No one wants to look like a fool.

Fear of looking a fool can stop us doing a lot of things, from wearing a slightly different outfit to speaking up in meetings.

That’s pretty common, but as a coach, the question I ask clients is how are they interpreting what a fool looks like? In my experience it’s mostly just our own perception based on assumptions we are making about what other people think.

I remember feeling rubbish at my job. I also knew that I was my own worst critic and set very high standards for myself. After struggling for a while, I decided it was logical to measure my peers using the same scale I applied to myself. When I did this, nobody did very well.

That’s when I thought, we are all rubbish at our job. This didn’t make sense, it seemed very unlikely - why would the organisation employ all these people that were rubbish at what they were doing?

Job interviews seem to hold a particular place in people’s hearts. And it’s not a good one.

A client came to me recently who had been out of work for a little while. They’d been applying for quite a few things and getting invited for interviews but that’s where it ended. It was becoming a disheartening routine.

We humans love a story. We love telling them, we love hearing them and we certainly love watching them on TV. In fact, we tend to think that everything has to have a story behind it, it makes us feel more comfortable.

There is a lot of advice out there these days about preparing for a job interview but how do you stand out from the crowd? For example, we all know these days that you should have a look at the company’s website, see what news articles come up when you Google them, and of course to have a few questions for the panel at the end of the grilling. It’s all good advice.

But I’ve found that if you’re not careful you can prepare so hard, you forget to be you.

Confidence can come and go. You might feel super confident giving a presentation to the Board but then like a fish out of water at a party. When you have it you aren’t really aware of it and it never crosses your mind. When you don’t have it, it feels like you can stop noticing it. The strange thing is in either situation, nothing has actually changed, you are still you. The only thing that’s different is your perception of you.