The Job Hunting Podcast 81
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The Job Hunting Podcast 81. A career coach's top tip for job interview preparation to guarantee your best performance. Renata: Hello and welcome back job hunters and career enthusiasts. I'm so happy you have joined me for this episode because it is about one of my favorite things on earth. Coffee. In fact, it's not just about coffee but caffeine in general. So even if you don't like coffee, there are other caffeine drinks and gums that you can take to help you perform at your best during job interviews. Or when you have those important work presentations, boardroom meetings, crucial negotiations, anything that you may be preparing for that may be causing anxiety and stress, but they are part and parcel of an executive career. You may have something like that coming up in your work, or as part of your career developments. So don't shy, shy away from this episode. And let's dive right in. And if you're thinking of skipping this episode, because you don't take any caffeine at all, you will be surprised by what I have to say towards the end of this episode. So please stick around because I have options for you too. And I will discuss them later in this episode. Renata: But first, I want to remind you that I have free resources for you. When you join my email list, I will send you the two documents I give all my clients when they first join me. It's my guidebook. So that you know what works when taking the first steps towards your next job and my email template to help my clients connect with recruiters and hiring managers in a very professional way. So the guidebook will have important information that I give everybody that comes in touch with me about job hunting and career progression and the email templates you can use to adapt it to your own style or industry, or sector. But it's so good. And it works every time. So sign up for my mailing list. Renata: I will also send you a weekly newsletter for career advancement, and that newsletter includes all the future episodes of The Job Hunting Podcast. I send one newsletter a week to let you know that there is a new episode available to you. Plus, I also send you curated articles and resources, life coaching sessions, invitations, special events, and discounts, which I only share with my mailing list. So to sign up, go to renatabernarde.com/join. And if you don't remember or can't spell my name. There's a link to it in the episode show notes or in The Job Hunting Podcast blogs. So find it there, sign up and join because it will be important for your career progression. In addition to the link to join my mailing list, you will also find any other links and resources that are mentioned in my episodes in the episode show notes or on the podcast blog. Renata: So make sure that you always reach out to those when I'm talking, you don't need to take notes. I mean, you can, but you will have those links in the episode show notes. So remember that. Thank you so much for supporting this podcast, by the way. Make sure that you subscribe wherever you found us. We're available on almost all popular podcast apps. If I’m missing any, please let me know. We try to make sure that we're available 1 The Job Hunting Podcast 81. A career coach's top tip for job interview preparation to guarantee your best performance. everywhere. So please like us, write a positive review, or give us a five-star rating. It really helps us immensely. It makes a huge impact on this podcast’s future success. If you give us a thumbs up, a five-star rating, or write us a review. Thank you so much in advance for your support. Renata: So, as you know, one of my services is I provide one-on-one consultations with anyone that needs help with their careers. You can book that on my website, and mostly people book them to prepare for job interviews. There is a range of reasons why you would book a one-hour coaching session with me, but I have to admit, a lot of the time, it’s people that are getting ready for job interviews and good on them. Because preparing for job interviews is it makes a huge difference. It's highly correlated to your success and getting the job, which is ultimately what you want to do. So I'm very happy to do those consultations. And one of the first things that I ask that really surprises my clients is I ask them about their caffeine intake. Tell me about your caffeine intake routine. Renata: And there are lots of other weird questions that I ask when people sign up with me for those consultations. And I can see, because it's a zoom meeting, I can see that they're puzzled and quite surprised. I'm not going to give away all of my tricks and secrets because that's my IP, and I share that only with my clients. But I decided that it would be great to talk to you about coffee. You know why? Because caffeine is consumed by over 80% of US adults. Now I don't have statistics for other countries. This podcast is listened in dozens of countries. So apologies for that. But I am assuming that wherever you are in the world, you are drinking coffee or caffeine, or you know a lot of people that do. And, you know, it's part of our 21st-century culture. It's what we do now. Renata: And there are ways to use coffee and caffeine to boost your performance. There are several research that have been done in US, in Australia, and in many other countries that examine the effects that caffeine has on your cognitive and physical function and performance. Job interviews require a lot of complex decision-making, really high cognitive functions, and also moto processing and movement as well. You know, another trick that I talk to my clients about is about body language and the tone of your voice. You have to have this holistic and very complex set of strategies in motion to ensure that you're wowing the interviewers, that you are really making a high impact and a successful presentation to them. So, there are things that will impact you before a job interview that can negatively affect your performance. And we are going to counteract that with caffeine intake if you are, you know, keen on taking coffee or tea or chewing a caffeine gum. And I'm going to talk about all the different options with you in this episode. What research has found is that low to moderate caffeine doses improves alertness, vigilance, attention, reaction time, and attention to improve your performance, whatever it is that you're doing. Less consistent effects are observed on memory and high order executive functions, such as judgement and decision making. 2 The Job Hunting Podcast 81. A career coach's top tip for job interview preparation to guarantee your best performance. Renata: But I have to put a critical eye on that because you see most of the observations are done with people in the military, first responders, transport workers, factory shift workers, all of which require optimal physical function to ensure success and safety in the workplace and productivity and all of that. So I'm not really sure that there has been a lot of research that has observed memory and higher-order executive function, which are necessary for a successful job interview to happen. Right? But I'm going to just extrapolate and use those caffeine research focused on performance, in high-performance to say, look, I think it's very worth you considering your caffeine intake before a job interview, to make sure that you are maximizing your chances of success. Right? Renata: So we've been discussing low doses of caffeine intake. Now, what about high doses? Research has shown that high doses of caffeine intake have a positive effect on physical performance, on a vast array of physical performance metrics. Such as time to exhaustion, time trial, muscle strength and endurance, high-intensity sprains, things that are typical of team sports. Renata: And that's why these researchers have focused so much on caffeine intake. It's usually to help athletes, like I said, and also people in the military, first respondents, and all of that. So it's really interesting to see the correlation between caffeine and high performance. Whenever I read articles that have a title that seems to contradict the link between caffeine and high-performance, it’s, in fact, inviting people to consider taking less caffeine so that they can respond better to caffeine when they need it for high performance. So it's not like, you know, you might sort of Google it and see a few articles that say, Oh, you know, athletes shouldn't be taking caffeine. And, what the article actually is saying, if you read it fully, is that caffeine does help you perform better, but it's probably a good idea for you to lower your dose or don't take any caffeine, go cold Turkey, as they say, so that when you actually need that boost that the caffeine can do to your body and your mind, you will be more sensitive.