If you needed to convince someone that Girl Scout cookies are delicious or that rainbows were really beautiful, you’d have to first know what the cookies taste like and what rainbows look like – right? Related: 7 Things All Interviewers Want To Know About Your Brand The same applies when it’s time for you to sell yourself in an interview to strangers. You need to know where you’ve been, what you’ve accomplished, and where you’re headed. On the one hand, that might sound really simple. They are your experiences, so you would be the best one to know how far you’ve come. Yet, how many times do we easily forget by Monday what we just did on Saturday and Sunday? How often do we make the same mistakes over and over because we failed to assess our experiences and extract the lessons learned so we don’t repeat those mistakes? These things happen often, only to leave us stumped and running in circles. The same thing can happen in an interview if we don’t take the time beforehand to really understand our past and know what we have to offer in the future. Preparing for an interview is crucial to ensuring that you come across as a competent, potential employee. You need to be able to recount your previous work experiences as if they were yesterday. You need to be able to tell a future employer what you’re good at; they aren’t going to know yet, so you need to be able to tell them. You need to be able to show them that you think about the future and have goals and aspirations you’re working towards. All of this requires you, the applicant, the interviewee, to know yourself first. Below are some simple steps every job seeker should take before each interview to ensure they present their best self in the most confident way: