334: Stop Saying “I’m Passionate” in Interviews and Start Showing Your Value

One word keeps showing up in interviews with mid-career professionals, and it may be holding you back more than you realize. That word is passion.

In this episode, I break down why employers already assume you care about your work and why passion alone is not what helps you stand out in today’s competitive job market. At mid-career, hiring decisions are less about enthusiasm and more about clarity, credibility, and measurable results.

If you feel stuck, undervalued, or frustrated in your job search, this conversation will help you reposition how you talk about your experience so employers clearly see the value you bring.

I explore how expectations change as your career progresses. Early in your career, hustle and enthusiasm can open doors. At mid-career, decision-makers want proof. They want to understand how your judgment, leadership, and execution improve outcomes, reduce risk, and help teams and organizations perform better.

I also share a real career example that shows how naming measurable results rather than emotions accelerated trust and opened better opportunities. From there, I translate common interview buzzwords into language hiring managers actually use when making decisions, including improving retention, reducing rework, speeding up delivery, and driving measurable performance improvements.

You will walk away with practical ways to reframe your answers so you clearly communicate how you lead, influence, and deliver results, even when you do not have formal authority. Instead of saying you are passionate about leading teams, you will learn how to explain how you improve outcomes and help organizations execute strategy effectively without burning people out.

We also talk through common interview traps, phrases that signal strategic impact, and ways to connect your strengths to the real problems employers are trying to solve right now.

If you want to stand out in a cautious hiring market, this episode will help you replace vague claims with clear, testable value.

If you found this episode helpful, follow the podcast, share it with a colleague who is interviewing, and leave a review on Apple Podcasts so more mid-career professionals can find these conversations.

For a deeper perspective on why being good at your job is no longer enough and how to navigate today’s market, download my free 15-minute audio debrief at https://johnneral.com/briefing. 

Transcript

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Welcome And Snow Day Setup

John Neral 0:01

Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Mid-Career GPS Podcast. I'm your host, John Narrell. This is the show for mid-career professionals who feel stuck, undervalued, or unsure what's next, and know that doing more isn't the answer. Here we focus on how you show up, and that means how you make clear decisions, build influence, and take control of your career so you can find that career you love or love the one you have. Well, my friends, if you have been anywhere in the path of this gigantic snowstorm that hit a good portion of us last week, I hope you are doing well. I hope you are safe. I live outside of the Washington, D.C. area, and we got about six inches of snow and about three inches of sleet and freezing rain. It was not a fun storm to have to deal with, but here's the best part. The power stayed on, the heat stayed on, the water flowed, and the former school teacher and me absolutely loves a good snow day. So I hope you had as much uh good fortune, or if you know your power did go out, hopefully it wasn't out for too long and everybody you love is safe and taken care of. But one of the things I remember about a good snow day is I was always like, what can I get done? Right? Like, what now that I have this extra time, what can I get done? So here's what I did last week.

Free Audio Debrief Invitation

John Neral 1:27

I recorded a 15-minute audio debrief. It is all about why doing good work is no longer helping you at mid-career. Now, it goes without saying you still have to do quality work, but it's the idea that if you're just doing good work, it's not going to serve you as much as it did in the early stages of your career. Now, I put all of this into a free audio debrief. You can get it on my website, johnnarrell.com. It is located on the homepage, the resources tab. You can even go to johnnarrell.com forward slash briefing. And it's also in the show notes. But I would love for you to go ahead and grab the audio debrief. Just like this podcast, you can listen to it on the go, on your run, when you're doing dishes, whatever it might be, and get some true perspective on what this job market is actually looking like right now and how to navigate it. So again, visit johnnarrell.com forward slash briefing to get that. Okay. So here is the other thing I

