“Coolly competent, the interviewee enters. Her handshake is firm, her gaze unwavering. Her answers are curt and unvarnished. She’s confident. She can get the job done, no doubt about that. But is she a nice person?”

“Warmly incompetent, the interviewee enters. She smiles nervously, but warms to the interview quickly. She speaks in fits and starts, but always with a big smile. She’s a nice person. But can she get the job done?”

Coolly competent, or warmly incompetent?

According to research done by Amy Cuddy, first impressions are binary. “We look first at two characteristics: how lovable they are (their warmth, communion, or trustworthiness) and how fearsome they are (their strength, agency, or competence)”.

We do this to answer a rather important question: whether or not your new acquaintance is a threat. Threats aren’t so prevalent nowadays. You’re rather less likely to be slain by a marauding tribesman. But our hunter-gatherer brains haven’t caught up. So, when we assess a stranger, we’re looking for danger signs.

Consider the first interviewee. Reading the description, many of you may admire her. She’s certainly got ability. But her lack of warmth triggers the ‘danger’ alarm. The interviewer goes into ‘avoidance’ mode, trying to get away from the threat in front of them. Despite seeing their obvious competence, they begin to find reasons to dislike the interviewee. So, even though the interviewee can do the job well, they don’t get it.

Cuddy advocates the approach of the second interviewee. Being warm and lovable activates the listener’s ‘approach’ mode. They begin to feel kindly towards you and will ignore some of the mistakes you make. You’re more likely to get the job. And if you go on to demonstrate great competence, they will say ‘I knew it all along’.

We think of job interviews as all about demonstrating competence. But they’re not: it’s about demonstrating warmth. That’s why they’re a part of the process: to weed out candidates who might pose a threat to the office environment. But what if you feel that you don’t come across warmly enough?

See Also: 8 Interview Tips For Introverts

The importance of emotion

Here begins the deluge of standard-issue advice. Smile. Make eye contact. Shake their hand with both of yours. Sit with your hands a certain way. Keep your body language open.

The trouble with these pearls of wisdom is they don’t go deep enough. The real way to change from office ‘threat’ to office ‘asset’ is in the way you speak about your experiences.

A quick test. Imagine you’re speaking to someone about your day. If you’re alone, speak out loud. If you’re not, run the conversation through in your head. Talk through what you’ve been up to, what your plans are tonight, and what you’ve got on the docket for tomorrow.

Now consider two possibilities. In the first, you logically went through everything you needed to do. “I’m writing a blog in the morning, then taking the dog out, then going out to dinner in the evening.” It all made sense, and hung together like a list.

In the second, you emphasised the emotive parts of your day. “So I’m struggling at the moment to get a blog finished: you know how it is. Then I’m doing a little walk with Jasper. Oh, and we’re going out to this Persian place. They do really good meze.”

Notice the difference in the two stories. One is rich with detail, full of images that spring to your mind. It’s obvious that the speaker enjoys what they do, and remembers important details from their day. But the other is bland. It has the bare facts, but no details: nothing is important enough to remember.

Let’s test this with an interview question: “Tell us about yourself”.

Here, it’s tempting to start demonstrating competency. You might speak logically about where you went to school, what you did afterwards, and what you did after that. But remember, it’s all about warmth.

You can use the same logical structure, but fill it with detail. What did you enjoy most about school? What did you learn about yourself from where you worked afterwards? What was important, enjoyable, inspiring, or difficult about the experience you had? What did you learn?

It comes down to empathy. The ‘perfect’ job interview isn’t one where you read off your resume. It’s a communion. It’s an easy friendliness and emotional openness that proves two things: that you’re not a threat, and that you might just be something special.

How Do You Show Warmth?

Competency is rather easy to demonstrate. You can reel off years of experience and academic qualifications. Warmth is harder. But there are some steps you can take to put you on the right path.

Reframe Your Experience

Anecdotes can be easily abused in interviews. Remember that time you made a discovery that saved the company? Consider how you might share that story in an interview. You might emphasize how important it was to the company and how much money it saved. Imagine the ideal reaction from your interviewer: ‘How conscientious you are! What an asset you are to that company. They must be terrified to lose you: what will happen now that they can’t leverage your competence?’

Try and find the warmth in your experiences. Tell the story of how you found the discovery. How did you feel when you found it? What dilemma did you face? Who did you tell? How did you feel afterwards? What did you learn? These questions invite the listener to consider your motives, instead of just seeing how great you are. They begin to understand you at a deeper level, and you start to build warmth.

See Also: Interview Tips: What Not To Say During Your Next Job Interview

Study Your Habits

It may be your brain that considers what to say, but it’s your body that says it. Sometimes, your body says things you don’t expect. You may feel deeply interested in the subject, but your body may be communicating disinterest. Get someone you trust to assess your speaking habits. Do you speak too quietly? Do you seem bored? Do you seem nervous?

Try to get the simple things right. Make eye contact. Keep your posture upright and your chest relaxed and open. Use energy when you speak to keep your listener interested. And while you’re there, focus on breathing to relax your body and calm your nerves. Tips on diaphragmatic breathing will be invaluable on that front.

