The next week was exiting and crammed full of learning for everyone—especially me. In order to help students engage successfully at an interview and write powerful résumés, they wanted to see the value of all the work they had done in the past. They needed to retell the story of their employment history, so they gave it the respect it deserved and made the skills they had shown in those jobs transferable to their new careers. We worked on all of that and many other elements of the working and personal self. Part of our discussions centered on the idea that the subject of the interview was the person interviewing. The job was the object of the interview, and the interviewee was the subject. All this meant to offer students an environment where they could experience a personal empowerment from within. When they discovered how they had acted powerfully in the past, they could see how they would act powerfully in new jobs and new roles.
Everything seemed to go well. Students showed insights into their past work and conduct. We laughed a good deal, and they spoke with growing respect and confidence about their employment history. Everything they said seemed to augur well.
The mock interviews said otherwise.
The students still knew what they had learned about themselves, but they could barely get any of it said. After all the confidence they showed in class discussions, they lapsed into the clichéd interview performance that came directly from fear. I conducted the interviews, and they knew me, but the fear still dominated. Clearly, the intellectual, conscious approach toward the successful interview didn't work by itself. That perspective had only limited success. It did well for the mental attitude of the students, but it hadn't touched the emotional part of their understanding and performance. The intellectual helped, but the emotional apparently dominated.
When the interviewing course started the next time, I went at the question of interviewing and fear quite directly. We discussed the idea of the subject of the interview, and we came to the same conclusion. The subject of the interview was the interviewee. Then I posed this question, "If the subject of the interview is you, and you are afraid of the interview, what do you have to fear about yourself? What's wrong with you?"
That question stunned us all. I explained that in my first try at the interviewing course all had gone well in terms of the external self, understanding consciously our individual excellence in the workplace. That didn't seem to do much if anything for the internal self, the one that makes emotional judgments about the self. The external discussions did not touch on the meaning perspectives that drove the emotional response to the interview situation, the most immediate part of the interview.
If they and I feared there was something was wrong with our self, maybe what we needed to do was examine how the self came to be, came into form, and why we felt such fear about that self.