Indulge me for a moment with three scenarios.

One day, you meet a friend for coffee. You get there first. They walk in the door with a huge smile on their face, at ease and relaxed. You sit down and the conversation just flows. You’re sharing things about yourselves, asking each other questions, and before you know it, hours have gone by. When you say goodbye, you feel good. You feel like you get them, and they get you, and you can’t wait to talk again.

The next day, you meet a different new friend for coffee. When they walk through the door, you notice they look a little tense and stiff. You think, whatever, maybe they had a stressful day, or they’re nervous about meeting. You sit down and ask how they’re doing. They’re polite, but they give you a short, generic answer, not much to work with. You keep trying to carry the conversation, but it keeps going flat. Ten minutes in, you wonder if they even want to be there, and it’s starting to make you anxious. You know you’re not hitting it off, but you keep going, hoping they’ll warm up. You notice they have some trouble making eye contact, whether they’re speaking or listening. They share things about themselves, but you still feel bored and disconnected. When you talk about yourself, you can’t tell whether any of it is resonating. By the 45-minute mark, you’re relieved to have an excuse to leave. You walk away feeling deflated, like you know nothing about them, and they know nothing about you.

The third day, you set that experience aside and meet yet another new friend. When they walk through the door, they have a big smile on their face, but they seem a little hyper. They seem cheerful and talkative, and the conversation comes more easily. They ask good questions, and they seem interested in what you have to say. But every answer feels just a little rehearsed, as though they’re trying to make sure you’ll like them. Something about it is unsettling, and twenty minutes in, you realize you’re starting to feel drained. You keep going, slowly noticing that sometimes they’re fully with you, but other times they seem more focused on what they’re going to say next. All their talking has made the meeting run long, and when you finally get up to leave, you still don’t feel like you know who they are. The unsettled feeling, you realize, came from watching someone try too hard.

Here’s the thing. Those three friends? They’re actually all the same person.

And if you’re someone who feels, on any level, that job interviews are uncomfortable, it’s possible that you’re showing up as some version of friend #2 or friend #3.

What’s hard about these scenarios is that friend #1 is you in your most natural state. You’re at ease, you’re present, and you know how to connect with people—in some or most situations.

Friend #2 and friend #3 are the versions of you that take over when you’re in front of a camera or sitting in someone’s office, talking about a job. Friend #2 gets smaller and more mechanical. Friend #3 puts on a performance to overcompensate. In both cases, they look decent on the surface—you may even walk away thinking you did well—but their energy is giving them away.

And if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of an interaction like that, being across the table from someone who isn’t quite themselves, then you already know what the interviewer feels like when they’re sitting across from you.

If I’ve just brought up something uncomfortable, please know it’s not to make you feel bad about yourself. I want to help you consider whether this plays a role in why you haven’t landed a job, or why you found one that doesn’t fit you.

Think back to those three coffee meetings. Which friend would you feel like you actually got to know? Which one would you want to spend more time with? Interviews aren’t all that different. The interviewer isn’t just listening to your answers. They’re trying to get a sense of who you are and what it would actually be like to work with you.

Friend #1 makes it easier for the interviewer to settle into the conversation. They’re not distracted by uncertainty or performance. Instead, they get a genuine sense of someone who’s present, grounded, and comfortable enough to let their thinking, personality, and capabilities come through naturally.

Friend #2 can leave the impression that you’re less confident or interested than you really are. That’s often because so much of your energy is going toward managing the discomfort instead of the conversation itself. Friend #3 creates a different problem. When someone is trying too hard to say the right thing or make the right impression, the interviewer has a harder time telling what’s genuine and what’s performance. In both cases, the interviewer walks away without a clear picture of who they’re considering hiring.

I can already hear the counterargument: But Akiyo, I’ll admit I’m not always fully myself in interviews, but I have landed jobs.

That may be true. But your employer chose you based on the version you presented. So for the sake of argument: if someone hired you because they liked that you were small and quiet, you may attract employers who expect you to stay that way, and who aren’t interested in what you actually think or what you’re capable of. If someone hired you because they liked that you were a people pleaser, always cheerful and endlessly positive, they may assume nothing bothers you, and pile on whatever work they want.

And it isn’t only that they chose you. You chose them too, by presenting a version of yourself that fit what they wanted.

You might be wondering: if I can’t be nervous and small, and I can’t compensate for it either, and people are going to see through it no matter what I do, then what’s the point? How is there any way out of this?

The answer is understanding what’s making it so uncomfortable to just be yourself in those moments.

And I’m sorry to say, the answer is often not deep breathing, or a power pose, or one of the other mindset strategies people love to recommend. You can breathe as deeply as you want, jump around, play your most upbeat song before an interview, even pop a pill beforehand. Those are bandaids. They cover over the discomfort without addressing what’s underneath. Sometimes they stick for a while, but often they peel off the moment you’re under pressure. Either way, they’re usually just masking who you are instead of helping you become more comfortable being yourself.

There’s another issue with the interview process, and honestly, this is the part that bothers us most.

Standard interview tips usually look like a handout of questions to prepare for, explaining who you are, how you work, and why you’re interested in the job. The most god-awful one of them, still handed to recent graduates to this day: “What are your strengths and weaknesses?”

If you’ve ever hired someone yourself, you already know how terrible that question is.

And maybe the issue isn’t just how these questions are written or asked. Maybe it’s the simple fact that the interview gets treated as a completely scripted process, where the interviewee is taught to rehearse boilerplate answers to boilerplate questions instead of having a normal conversation between two human beings.

Now you might say: But Akiyo, if employers are asking these questions, and worse, having an AI bot ask them, there’s no way around it.

The topic of AI in job searching and hiring is a big one, and I’ll leave that to David to dig into another day.

What I will say is this: there’s strategy in every step of the job application process, and communication techniques that can be woven naturally into how you talk, without being fake or forced. In fact, I find that when my clients—people who often have a natural knack for connecting with others once they’re not anxious or overthinking—figure out how to just be themselves, these techniques come easily. The strongest interviews don’t feel like performances. They feel like two people figuring out whether they want to work together.

Doing this kind of work—getting comfortable being yourself and learning to communicate skillfully—is not a quick fix. And I know that.

It can feel a lot more productive to keep clicking submit on one application after another, or to keep meeting different people, pulling the lever again and hoping this one finally pays off. Especially when you want to land something soon, doing more of what you already know how to do can feel like the safer, faster move. At least it feels like you’re doing something.

But if you’ve been doing that for months, or years, and it still hasn’t worked, it might be worth considering that the piece you’re missing isn’t a better resume or better-rehearsed answers. It’s something less visible, and it comes in two parts, working together.

The first is emotional: understanding what’s driving you to shrink or perform in the first place, so you can find your way back to that friend #1 version of yourself: at ease, present, and able to connect with people without trying.

The second is skill: learning how to communicate in a way that gives the interviewer a genuine sense of who you are and what it’s actually like to work with you—something they can’t get from your resume alone.

Once you have both, you and your employer choose each other for the right reasons: the kind that still hold up once you’re actually doing the job, not just the version of you that got you in the door.