The Problem With Saying Passion

John Neral 2:36

did. I had some chance to work on some things with the podcast as well. And I was going through some notes. And I thought, gosh, what is the one thing that I am continually hearing people say, or prospective clients say, or even my clients will come and they will say this and they will say this one word. And again, former school teacher and me, it's like nails on a chalkboard. And that word is passion. I hear things like, I'm passionate about what I do, I'm passionate about leading people, I'm passionate about saving companies money. Saying I'm passionate is hurting your mid-career growth. And this might be a little controversial or a little sticky for some of you, but stay with me on this because I need to explain this very clearly to you. If you continually use that word because you think it is attractive or it makes you more appealing, it doesn't when it is a standalone word. If you are thinking that you're saying, oh, I'm passionate, and people are going to absolutely understand what that means, you're wrong. In a job interview, your task is to explain your results, your experience, your beliefs as clearly and cleanly as possible. And if you think that by simply saying, well, I'm passionate and they're going to know what that means and they're going to love that and they're going to want to hire me, you're wrong. At mid-career, how you are speaking about your work matters more than ever. And the word passion has quietly become one of the most overused, underperforming words in any professional conversation. When I was hiring talent across organizations and people would come in and they would say that, I would pause the interview for a moment and I would say, what exactly do you mean by that? Because throwing out the word passion or I'm passionate is actually weak positioning. And what it signals to those hiring managers, HR reps, and recruiters is that you're just throwing out a buzzword and you're not really backing it up.

Hiring Is Analytical Not Emotional

John Neral 5:12

So if you're saying I'm passionate about things, understand this that passion is already assumed. In fact, it's actually taken for granted. No one is impressed by how much you care about your work in this job market. What they care about is what you deliver. When you say you're passionate, you're not explaining your value, communicating your results, clarifying your expertise. What makes you different from everyone else? Please, if you think saying I'm passionate about my work makes you different from everybody else, it doesn't. It is vague, it is generic, and most importantly, it is forcing the hiring manager or whoever is interviewing you to do extra work to figure out exactly what it is you bring to the table. They don't have the time for that. You need to get in there, communicate your message, and get out. The interview is not about you. As much as we would like to think, yeah, they want to take time and get to know you. It is not what it is. It is about whether or not you're a great fit for that organization. And the way that they know that or learn that is based on how well you communicate your results. And you do that with clarity. Early in our careers, we could talk about how we were a hard worker and how we we volunteered for multiple clubs and organizations in college, or we did an internship and we learned so much and we were excited about getting started in our career. That worked then. It doesn't work now. At mid-career, we know the game has changed. And so what I have seen time and time again, especially when I'm doing interview prep coaching with my clients, is that often when they will say, I'm passionate about something, it actually derails their momentum. Passion is emotional. You can feel passionate about your spouse, your partner, your loved one. Right? It's that thing that that they do for you that excites you in a way that you've you know you've never felt before. Passion is emotion. Hiring decisions are analytical. So can you see where in that job interview where you're talking to someone who is making an analytical decision, bringing an emotional component in as the primary driver for your conversation is not going to help you? The people who are making that hiring decision, they are thinking about ultimately their return on investment. Are they willing to invest time, money, and energy in bringing somebody new on like yourself? And there's going to be an outcome that is going to positively impact the organization. Yes, they are going to take a risk, but in an analytical decision, we want to make sure that they are taking the most calculated and beneficial risk possible. When they're looking at the pool of applicants, and especially when they get down to their final selections, they are not asking who wants this the most. Oh, you should you should hire me because I'm passionate. How do I know that? When you start asking yourself that question, we can then start digging more deeply into what that passion actually looks like and how it's demonstrated. Because when you lead with passion, and I'm talking about this from the standpoint of you're interviewing for a job or even a promotion, you're offering something that is unverifiable instead of something that is concrete. Mid-career professionals are hired for what they have proven, not for what they feel.

