After the long, exhausting journey of searching for and applying to new jobs you’ve just been rewarded with a gold ticket, an interview.

But after a brief moment of celebration the panic sets in: Your heart is already pounding, your palms are beginning to sweat, and you’re wondering: Are hiring managers like sharks—can they smell fear? If the thought of sitting across from a hiring manager makes your stomach turn, you’re not alone. But don’t let your nerves get the best of you! Try one these strategies that will help you feel calm, cool, and collected—or at least make you appear that way.

How to Show Confidence in Job Interviews:

1. Eye contact

Practice keeping good eye contact while listening, and equally important- while speaking! (Most people find this harder to do when speaking).

There’s nothing more important than eye contact when it comes to showing confidence, and it’s extremely noticeable if you’re staring down or to the side when you talk.

2. Body positioning

Once you’ve made a habit of maintaining eye contact, it’s time to think about your body positions.

You want to stand and sit in open positions – arms by your sides, not crossed. Make your body take up a lot of space, rather than making yourself smaller. This is how to seem confident.

3. Don’t fidget

Be still, and make controlled, calculated movements. Don’t hold a pen or paper and fidget constantly. Be careful not to tap your hands or feet either.

It’s okay to be animated and talk with your hands. It’s probably even a good thing in most interviews to show enthusiasm. But don’t move your hands around when you should be listening! (More on listening coming up…)

4. Smile and try to enjoy the process

Confident people smile. Nervous people grimace or wrinkle their face up and look super serious or distracted.

So along with making eye contact like we discussed earlier… smile and try to hold relaxed, calm facial expressions.

It’s okay to show you’re thinking about an interview answer , or deciding what to say, but you shouldn’t constantly look like you’re strained and having a miserable time.

Maybe you feel shy or think that nobody notices you at school. You might want to try out for the school play but fear people will make fun of you. You may even think that everyone has it figured out but you. It’s important to realize that everyone is learning who they are and nobody has it figured out yet. In the meantime, however, there are plenty of ways to build your confidence, here are some tips that will make you feel more confident at school

• Believe in you and your abilities. It’s very easy to get stuck in negative thinking that you’ll be bad at something, or you’ll mess up, or that people won’t like you. Ignore all of these negative thoughts and choose to believe in yourself and in your abilities.
• be prepared.Being absolutely prepared in every academic and social situation this year is the key to success. Academically, make sure you stay on top of your school work by keeping a planner.
• Accept your looks the way they are. You may have a lot of spots or maybe you have a birthmark in the most inconvenient place. So what? That’s who you are, that’s how you were born! Like yourself for you, and stop putting your body down.
• Learn to appreciate your personality. Your personality is one of the main things that makes you, you! Do not change it because you think people want you to be somebody else. It’s way more important to be you. 

It’s great that you have decided to build your self-confidence. However, there are a few obstacles that can keep you from achieving your goal. Most of the time, these obstacles are so obvious that they do not seem like obstacles at all, and all you can see is that your resolve to be self-confident is not taking you anywhere.

Therefore, it is important to become aware of these seemingly harmless obstacles that have all the power to stop you in your path which are: Fear

Negativity

Judgement

in my blog i will be showing you how to avoid these obstacles , and eventually build your confidence

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.

— Oscar Wilde.

This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.