Erin came to me for help with an upcoming interview for a director role at a well-known tech company. She was sharp, deeply technical, and clearly good at her job. When I asked her to introduce herself the way she would in the room, she gave me a clean, confident pitch that covered her technical depth, her management style, and a closing note about her character.

It was clear, concise, and confident.

I asked her, "What are your thoughts?"

She said, "To be honest, it doesn't capture everything I am."

That gap is why most people come to coaching. Some ramble and lose the room. Others oversimplify and lose themselves, which is what happened to Erin.

The goal when interviewing for a senior position is to begin building relationships on day one. This makes sense because the hiring team is test-driving how you think, how you handle a room, and how you will show up in the leadership meetings you are not in yet. They are reading your character across every story and answer, and they are reading them together, as a whole. So show them who they are hiring from the very beginning.

When I share this mindset with clients, they get quiet.

I say, to step into a leadership role, you have to take a position. You have to state who you are and what you stand for. And you have to reinforce that with every response you give.

That is when they get scared. Because if they show up authentically and get rejected, that is going to hurt. Here are the seven steps I take my clients through to prepare them to be bold, be honest, and to be radically themselves for interviews.

Before you draft a single answer, get clear on the work that actually invigorates you, and be honest about your stretch zone: the challenge you could step into and grow through. Leaders grow by reaching for the role that stretches them, and part of the interview is persuading the hiring team that you are ready to make that reach.

Then ask whether your experience adds up to a cohesive, persuasive story. Across the interview, can you convince the hiring team that you will thrive in the role, and that hiring you is in their interest because you can help them skyrocket into their future?

Pull the common behavioral questions and draft a response to each one. You may not get asked these exact questions, and that is fine. Drafting them means that when a question comes, you are not scanning the back of your mind for any situation that might fit. You already understand what the question is really asking, and you can reach for a specific experience, a framework, a trade-off you navigated, and show that you can reason through it in real time, in front of others, under pressure.

Here are some common behavioral questions:

Talk it out with a friend. Journal. Open a dictation app and brain-dump off the top of your head. Capture how you actually think before you figure out how to shape it for a specific audience.

Once you have your raw material, shape it so it lands clear and concise. Structures help you land the answer at the right length and in the right order. These four carry most of what you will need:

Three notes on using these structures well.

Once your answers are drafted and structured, stop working on them one at a time and look at all of them together. This is where you find out whether you are portraying a credible, dynamic character, or proving the same thing over and over.

Watch out for redundant responses. For example, you tell a conflict story where your solution was bringing everyone into the room to talk through their differences. Then your failure story is about how you invited different perspectives into the room to understand each other. Different circumstances, same point. You just told the same story twice, and to a hiring team that reads as a leader with one move.

You want each response to reveal a different facet of who you are. I have written about the six stories every leader should be able to tell, and each one proves a different facet: your purpose, your vision, your resilience, your values, your ability to influence, and your ability to create momentum. A well-rounded character shows the room a capable leader.

First, re-read your stories through the company's eyes. For example, you would prepare differently for Meta, Airbnb, and Anthropic because their cultures reward different things. Research the company, then look at each story. Sometimes a story fits with a small shift in emphasis. Sometimes it does not fit at all, and you have a choice to make.

Make a conscious choice here: You can contort yourself into a story that fits what you think they want, and you might get away with it, but then you have signaled you are someone you are not, and if you get the job you have to keep being that person. Or you can be honest about the fit and let the right company recognize the real you. A rejection here means the fit was wrong, and you found out in an interview instead of eighteen months into the job.

Second, prepare the company-specific questions. "What do you know about us." "Why do you want this job and how are you a fit." "Why should we hire you." "How have you demonstrated one of our values." Brainstorm answers that complement the treasure trove of responses you have already crafted.

Third, build your introduction. "Tell me about yourself" is the hardest question you will prepare, because it is your positioning statement, and it is rebuilt for every company you interview with. This is where you illustrate who you are and what your potential value is. Be strategic and stand out from the crowd. You can even end your introduction with a question of your own, so you signal from the first minute that you came for a conversation, not a one-sided interrogation. You’re interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you.

Don’t skip this step.

Saying your answer out loud to a friend, watch their face, read whether they are with you or lost, feel the stress. Real presence is built through reps and reflection. Read my article about emotional regulation, so you can feel calm and focused for the interview.

You can run role-plays with AI, and that helps you rehearse the words. But I have coached clients preparing for interviews at companies like OpenAI who have told me that prepping with AI helped them think through their ideas but the real unlock came from saying the story to me and watching my expression. They confessed that they worried about what I was thinking and began to uncontrollably ramble or oversimplify to keep it simple. Practicing with a human raises the stakes in a way an agreeable, compliant AI never will.

If you can communicate effectively in practice, you increase your odds of communicating effectively during the interview.

Bring your embodied responses to the interview room. Bring your emotionally regulated, authentic self ready to connect with others. Bring questions of your own, engage with what they say, and let the interview become the back-and-forth test drive it was always meant to be. Loosely hold your strategy and go with the flow. The company you want to give your best work to is the one that builds something with you in the room.

When Erin and I finished our work together, I asked her the same question from our first session: what are your thoughts?

She said the introduction finally sounded like her, and that saying it out loud still scared her a little. I told her that was the right amount of scared. It meant she knew her worth and was asking to be seen for her experience, her knowledge, and her capability.

That is what all seven steps are for. Over the past ten years, I have taken countless clients through this process, and it always comes down to the same thing: understand yourself well enough to showcase your talent accurately, so you and the company can find out together whether there is a good fit.

Imagine it: on your first day walking into work after they have hired you, you get to start work just being yourself.