My name is Kevin.
I am proud and excited, to say I've recently been accepted
onto the SET training program and cardiothoracic surgery.
Hi, I've got one of those emails the other day
on a Sunday.
That's one of those real pick you up emails like
a feedback email from one of the clients that I'm
working with in the job challenge process and I thought
I'd read it to you because once it's a fairly
long email, it actually highlights a number of key points,
things that I think are important to note about the
coaching process in general as well as the process of
getting yourself best prepared for the job application and interview
process and putting your best foot forward.
So it's from Kevin to me.
Hi Anthony.
Hi Kevin.
So sorry for the long delay in getting back to
you.
Doctors are always late.
That's okay.
I write quite a long and rambling testimonials, suspect you
won't want to use the whole thing.
As I've repeated myself a few times, you guess wrong
might be just best to grab some quotes from here
or there.
If you wanted me to write something more succinct, just
let me know.
I'm happy for you to use any of this on
anything on your website or promo material and you can
use my name as well.
So thank you.
Um, I have a few people who need to get
some interviews in the next year and I've already recommended you, so
thanks again for that.
Let me know if you want contact details.
Uh, interviews will be around early June again next year, so I don't imagine that
things will start till the new year, which is okay.
Give me, so about six months is plenty of time
to get prepared.
And again, thanks so much for you coaching.
I have no doubt.
It's what gave me the edge kind regards Kevin, so
thank you Kevin for this email.
Oh, and that's the preamble, but let me just read
you through the rest of the email and it's in
the form of a testimonial.
I wanted to write a testimonial of gratitude and recommendation
to Dr. Anthony
oil and of advanced med to start.
My name is Kevin.
I am proud and excited, decided that I've already been
accepted or recently been accepted onto the set training program
in cardiothoracic surgery.
And for those who don't know, that's one of the
college training programs is one of the probably one of
the hardest subspecialty programs to get into in surgery.
I applied to vascular surgery three times, which is also
hard and cardiothoracics twice being successful with cardiothoracics on the
second attempt or were very hard and did as much
as I could with competitive CV scores and good references,
which is what you need for applying for racks, uh,
and all the applications.
But my real downfall was the interview.
I found this surprising as I normally well liked and
feel like my judgment ended to personal relationships with patients
and colleagues is one of my strong points.
And so here's the first key point.
Just cause you communicate well in the natural environment, doesn't
mean that you're going to be out of trends like
those skills automatically into an interview.
And if you think about it, we are using our
clinical patients as a feedback mechanism all the time to
see if we're getting our communication right.
That's why you need to practice for the interviews as
well, but soon found out that the interview process is
a different beast.
As I said, one that most people have no experience
with.
And I think this is true for a lot of
doctors and I've talked about this before, but it's a
very vital skill, but it's only one that we use
infrequently so it's meaningless the rest of the time.
That's why we don't practice it all the time, which
is fair enough.
But we need to build in some practice in the
lead up to one.
My first interview was a disaster.
I had done almost no specific preparation for it and
my mentors really gave me no practical advice other than
to be myself.
I got destroyed and this is hard when you know,
used to succeeding in medicine.
I mean you have to be fairly talented to get
into medical school in the first place in you.
You're competing in some really high quality other people.
So it's not actually about you being a failure or
not good enough.
It's just that the stakes are often quite high.
For the next year.
I prepared hard for interviews, reading a couple of interview
books, cover to cover, writing down, tons of examples of
things I could talk about.
I did a couple of interview sessions with the coach
whom I traveled overseas to meet in person.
I didn't find the sessions very useful as there was
a lot of negative feedback.
Kevin talks a little bit about his coach a bit
later on.
The first one that he saw and then he talks
about my approach and look.
I think one of the things is sometimes the first
coach that you meet is not the right coach for
you.
Some people might need some real criticism and they like
that approach.
Others need a bit more of a positive approach.
I think as a general rule though, you're going to
improve your performance if the coach is helping to point
out progress, but yeah, it's, it's often about a goodness
of fit thing.
I'm not claiming that I can get everyone as fantastic
as this is success is for Kevin to get into
cardiothoracic surgery.
And I've this year managed to get some other candidates into
some other hard specialties like ophthalmology or radiology.
And that's great, but I never guarantee my success.
I never guarantee results that that would be disingenuous.
