5 essential ingredients of informational interviewing

I believe everyone has a gift worth sharing, and that informational interviewing is the key to unlocking the potential of that gift. I’m an evangelist for this belief, and I always will be. But I’ve also learned that not everyone can or will follow my fail-proof informational interviewing recipe.

Informational interviewing is an important tool for getting where you want to go, but there are certain ingredients you need to already have in order to be successful at informational interviewing. These are ingredients that other people can’t easily give you. You have to find or cultivate these ingredients yourself, before you are able to start informational interviewing.

Without further ado, five ingredients you need in order to informationally interview.

1. Hope — if you truly had no hope, you probably wouldn’t be reading a newsletter about informational interviewing. You need a little bit of hope in order to be successful at informational interviewing. You have be open to the possibility that well-paid, rewarding work is possible, that there are CEOs, manager and future coworkers out there who are kind and who have integrity. Even though we live in a late-stage capitalist nightmare, and things are much harder than they ought to be, you have to have a teeny bit of hope that things could be better for you.

2. Time — Informational interviewing takes time. You have to research who you want to talk to, write e-mails, coordinate coffee dates and zoom calls, attend those meetings, follow-up, rinse and repeat. Each discrete task is not that hard, but taken together it is a fair bit of time and bandwidth. It’s definitely possible to have a family and a full-time job and still make time for informational interviewing, but it’s not easy. There are phases of life when it’s simply impossible to make the time. That’s okay. Informational interviewing is a tool that is always available to you. You can come back to it when you’re ready and have the time.

3. Energy — You also need a little bit of energy in order to be successful at informational interviewing. If you don’t have enough energy, it may not be the right time for you to undertake a serious spate of informational interviewing. Keep in mind, you can titrate how much you are doing based on your bandwidth. But it’s still important to acknowledge if you simply don’t have the energy for informational interviewing. Maybe you need to focus on other aspects of your life like rest, caring for yourself or your family, or just getting by.

4. Self-Esteem — This one is tricky; you don’t need much self-esteem to do informational interviewing. After all, self esteem often comes from developing ourselves, advancing our skills, and getting where we’re trying to go. You shouldn’t wait around to feel great about yourself before you start informational interviewing. But you do need a little bit of self esteem before you get started. At a minimum you need to believe that it’s possible you might have something to offer the world, an employer, another person. You need to believe that you are worth other people’s time, and that you deserve the chance to discover where you fit in in the professional landscape.

5. Ambition — You have to want something in order to be successful at informational interviewing. Whether its money, status, meaning, camaraderie, freedom or power. You have to have some kind of goal for yourself. You’d simply never get started if you had no ambition. You don’t need a hyper-specific goal (more on this later), but you do need some kind of north star objective, however vague it might be.

That’s it. That’s all you need to be successful at informational interviewing. Next week: 4 things you do NOT need in order to be successful at informational interviewing.