it feels so much better when you bring out the specifics from your unique selling points, the projects you've done, rather than persuading them, rather than being like, this shows I'm great because of this, or everyone gave me really nice feedback and everyone loves me. But you're actually saying, I led a team of 6 people, we did X, Y, and Z, we audited 100 patients and we showed And that is so much clearer, and you're not needing to feel like you're embellishing it or kind of persuading them that you're awesome. You're just showing them with fact. It is this hard balance of— it does feel weird trying to sit in front of a panel and tell them why you're great, but it is a weird situation. You need to just embrace the weirdness. If you were going for a coffee with one of them informally for a social, you wouldn't be doing that. That's fair enough, but this is an interview situation. You have to just kind of lean into the fact that you want them to give you a job, and in order for them to give you a job, they need to know what you're good at. Otherwise, there's no reason why they would pick you as opposed to any of the other candidates. So, there has got to be selling yourself as the goal, but you can do it in different ways. You can do it in ways that make you still seem like yourself and seem nice and not seem arrogant.

And look, this is 30, 40 minutes out of your life that you've got to secure your dream job. Nobody else in that room is going to do it for you. It's, it's down to you, and you don't want to walk out of there feeling like you could have given it just a little bit more.

Yeah.

So I think just instead of describing yourself, you know, in sort of generic terms— I'm a really great communicator, I'm a really great team player, and people love bit when I'm on the shift. I'm sure that's absolutely true, but show them an example of your great communication skills. You know, have an example ready where you successfully de-escalated a conflict, or where you persuaded the board to give you money for a business case for a service transformation. Those are great communication skills, and those are fact-based things. They actually happened. You can demonstrate the outcome, and you're not just saying some generic thing like, you know, my interpersonal skills are really fabulous.

I'm a great guy. I'm a great guy, you want me on the team? Yeah, so the general theme is being specific and being objective is much better than being subjective, vague, or persuasive. You'll feel better, you'll be able to still sell yourself, but not in a way that feels, uh, braggy or comes across as arrogant. Let's go on to the golden example. So this is an example from one of our students. This time we've got an example of tell me about a time you made a mistake. And the one we've got here is, I requested an MRI for a patient. My secretary got a call that she hadn't had an appointment come through. I checked and I had requested it as routine. It should have been on the 2-week cancer pathway. I felt terrible. What do you think?

Yeah, I mean, look, I think this is a good example, and there's a number of reasons for that. So the first one is it's really easy to explain. Yeah, you've explained the answer, the example, in a couple of sentences. There's no huge amount of clinical detail, there's not a great big story in there, so we all know what happened. You've taken ownership of the mistake, and I think that's one of the things, it's really important that you Own it, you know, this was me. And then just be clear, I felt awful about it. This is a patient who should have been on the 2-week cancer pathway. And then you can just talk about, you know, the steps that you took to rectify it, and what was the learning, both for you personally, and if there's any wider system learning as a result. I think this works really well. Yeah.

What do you think about the— so one thing that we don't know from this example is how long it was. Before the patient called up the secretary. And I, in some way, I mean, it would make a difference if it was 9 months later versus 3 weeks later. Do you think it's important to include the time, or are we okay without it?

Yeah, I suppose often with these mistake examples, or, and the conflict ones as well, I kind of like to close the loop a little bit. You know, I've just said that I don't like a load of storytelling, but I do think sometimes the panel needs to know That it was okay.

Yeah.

You know, so maybe it could be, you know, a week later, the patient called to find out what was happening. And at that point, I realised she got, you know, I fast-tracked it, she got the scan done, you know, whatever. So, yeah, I think you're right, particularly so that we don't have the panel sitting there wondering about—

How bad was it? That's a good— yeah, I think closing it, the loop, in some way, if it's not in that moment, then even at the end of the answer, is just saying, you know, It was okay, because if it was 9 months and it was very bad, then it becomes a pretty big mistake, um, that may be too significant to share in your substantive consulting interview.

Then we're in duty of candour territory.

Yeah.

And somebody else could use that as a duty of candour example, but you can't.

Yes.

Um, so I think as a mistake example, this works well as long as there was no major harm caused.

Yeah, agreed. Love how easy it is to explain as well. Like you said, I think it's really nice that you're not left needing to know all the details. Like, it doesn't really matter what the MRI was for or what the clinic— why, you know, it was— it's just enough. Um, and I think it's very easy for people to get bogged down in oversharing the details, but this is a great way to, to phrase it in a couple of sentences. And now next up, we've got our interview question. This is a question that would— has been asked recently in an interview, might be asked in yours. What is the question we're going to look at today?

So the question is, how do you see our specialty evolving over the next 5 years?

