Two candidates. The first has prepared meticulously: every likely question rehearsed, every answer polished, a story ready for each competency. The second knows their material but hasn’t scripted it. They walk in, have a real conversation, think out loud, laugh once or twice.
The second one gets the offer. And if you asked the panel why, they’d struggle to point at a specific answer. They’d say something vague like “they were just easy to talk to” or “we could see them in the team.”
What were they actually responding to? Not the answers. The state.
What’s really being tested
Underneath the questions, an interview is reading three things: what you’ll be like to work with, how you handle it when things go wrong, and how you actually field a question in real time. And all three are reading the same underlying thing. They’re sensing which of two states you tend to live in.
We all move between a natural and a normal state. In natural you’re relaxed, present, resourceful, good to be around. In normal you’re tense, guarded, brittle, working hard and slightly closed. An interview, for all its formality, is largely a device for finding out which one shows up in you under pressure.
Why tech makes this sharper
If you work in tech, this is even more the case, because setbacks are the job. Things break. Outages happen at the worst time. Priorities shift, releases slip, the demo fails in front of the client. Nobody senior is really wondering whether you’ve memorised the correct answer to a hypothetical. They’re trying to feel what you’ll be like at 2am when it’s on fire.
So when they ask “tell me about a time something went wrong,” they’re not grading the story. They’re watching your relationship to things going wrong. Do you stay grounded and curious, or do you tighten and get defensive just describing it? That tells them more than the facts of the case ever could.
Even the answers come better from natural
Here’s the part that surprises people: even the narrow business of answering questions works better from natural.
From normal you over-explain, talk through your entire thought process, hedge, and brace for the follow-up. You reach for the complete, airtight answer, and if you don’t have one you freeze. From natural you trust your instinct, say the useful thing simply, and handle “I don’t know, let me think about that” without it being a catastrophe. As I’ve written elsewhere, your first-instinct answer from a relaxed state beats the polished one from a tense state, and the people in the room can feel the difference. A memorised answer delivered from normal reads as canned. A slightly rough one from natural reads as real.
So there aren’t three things to get good at. There’s one. Show up in natural, your most resourceful state, and all three take care of themselves.
The two things that drag you into normal
If natural is the goal, it helps to know what pulls you out of it. In an interview, two things usually do.
Over-preparing. There’s a difference between preparing and over-preparing. Preparation is being ready: knowing a few stories, a handful of topics, the shape of what you care about. Over-preparation is trying to script the outcome, and it reliably backfires. The more tightly you rehearse, the more you tip into normal, the more canned and brittle you become exactly when you need to be alive. Prepare, then stop. Don’t keep cramming yourself into a corner.
Needing it too much. The job you need too badly is the one the interview goes stiff for. Desperation leaks, the room feels it, and it quietly repels what you want, the same way it does on a date when you’re trying too hard. A useful question to ask yourself beforehand: am I coming across as desperate? Wanting the role from genuine desire, while being fundamentally fine either way, keeps you in natural and, not coincidentally, reads as more attractive.
What to actually do
The real preparation isn’t done in the moment. It’s the well you dig well in advance of being thirsty. The more you hang out in natural in ordinary life, the less you’ll ever need a strategy to climb back from normal when it counts. That’s the deep work, and it’s the opposite of cramming.
But if, on the day, you need something, there are a few honest ways to come back to natural. Accept the situation as it is rather than fighting it. Relax, deliberately. Tend to your breathing and your body. And if you do only one thing, smile, because it does more to shift your state than you’d expect. The simplest move of all is just to ask yourself, mid-conversation, “am I in natural or normal right now?” Noticing is most of the shift.
The point isn’t to collect techniques. It’s that the fewer you need, the better, because you’ve been living in natural, not scrambling back to it.
You’re interviewing them, too
One last reframe, and it’s the one that takes the most pressure off.
You’re not only being interviewed. You’re interviewing them. And one of the most useful things you can read is how the organisation itself handles things not going its way. When something breaks in their world, is the culture “okay, let’s figure it out,” or is it “this should never have happened, whose fault is it”? One is an organisation that lives in natural. The other defaults to normal the moment the pressure comes on.
This matters more than it seems, because someone wired to show up in natural will not thrive in a place that goes to normal whenever things hit the fan. So the interview isn’t a performance you have to win. It’s a two-way read on whether both of you would actually be good for each other. Holding it that way is itself one of the surest routes back to natural.
You can’t control whether you get the offer. You can show up as your most resourceful self, find out together whether it’s a fit, and let the rest be a real conversation. Prepare your state, not your script.
