Please Don't Memorize Your Interview.

I mean this lovingly, because I understand why people do it, but one of the fastest ways to sound completely unlike yourself on camera is to spend the night before memorizing exactly what you plan to say.

I have watched perfectly normal, funny, articulate people talk to me before an interview, and then the camera turns on and suddenly I am receiving the annual shareholder address.

The voice changes, the breathing changes, every sentence becomes suspiciously perfect, and now both of us know you are trying to remember sentence number four.

Know what you want to say, not exactly how you are going to say it

If I am asking why you started your company, you should absolutely think about the answer beforehand, but think about what actually happened rather than trying to memorize your About page.

What bothered you enough to start? Was there a moment when the idea became real? What did you notice that other people were not doing? What did the beginning actually look like?

Those are things you know because they happened to you, which means I can ask follow up questions and you can answer them without mentally searching for the next line of your script.

That almost always sounds better.

Stories are easier to believe than statements

“We care deeply about our customers” is fine, but it is also the kind of sentence nearly every company in the world could put on its website.

Tell me about a customer you still remember.

“We have fifteen years of experience” is useful information, but tell me what year one looked like, or what you understand now that you definitely did not understand then.

Specific stories give the audience something to hold onto, and they also give us much better material to edit because now we have an actual beginning, middle and end instead of ten perfectly polished statements that all sound like taglines.

You are also allowed to think.

One of the funniest things about being interviewed is that a two second pause feels enormous when you are the person sitting under the lights, even though nobody watching the finished video is going to think, “Wow, she really took two seconds there.”

Take the pause. Start again. Lose your train of thought. Laugh because you said something weird.

We can edit pauses and restarts.

What is much harder to fix is somebody concentrating so hard on performing correctly that all of their personality disappears.