Uh, and I think it's important that you need to
build up some trust in your coach, find out a
bit about them, do your research, you know, do a
once off call if you're not sure, make sure there's
a good fit there.
So that Rudy's confidence a bit, uh, I interviewed for
both cardiothoracics and vascular that year scores were poor despite my
hundreds of hours of preparation and mentally my actual time spent answering
questions out loud in front of somebody else who knew
what they were talking about was low.
And again, this is another point you can practice with
the wrong people and get the wrong sort of feedback.
Uh, I think an hour with an expert performance coach
who knows about the interview process.
He understands what the panel is looking for can be
quite valuable and if they're not actually making you practice
questions a are the, you are asking too much, too
many questions about the process and avoiding answering questions or
they're not setting this up properly in my opinion.
Which brings me to my successful interview.
Again, the cardiothoracic or both cardiothoracics Invesco interviews, cardiothoracic being
my focus and my focus of the sessions with Anthony.
I tried the previous interview coach for a few sessions
but didn't get very far and abandoned that so that's
good.
Like you shouldn't, if your strategy is not working, change
strategy.
That's, that's great.
I get go to interview coaches and found Anthony's website
is full of useful information as a very easy to
use and professional design.
I think good coaches will have a bunch of resources
for you to help you when they're not there and
it's also a way of seeing whether people know what
they're talking about.
So someone's comfortable enough to put a lot of content
out, helpful material and they usually pretty passionate about it
and uh, usually, um, it's worth then investing a bit
of time with them as a coach as well.
Uh, there are lots of great free information and links
to Anthony's YouTube page, career doctor.
I started by watching, uh, all of the videos that
he makes about interviewing particularly helpful and this is what
I love.
That's probably the gold in this, this, this email was
the information about the models of competencies.
I firmly believe understanding competency frameworks is the key to
having a successful career in medicine.
I quickly realized that the racks nine competencies with just
a slight modification of the principles he was teaching little
my principles are the cam IDs framework.
Yeah.
But it is, uh, in fact, uh, the Royal college
in Canada helped the college of surgeons in Australia develop
the framework.
I've been trying to organize interview practice with colleagues, uh,
who were going for general surgery.
Uh, it was always hard to get a time when
we could all meet up.
Also when working in a group we ended up avoiding
hard questions and topics.
You don't want to uh, you know, make other people
feel bad.
Uh, it was helpful but not the most effective use
of time.
If we did a session of two hours, I probably
spend about 10 to 15 minutes actually answering questions myself
cause you're trying to help out someone else.
Obviously in these types of sessions you have to listen
feedback to the other people you're working.
So it's not as efficient for your time as having
private coaching.
And that's true.
The private coach is there to help you the whole
time that you're paying them.
Because I was aiming for vascular cardiothoracics, I only knew
one other person going for these specialties.
So I could only practice with people going for other
specialties.
Say, you know, not practicing the right context is going
to be a problem as well.
Another thing I tried was getting some consultants to interview
me again.
This was hard to organize as they're also busy when
trying this.
I felt intimidated at times that these people are my
boss.
And, and I think in probably in Kevin's case, they
were probably feeling the passion for Kevin and maybe themselves
w you know, I'm maybe putting a bit too much
pressure on him cause he's a genuine good bloke and
I'm so glad that he made it into cardiothoracic surgery.
I didn't want to focus on my weaknesses with the
concerns as it felt.
It would reflect poorly on me.
The consultants who did practice with me needed questions to
ask me, so you have to organize them.
And one of the things to be organized by me,
so it was a bit time consuming.
Interviewing at home with family friends was easy to organize
but it was uncomfortable at times.
And because a few rounds I decided to purchase the
three session interview packages, the starting point, I purchased another
two sessions.
I knew after my session, first session with Anthony that
Anthony was the coach for me.
So yeah, I'm glad that we got on well.
And I do generally try to tailor my coaching to
each person.
I do find that confidence is one of the things
that people come to me as an issue that they
want to work on in the interview.
Firstly, the online booking system worked well, much easy to
be able to book a time that suited me interview
on zoom or seamless.
Now I actually, so Kevin traveled presumably to Australia to
see an interview coach.
There's a lot of time involved in doing that.
I actually think doing it online is better because you
get the recording and you can watch that back as
well and you're not traveling and doing it on your
own time.
