That would be me… the guy knows as cocky (aka, self-confident). I’m sure I’ve made this mistake, but I also heard of someone else who recently made this mistake.
Imagine this: you are in a job interview and the interviewer asks you “can you do this particular skill?” You either answer:
a) “oh yeah, I can do that. “
b) “I haven’t done it before, but I’m sure I could learn it.”
Does that sound familiar?
Is this a response you have made, heard, or might make?
Let me give you a tip to give a response way, way, way more impactful. Instead of saying a), “yeah, I can do that.”, say something like this:
“Yes, I can do that. In my past job I had this exact responsibility. I was given the task and within six months was training others to do it well.”
Isn’t that 1,000% better than “yeah, I can do that.”
Here is something better to say than b), “I haven’t done it before, but I’m sure I could learn it.”
“I haven’t done that before, but I really think I could learn it quickly. In my last job I was asked to do learn a new software program we were going to use at the front desk. No one had any experience with it, but I dove into the user manuals and got on the training webinars, and was quickly able to train the rest of the front desk team. In fact, the software company recognized me as one of their best users and asked if they could refer some of their other key customers to me for consulting.”
Isn’t that impressive? Much better than “yeah, I’m sure I could learn it.”
SHOW ME.
Of course you need to have your own, and better, wording. The idea, though, is to give examples, and what I call “mini stories.” If you can get it into a Problem-Action-Result format, your response will be way better than what you were going to say, and probably better than your “competition.”
Sound good?