Part Two: The Interview

Humility is the worst virtue to practice during an interview.

Your interview is not the time to be humble. Nor is it the time to be arrogant. If you want to join a company or organization, then the interview is the time to express to them exactly who you are by stating what you have achieved and how you achieved it. When you leave the room, a lingering presence of your character marked by your strong values and your admirable personality should remain. Your spirit should be left resting in a chair you no longer occupy. At this stage of the game, you must master the art of leaving a powerful first impression to ensure the interviewer remembers you and not your résumé!

This aim highlights a common failure, particularly for women across the globe who combat the legacies of gender roles, stereotypes, and racial profiling.

Women have an uncanny desire to downplay their skills, for what I believe is the pursuit of humility or avoiding condemnation. Even more so, Black women live in the legacy of being rejected, humiliated, reprimanded, beaten, and abused for proficiency in their remarkable abilities. People of color still fight for equal recognition of their skill sets, particularly in white-dominated work environments or vertical structures. Moreover, I’ve watched and experienced women who shame other women for owning self-confidence in their abilities or achievements. I’ve watched and experienced grown men bastardize women’s career successes, out of what I believe is pure insecurity based on either the lack of their own successes, the length of time it had taken them to reach a similar level, or the fact that they have become redundant. In short, a woman’s self-awareness of her intelligence coupled with self-confidence lies in danger of emasculating insecure men or making insecure women feel more inferior.

Additionally, regardless of gender, negative responses received from peers when you’ve owned your self-worth is beyond disheartening. It speaks towards a greater challenge in managing our resentment towards those who are succeeding when we are not, especially if their success is in a desirable skill set. The constant barrage of discrediting another’s proven abilities by character-shaming their self-confidence as cockiness is precisely why there are blurred lines between these two traits. What follows, sadly, is the belief that a peer’s acknowledgment of his or her self-worth and self-confidence is a mark of their cockiness, arrogance, and egotism.

So, where would one draw the line between confidence and cockiness?

 

- Excerpt from This is Not an Interview. It’s a Conversation.