Larisa was sitting at the kitchen table, her eyes filled with tears of frustration. Six months before, she was laid off from her position as a Senior Project Manager at a large insurance company where she worked for more than 20 years and now she was holding her fifth rejection letter after yet another final interview for a position that she knew she was qualified for. Larisa was starting to suspect that her interview skills might be letting her down. She wondered: “What do I need to do differently to convince my interviewers that I am the right person for the job? How can I speak with more power?”
Speaking with power is a skill that most would agree can help in many situations. And few situations have higher stakes for speaking with power than a job interview. Larisa’s struggles are not unique. Many job seekers spend a lot of time and effort searching for the right job, preparing their resume and practicing interview questions only to fail to speak with enough power and conviction necessary to get that job. What is unique about Larisa is that she is… my mother!
As a public speaker and a speech coach, I have become a student of speaking with power. I found that there is a 5-step process that effective speakers use to speak with power. This process is applicable to almost any situation where it is essential to connect and convince an audience, but it is particularly effective during a job interview. I have successfully trained many job seekers in this way, but it was not until I had to train my own mother that I really understood the full potential of this process.
To speak with power you need to tell a Story with a Purpose that Engages your Audience so you can share your Knowledge. Story, Purpose, Engagement, Audience, Knowledge or SPEAK for short.
As common sense as this might sound, speaking with power is not a common practice. Too many people, including my mother, have gone to interviews trying to convince their audience of their superior knowledge instead of focusing on a way to engage their audience’s hearts and minds. As you will see, if you speak with power you can connect with the audience AND get your point across far more effectively.
Story: Speaking with power always starts with a story, because our brains are actually wired for stories! Incredibly, if I was to slide you into an MRI machine, your brain would light up in the same way whether you experience an event or just see or hear about it.
Imagine holding freshly sliced half of a lemon. Visualize its pitted yellow skin, its juicy center, its tangy smell. Now imagine biting into its tart, mouth-puckering flesh… Now, I bet your mouth has just filled in with saliva as if you actually bitten a real lemon! Your mouth will not salivate, though, if I told you about lemons being tart citrus fruit with astringent juices full of Vitamin C and other nutrients. The story of eating a lemon fired up your brain and made you feel its effect!
Unfortunately this hard-wired connection to stories is rarely used by job seekers during an interview. In her first interviews, my mother proudly presented facts and statistics of her successes at her previous job, but such numbers and experiences do not really connect with the interviewers. It would have been far more effective to turn her job experiences into engaging Stories that illustrated her expertise.
Preparing Stories: When preparing for the interview, you might consider creating 3-5 stories, each 1-2 minutes long that describe most memorable are relevant experiences of your professional life. When you do, work on making them as specific, vivid, concrete and suspenseful. If you do, the brains of your interviewers will light up with understanding and empathy-which is instrumental for you getting that job.
Purpose: No story is ever complete without a Purpose. We all can remember a time when our colleague, teacher or parent launched into a long story, while we kept wondering “What’s the point?!” The Purpose of interview stories is to help you stand out in your interviewers mind and to help them feel that you are the right person for the job. But stating your purpose outright rarely works either. Coming in and saying “I am the best, my work is best and I can solve all your problems.” would most likely sound arrogant.
My mother had trouble balancing between those two extremes. She did not want to sound conceited but still felt the need to outline all her skills, experience and abilities. But this breadth of information tended to obscure her purpose, took too long and failed to help my mom stand out. She often left the interview feeling that she did not have enough time to give all information.
Getting to The Purpose: When you share your purpose through a story, the interviewers will be able to visualize for themselves how you will fit into the company if you get the job. The story needs to be able to answer three key questions:
- Why YOU?–dealing with your credibility
- Why This–dealing with the quality of the story
- Why Now–dealing with why this story is relevant to the question in hand.
By weaving the purpose into the action each story, you will be able to give the interviewers all the reasons to hire you while engaging the audience.
Engagement: Engagement is the third and critical element in speaking with power. It deals with HOW to say it vs. WHAT to say. Reverend Martin Luther King, is often mentioned as one of the most powerful speakers of our time. Visualize for a moment the 200,000 civil rights supporters gathered in the sweltering heat of summer in front of Lincoln Memorial. Hear in your mind the booming voice of the MLK engaging the audience in his powerful message: “I have a Dream!” Now imagine the same words spoken in an arrogant voice of someone who is full of themselves “I have a dream” or in a small timid voice of someone who is unsure of themselves: “I have a dream?” How effective would these same powerful words be then at creating engagement?