Be Present

The trickiest thing about demonstrating competence is that it pulls you out of the moment. It sends you out of the interview room via memory lane. You begin to lose focus on the people opposite you. And as you lose focus, you begin speaking at them, not to them.

Every time you speak, your listeners are giving you crucial information. From their reactions, they might be indicating that they’ve heard what you’re saying before. They might be showing confusion or interest in something that you only explained minimally. They are guiding you.

Demonstrating competence can feel like reading off a list of things by rote, without regard for what people actually want to hear. Keep your focus on the person you’re speaking to. You’re speaking to them, so explain things that mean more to them. You’ll learn more about them, and they’ll learn more about you. And that’s how you make a connection.

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While some folks bandy around the statistic that we each make 35,000 decisions per day, others prefer to level it out at a neat 773,618 per lifetime.

Whatever way you look at it, you are at least aware of making a handful of semi-important to important decisions each day, and at least a couple of major-ish ones each week: and these are the kind of forking-path moments for which we need to be best advised. The wrong choice might wind you up with a heartache, crippling debt or serious injury.

Unfortunately, nobody ever teaches us how to make decisions. We’re just equipped with a ton of information through school, the media, and life, and expected to figure out how best to use it ourselves. This would be fine if we were robots, but when human values come into play we tend to frame the information we have in strange ways – for example, ‘confirmation bias’, where we focus on facts that back up our instincts rather than paying more attention to warning signs that we might be wrong.

What you need is a little objectivity. Let’s take a look at how to get some.

Step outside yourself

A Princeton University study showed that we are more objective when we pro-actively try to make a decision that will appear to be objective to someone else.

To truly shed your personal bias, pick a random figure from your life, or perhaps someone whose opinion you really respect. Imagine yourself explaining your decision-making process on a particular issue to them and see what comes out.

If in doubt, you can always find somebody to try it out on in person!

Make a decision, then decide whether to keep it

One reason it’s so tough to make a decision is because it feels so final. You um-and-ah between two options, never quite willing to opt for one or the other because it feels like a commitment.

In fact, it’s been shown that simply plumping for your favored decision and then deciding whether to keep to it can be a more positive way of moving forward. So, make your decision quickly, without too much thought – and then take a moment to reflect: does this feel right? Suddenly your options will seem less abstract.

Clear your mind

Decision-making moments often seem to come at us like a whirlwind. With new information and new emotions to process, it’s easy to make an overly-subjective choice based on the way you’re feeling in a given moment.

A study by the Association of Psychological Science showed that it only takes a few minutes to let those emotions fade and return to a more objective state of mind. So, next time you’re about to make a decision in the heat of the moment, take ten minutes to go for a walk, do some stretches or close your eyes and listen to music.

You’ll return to the decision-making process with cooler blood and a smarter state of mind.

Be positive

One of the reasons that decision-making is so stressful is that every option seems to be piled up with potential negatives. We want to avoid feeling regretful, so we concentrate on avoiding the biggest downfalls.

These negative issues also tend to be the most emotive ones, so concentrating too hard on them can lead you away from making an objective choice. Instead of framing your problem as the avoidance of negative outcomes, try listing the pros of each option first – and identifying the positive side effects of the cons.

Know thy own mood

You know intuitively that the way you feel will affect the decisions you make. Yet, particularly when emotions are running high, we don’t tend to slow down to consider these emotions. Before you make a decision, slow down and ask yourself how you’re feeling – and be careful not to make your choice based purely on the power of passing emotions.

See Also: 3 Simple Steps to Balance Your Emotional State

Look at the bigger (and older) picture

Human beings have a tendency to make our choices based on the newest information that we’ve received – often overlooking what we already knew.

Refusing to make snap decisions upon the discovery of new information can give you a chance to let it settle into context. Again, it’s about letting that initial emotion pass before you do something silly.

The 5 Whys

Perhaps you’ve already heard of the 5 Whys. It’s a process that can be applied to many different tasks in your professional and personal life, from the development of ideas to problem solving.

When it comes to making decisions, the 5 Whys can help you by identifying the underlying mechanics of the situation. Ask yourself a big why – ‘why am I thinking about proposing marriage?’ and then ask ‘why’ to each of your subsequent answers: ‘Because I love her. Why do I love her?’ etc.

GOFER

There’s no ‘Y’ in GOFER, but this is still a serious idea-interrogation tool. It means making a structured list of five key aspects of your decision:

Goals: What do you want from the outcome of this decision?
Options: What are the possibilities from which you must choose?
Facts: What do you objectively know about the situation?
Effects: What are the potential outcome scenarios of each possible decision?
Review: What do the above answers point towards?

Quantify your options

Decision-making is usually a complex process involving a whole ton of variables. Getting a bird’s-eye view on your opinions in each of these aspects can involve the kind of clarity that’s difficult to find when you’re stressed or hurried.

So, instead of letting those outcomes float around in a cloud, write them down and give each pro and con a score on a consistent scale: for example from -5 to +5, where -5 is a terrible con and +5 is the best pro.

Do the math at the end of it all and you should have a clearer idea of what you really think about each option. If your gut tells you that the math has given you a winner that you actually don’t want, that’s still okay – it just means the process has helped you to clarify your emotions and your inner needs, as well as the objective facts. We’re not robots, after all!

See Also: Why Good People Make Bad Decisions 

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