During an interview with State Farm insurance when I was 21, I was halfway into my answer when I forgot the question. In a panic, my thoughts wandered from “what was the original question?” to “I’m such an idiot, I can’t believe this is happening! I shouldn’t be here.” My words trailed off and neither I nor the interviewer addressed what happened. I choked. The interview quickly wrapped up and, needless to say, I didn’t get the job. I was mortified of my performance and took many years to fully appreciate the lessons being learned.

And there are SO many lessons here:

1. Self-loathing (the underlying feeling that we are just not good) impedes growth and ultimately is a “self-fulfilling prophecy”. Until you learn to love yourself as you are now, knowing that you will continue to learn, grow, and get better, this negative self-talk can sabotage important events. At best, I would have remembered the question had I not beat myself up. At the least, I wouldn’t have fretted so much about my performance.
2. We are not inherently skilled – we have to prepare and practice. This was my first professional interview, and I hadn’t prepared or practiced at all! Of course it went poorly!! Our brain is like a muscle that must be exercised and trained; we need to teach it to keep the question in mind as we search for a meaningful answer.
3. Forgive yourself and accept the embarrassment. Muster the courage to simply admit that you made a mistake. Look them in the eye and say “I’m sorry, can you remind me of the question again?”. Maybe even laugh about it so they know you don’t always take yourself too seriously. This could be an opportunity for them to see how secure you are with being a fallible human being who has the will to forge on.
4. Confidence and ability come from lessons learned through both success and failure. I would argue that failure is a necessary part of the learning process that should be embraced and even sought out. Expose yourself to failure early and often. Software developers build this expectation into their process… they want the software to fail in a safe environment in order to find and correct the bugs they assume must exist (before customers find them).
5. Confidence and ability can also come from simply letting go of the expectation of perfection and embracing that you might just be on the front end of a steep learning curve!