Engaging the audience has many elements that include eye contact, body language, vocal variety, and it is often the most critical part of speaking with power. Yet, like many other interviewees before her, my mother struggled with engaging her audience. Listening to one interview that she recorded, I heard how unsure her voice sounded, even though I knew she was a true pro at her job. She also tended to nervously wring her hands when speaking which made her seem even more unsure of herself.
Creating Engagement: When you interview, remember that your eye contact, vocal variety, body language and your props (like your resume, portfolio, or a presentation) are your tools of engagement. Use them effectively and your interviewers will get engaged in YOUR “I have a Dream speech” and wanting to give YOU the job!
Audience: But you are not the only one in the room who has a dream—your interviewers do too! Their dream is finding the best person out of dozens who they interview that will solve their problems, earn them money, and make them look good. That is why it is essential to understand your Audience’s unique needs.
For example, when my mother interviewed at a headquarters of an international bank, she was quick to point out her expertise in project management but did not seem to have a strong understanding of the bank’s business structure or the company culture.
Tailor To Your Audience: As you prepare for the interview it is worth your time to learn the company’s vision, mission and objectives, and to seek out ways to learn more about company culture. When you find areas where the objectives of your audience match yours– tailor your message so that this synergy of dreams comes through and it will be clear to the interviewers why YOU should be the one to get that job.
Knowledge: If a Story with a Purpose is a race car and Engaging your Audience is the gas that moves the engine, your Knowledge is the driver. Your Knowledge IS, after all, what the interviewers are looking for. That is why my mother, like most people at an interview present their knowledge in its unadulterated form to their interviewers, hoping that their interviewers will magically translate your previous job experience into the current position.
But therein lies the Curse of Knowledge. The Curse of Knowledge is a human tendency to speak in abstract on subjects we are familiar with, while the uninitiated audience is hungering for a story to use as a framework. In fact, another way of describing the five steps to speaking with power might be telling a Story with a Purpose that Engages your Audience while avoiding the Curse of Knowledge. During her interviews my mother tended to repeat the facts and figures that demonstrated her ability, inadvertently succumbing to the curse of knowledge. It was, as she found out, the key reason why she felt like she crashed did not win the race for the job.
Avoiding the Curse of Knowledge: When speaking with power, you must, of course, know your topic. But the more you know it, the easier it will be to lapse into abstract descriptions that are not memorable or convincing. If, on the other hand your, Knowledge is the driver of a Story Car driven with Purpose and fueled by the Engagement of your Audience, you will rally the hearts and minds of the interviewers and win that job!
Speaking with power is a process that can transform your ability to express and connect, but it does take practice.
- Story: Prepare 3-5 stories that exemplify your professional experience. These can be about your successes or challenges, and should be vivid, specific and suspenseful
- Purpose: Highlight how each story is relevant to the team you will be working for. Answer the three questions of why you, why this, and why now
- Engagement: Identify areas of vocal variety, eye contact and body language that you are good at and those that still need some work
- Audience: Research the company, culture and the team around the job you are applying to in order to better understand their specific needs
- Knowledge: Practice these steps so that when you are asked an unexpected question, you are prepared to share your knowledge in novel and impromptu ways.
Incidentally, did you know that MLK’s “I have a Dream” section of his speech was not even in the script? A lady in the audience shouted to him, “Martin, tell us about your dream!” MLK has practiced this story many times and he decided to improvise and tell it. And now it is the part of his speech that is remembered the most. That is speaking with power!
Practice also paid off for my mother. In May of 2011, my mother has landed another interview. In the preceding months, she has joined Toastmasters, trained with me and learned the power of the 5-step SPEAK process. She prepared five short stories about her job experience and was able to use three of them to answer questions about team work, overcoming challenges and creating innovation. Her purpose was to show the interviewers that she is a real team player and she loves solving complex challenges. She engaged her audience by eye contact, vocal variety, body language and when they asked for references, she surprised them by taking out a three sheets of testimonials from her former colleagues praising her skill and professionalism. She understood her audience, researching the company, the department and the hiring manager. She even found a current employee of the company on LinkedIn and interviewed him about the challenges of the job. All this preparation gave my mother confidence and a powerful platform to share her knowledge. The interviewers were impressed and now my mother has a job that pays more and is more rewarding than the one she had to leave.
So now it is your turn. SPEAK with Power by telling Stories with Purpose that Engages your Audience so you can share your Knowledge and
GET THAT JOB!
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