Put yourself in the lead

Have you ever wondered what it takes to be an Olympic champion?

Apart from having immense natural ability, superhuman levels of determination and a burning drive to succeed, many champions also excel at managing their mind for optimum performance. Essentially, they train their brains as well as their bodies so that on the big day they are able to perform to their full potential.

We know that in interviews and other assessment situations, sometimes the difference between a candidate who is successful and one who doesn’t make it is that the successful candidate was able to produce their best performance on the day, while the unsuccessful candidate left the assessment feeling that they hadn’t done themselves justice.

So what can you do about this?

There are lots of practical things you can do to ensure that you are well prepared for an interview or assessment centre, and most bookshops will have a whole shelf devoted to this subject. Amazon has dozens of books on interview skills alone. However, what we want to do here is go beyond the practical advice on interview etiquette and offer you some mental tools and techniques that will enable you to demonstrate your full potential during our assessment process.

Let’s be honest – we’re not offering you these tools out of the kindness of our hearts: the bottom line is that we put a great deal of resource into identifying talented graduates who will be the future leaders in the NHS, and it is disappointing when we get the impression during an assessment process that a candidate has potential, but because of nerves or some other block they weren’t able to show us the full extent of their ability. Remember, we are assessing you on your actual performance during the selection process – we can only credit you for the skills that you display on the day.

The approaches that we’re describing here are often gathered together under the heading of ‘Neuro Linguistic Programming’ – you may have seen people like Derren Brown or Paul McKenna using them on television shows. They fall into two categories:

l ways of preparing in advance so that you perform the way you want to on the day; l techniques for getting rid of any previous negative assessment experiences that may still be haunting you.

When you’re learning these tools we recommend that you:

l begin early. Don’t wait for the night before your interview. What you’re doing is training your mind, and just like training your body it can take time to see consistent results. Practise regularly – every day if you can. l set aside some quality time. Trying to learn these approaches in a busy or crowded environment is simply making things difficult for yourself. Choose a time when you can have 30 minutes on your own in a place where you feel relaxed and comfortable, and whatever you do, don’t try these techniques while driving! l try all the techniques. Some will feel more comfortable than others. You might find that one tool starts to feel a bit stale after a while – if this happens, try another one to keep things fresh.

If you practise diligently, these techniques will set you up to feel confident and positive when you attend an interview or assessment centre.