Okay. Um, quite a common— well, one thing is that if there's a presentation, I would say this is quite a common presentation topic, or a version of a presentation topic, is where do you see the specialty going? What's the future of the specialty? Or versions of that, I think, are quite common as the presentation. So you may get it as that. But if you don't, I think it's actually a good question to ask. Because it shows like your understanding of priorities, future directions. And what's good about it is you get a really good chance to bring in the stuff from your pre-interview visits here about what you know about where they're headed, as well as the national specialty goals or whatever, but also the goals within this team. And I think that's where you can do it really well, is to bring in the general specialty path, what you know about them, and what you bring. And so it is always— I think what's key is always remembering it's your interview. They're rarely just testing your knowledge on a topic. They want to know how you fit into it. So how are you going to help their team evolve towards that goal in 5 years? What are you going to do? Um, and so it's quite a lot to think about when you're doing it, but if you can do all these things, it'll be a cracking answer. Um, and I guess also bringing in the NHS 10-year plan is kind of a broad way that the specialty will be headed.

Yeah, I think you're right. I think this is a— um, versions of this can come up, and it could come up as essentially a vision for the service.

Yeah.

Um, something like that. Anything that's a bit, you know, a bit future-facing, more than in the next few months. I think that the key here is, as you say, to show your understanding of what are the priorities of the specialty and this service, particularly what are they focusing on in the next year to few years, but also how could you fit into this. So, for example, if you're talking about integrating NHS 10-year plan and your service and you're saying, actually, we're going to move to a model of I don't know, digital electronic triage in the A&E department. Actually, you know, this would help us to streamline patients, blah, blah, blah. You know, I've got specific experience in the use of AI in healthcare when I did my project on blah, blah, blah. So if we wanted to implement this in our department, I'd be very happy to lead on that. So now you understand the vision for the service, you've aligned it to the 10-year plan and your own particular skill set. Or even if you've done a great change project, you know, you don't have to be an AI specialist. You know, any amount of change that they want to bring in, you know, just, just show how you're the person to help create change in your department. Because that's stronger than just understanding where your specialty is going, because now you're a part of that journey for the department.

Yeah. I think when people— if you've not prepared well, this question will be quite stressful for you. But actually, you can anticipate it. And I think when you're prepping, thinking about priorities for the service and broadly, nationally as well, but within your team, is really important because it can come up in different ways. And anyway, you want to know what direction they're headed in for any projects you're suggesting and to tailor your answers to other questions as well. If you prep for it, you can do this really well, but you don't want to leave it to be a surprise because it'll probably not be great.

That would be quite a nasty surprise.

It would be. It would be hard, and you'd be pulling out— yeah, you just have to pull out stuff you know. But now we've discussed it in this podcast episode, that's not going to happen, so it's going to be fine.

That won't happen to you.

Nope. Okay, let's go on to our tip and trick of the week. This week we've got a visualisation tip. We have a lot of different guest speakers come into the Academy, and we have speakers who have spoken about this before, which is the idea of visualising in the run-up to your interview in the final week or 2, to visualise yourself walking into the room, doing a great first question and answering it calmly to help kind of get yourself into the zone and regulate yourself in the run-up. Is this something that you've done before, Becky? What do you think? How— what do you think about it?

I quite like it as a technique. I definitely do this for other stressful situations, like conference presentations and stuff. I just kind of think, you know, just picture myself, you know, standing there feeling what I'm going to feel, and, you know, then going for it. And I think that this works for any particularly stressful situation. I think it particularly works well for the interview question because you essentially know what the first question is going to be.

Mm-hmm.

So either you've been asked to do a presentation, in which case that's going to be probably the first bit of your interview, or they're going to ask you some version of tell me about yourself. Um, in, you know, in either case, you know what's coming, so you can kind of Picture yourself entering the room, settling yourself down, saying hello to everyone, being, you know, nice and warm and pleasant. And then they will either say to you, okay, would you like to give us your presentation? Or they'll say, right, you ready to start? Can you tell us about yourself? And then you can just, you know, picture yourself taking a deep breath and launching into that first prepared sentence that you know you're going to say. And then you're off on a great start because that bit's already over, the ice is broken, and now you're just in flow. So, I think it could work for quite a lot of people.

I do it as well. I actually, I like it too. It's, 'cause otherwise your mind can like just go to the, they're asking me a question, I don't know the answer, and I'm sweating and crying, and it's gonna be terribly awkward. And actually, if you can just settle into that first, but actually, no, it could go like this, and it will go like this. And you know, like you say, it's the predictability of the start. Obviously, you can't 100% guarantee what the first question will be, but in the vast majority, they will start by hearing a bit about you in some version. And so, yeah, I think it can be very grounding to just imagine that happening. Um, and then it takes you away from the panic of all the what-ifs and what if they ask this and what if, you know, I fall over on the way in or what if I burst into tears. Uh, so, um, yeah, I think it's a, it is a good technique and it's like you say, it's good to practice in other areas as well. Anything that you feel a bit stressed about. Um, so yeah, I think this is a very nice one.

Hmm. I like it.

Great. Okay. I think that's brought us to the end, so we will wrap up there and I will see you in the next episode.

See you next time.