So technology is really helping this stuff.
I just sat at the table and felt like having
a face to face session on zoom.
Anthony would mirror his desktop to me and show me
his slides and information while we're chatting.
So I like it cause I can sort of flip
our resorts like the cabinets framework or demonstrate how you
staff and behavioral questions, et cetera and work through our
processes, et cetera.
Also look at the actual competencies for the college, which
is good and this was especially useful while he was
giving me feedback about the question I just answered, recorded
all the sessions and emailed them to me so I
could watch them to see what I looked like answering
questions.
And this is the thing about deliberative practice.
You've got to see your performance fairly quickly after to
get the maximum benefit out of it.
Uh, it's especially useful to see my face when I
was not confident on an answer or when I stumbled
on questions.
It also helped me realize when I said something unprofessional.
So yeah, we can, a coach can help you pick
up sort of what might seem small, but actually significant
floors.
In the case of Kevin, he was using the word
girl occasionally, you know, that happens.
He's not wanting to be disrespectful deliberately, but picking up
on that with a coach is better than doing a
photo like that in the interview.
The most important thing about my interview sessions with Anthony
was his coaching ability to spend a short time outlining
his simple techniques for answering questions, but mainly focused on
getting me to answer questions.
And I think that's the guts of it.
Unlike any other person interviewed, be for Anthony was the
only person who actively build up my confidence.
He realized quickly the confidence was one of my weaknesses
when answering questions and did a fantastic job of pointing
out my strong points and being considered and offering areas
to improve.
That's, I mean that's true and it's good, but the
other thing you have to learn as a coach is
not to overload feedback as well.
Sometimes you need a few sessions to work on one
or two key points because you give the coachee too
many things to work on.
It's not going to help them just confuses, but definitely
put in a lot of work preparing for the interview.
But I truly believe that Anthony's coaching was the thing
that gave me the age getting a spot on the
program this year.
And what I often find with the people I coach
is that the mere act of them engaging me as
a coach makes them do the practice, makes them in
between seeing me, keeps them accountable as well, so that's
another thing that coaching can do for you, but that
is motivation and the mentorship.
I cannot see how we could, could have, would have
improved my interview skills enough to be offered a position.
Another few points about advanced means interview coaching or sought
out personal coaching and recommend it because every minute is 100%
on you.
Every minute you spend with the coaches focused on your interview,
there are no distractions.
Is there very little time and organizing sessions.
Your coach will do this for you.
Feedback is personal expert.
The most effective interview preparation is practicing interview questions.
We'll answer your questions out loud in front of someone.
Watching yourself back is extremely useful.
Positive feedback from your coach is helpful.
Negative feedback delivered in a confrontational way, damaged your damages,
your ego and make sure he interview worse and anything
you never did this, spending a few dollars to get coaching as
well.
Worth it.
45 minutes with your coach is more than equal to
several hours of group practice because the focus is on you
and this comes to my point, having a booking with
Anthony forced me to focus on prep even after a
long tiring day at work.
When I was practicing with colleagues and friends, it was
far easier to put things off because of other needs.
In conclusion, I applied in the two years prior to
coaching with advanced med.
I had good CVS in reference scores, but was let
down by interviews both times.
My confidence was very low and practicing before Anthony ready
interview books and practicing with colleagues was somewhat helpful, but
time consuming.
I attribute advancement, interview coaching with giving me the edge
to get on surgical training.
I've already recommended Anthony, several other people to prepare for
interviews next year.
I think if I hadn't had used advancement during my
first or second years, I would probably be on training
already.
Sign up today.
Get started.
It's worth every cent.
Kevin, so thank you very much Kevin and the peppers
of me reading through that email is not to blow
my own trumpet here in of my abilities as a
coach.
As much as I do feel confident that I can
help a number of people.
I've done this done training of practice, this approach.
I've worked with a number of people, I understand the
process, but I just would like to emphasize that this
is a important juncture in life when you're going through
a new job in medicine.
It does require effort, preparation and practice and a coach
can really help you with keeping yourself accountable and give
me the sort of efficient feedback that you need to
get what you want out of the process, which is
obviously the job that you're heading for.
So I hope you found that helpful.
And uh, if you liked this video, leave a like,
and if this sort of generated a discussion point for
you or some sort of thing you want to comment
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next video.
Bye for now.