Practice playfully

Practice your requests with a friendly audience and in a comfortable location to make the experience more playful and less stressful. Learning and playing go together!

Set challenges for yourself that expand your skills but that don’t have serious consequences. Instead of waiting for an intense, highly visible project at work to make your first attempt at approaching people, give yourself a short interview challenge. Pick a friendly location and choose a topic of research that would be of interest to most interview candidates and whose results you would not formally present.

Can you think of a local restaurant or cafeteria? Try interviewing its employees about their experience with the lunchtime rush to identify ways to better manage lines (of course, wait until after the rush to approach them). Taking a taxi? Interview the cab driver about their use of technology and how it has changed in the last three years. Do this as though you were conducting research for a real project (for example, ask to interview them, rather than launching right into your questions).

Here are two introductions you can practice:

“Excuse me! I’m a student, and today I’m conducting research on ways to improve transportation information for commuters. Hearing about your experience would be really valuable. Do you have 10 minutes to answer some questions?”

“Hi! We’re conducting some research today. Would you like to be interviewed on your lunchtime eating habits? It’ll take about 10 minutes, and your thoughts will help us improve the availability of nutritional information.”

Make it meaningful

Whether you’re interviewing for practice or for work, tap into the aspects of the topic that make it deeply meaningful and personal to you. Genuine enthusiasm for a topic is hard to fake and will override fear to a large extent.

Remember the high-school students who were so afraid of approaching people? The class ended up going through the research process a second time with different topics. Instead of being told to interview college students about financial planning, students picked their own topics, like helping other students complete their homework, eating healthier meals and handling peer pressure.

The class picked students to interview, a mixture of friends and strangers. Because they were passionate about the topics (and had practiced once already), the second round of requests was much easier.

Likewise, consider practicing with more than one round of interviews:

•Round 1 Choose a topic that you know will be of interest to the people you’re interviewing.

•Round 2 Choose a topic that you’re passionate about. (Try to be objective, though!)

•Round 3 Take on a challenge for a product or project with support from other team members. (See the section below, “Pair Up Personalities,” for an example.)

If you’re on a team that wants even more practice, you could take turns suggesting practice challenges for each other. The more you practice, the easier it gets — promise!

Pair up personalities

If you consider yourself an introvert, pair up with someone who considers themselves an extrovert, and play to each other’s strengths for the first few interviews.

Using your observational skill, you could identify candidates to interview, and the extrovert could approach the first three people.

After the first three or four approaches, take a break and share your techniques with each other. You could share your insight from observing the environment and suggest tips on which people in which location might be best to approach. The extrovert could share tips on conversation openers that seem to be working well. When you’re both comfortable, switch roles to exercise the other’s skills.

This method situates you as mentors to each other, bringing you both closer to the middle of the introversion-extroversion scale.