Career Story: Choosing The Right Role

John Neral 10:00

I remember a time in my career where I was coming back from lunch with my director, my supervisor, and we were getting ready to go through a reorg, and they posed two different positions for me. One position was in a very client-facing forward position, overseeing a multi-million dollar project. The other was essentially leading a team of 85 people and overseeing their professional development, their communication, their training, their onboarding. And my boss asked me, and she said, I don't know where they're going to put you, but if I had to advocate for you, what would you want? And I said, look, I could do both jobs. But if you want me to do a job really well that's going to deliver results, you put me in the position that is leading the team. Now, I understand that's not a revenue generator, but we can measure progress by how well we're retaining employees. We can measure progress with employee satisfaction. We can measure progress by getting things delivered on time and under budget. So I'm okay being the person supporting the efforts of those forward-facing employees because this is where I know I can deliver for you the best results. And then I said something else. And I said something else at this point that really was demonstrating my clarity in my decision. And I said, look, if you put me in this forward-facing client role, what I can basically tell you is that I'm not going to feel valued. I'm going to be in a position that I'm not going to enjoy. And I will probably be gone in six months. And my boss looked at me and I said, or it might be sooner if you really don't like me in that role, and then you just fire me. And I realized that was a gutsy thing to say. But I was so clear in my belief of where I was best positioned within that organization that I was willing to risk it all because I was clear and I was clean in what I can deliver. I never uttered the word passionate because it wasn't going to be a decision maker or a needle mover in any way, shape, or form in that conversation. Your passion is demonstrated in other ways. That's what I want you to be able to communicate here. When we say passion, passion becomes a placeholder for specificity.

Replace Passion With Specific Value

John Neral 13:08

Right? Instead of saying something like, I'm passionate for fixing broken cross-functional processes. Right? You want to say something like, I help teams make faster decisions with less rework by doing A, B, and C. We want to be as clear and specific as possible. Now, you might be sitting there and saying, okay, John, that's all great and that's wonderful, but but is there anything wrong in saying I really love what I do? At the end of the day, it depends on how and where you say it. For example, if you are in a people management type role, you should enjoy working with people. You know how people will say, I hate people, right? You wouldn't want to be that person in that role. So you can say, I love working with people, but I need you to back it up with more substantial evidence than that. Oftentimes, what I see is there is a trap that people think that saying, I love this or my passion is a demonstration of confidence, and it's not. It is uncertainty disguised as enthusiasm. And that will not get you the job offer, in my opinion. I've seen it time and time again. It just doesn't happen. If you put two qualified candidates in front of me, both look the same on their resumes and their LinkedIn, and one only talks about how passionate they are, and the other one talks about how they're going to deliver results. I'm hiring the one that delivers results a hundred percent of the time. In this job market right now, companies want to get stuff done. Look, the job market report, uh uh just as of last week, we're not seeing great things. Amazon's laying off people, UPS is laying off people. We're seeing big companies make really interesting announcements right now in terms of their staffing numbers. And we need to be careful with that, right? Because that means the job market is going to get tighter. And when it gets tighter, it gets more competitive. So if you're interviewing for a new position or you're interviewing for a promotion inside the company, here's what I want you to remember: employers hire talented, experienced, mid-career professionals for their judgment, their pattern recognition, how well they make decisions, especially in times of uncertainty or ambiguity, how

What Employers Measure At Mid-Career

John Neral 16:12

they influence without authority, and their ability to get results by leading other people. I want to go back to one thing I just mentioned, which is about influencing without authority. Those three words have come to greater prominence in 2025 in terms of looking at an employee's results where they are able to lead without necessarily having the title. So I want you to go back and take a listen to episode 322. It's called Leading Without the Title: How Mid-Career Professionals Build Trust and Get Noticed. This is an episode that if you are working inside of an organization where you're hearing a lot about we're measuring influence without authority, that is an absolutely relevant episode for you to go back and listen to. So episode 322, go back and check that out. Okay. But in the end, it is your language. Your language in how you communicate your value and your results, and that's where the transformation happens. If you've been following me for a while, you know that my whole approach to interviewing is about clearly communicating the transformation you are going to help the company achieve because of your skills, talents, and expertise. So instead of leading with passion, lead with value. Talk about the problems you repeatedly solve, the decisions you're trusted with, the outcomes you've delivered, and how you think, not just what you do.

Language That Signals Strategic Impact

John Neral 18:14

Because mid-career professionals, more and more, are being asked to show up from a very strategic perspective and position. So, for example, you might say something in an interview like, I'm brought in when things are unclear and leadership needs structure. I specialize in turning strategy into execution without burning people out. That same job that I was talking to you about, that my director asked me to choose between two positions, I remember sitting in that interview when I joined the organization. And I was with that organization for five years and had a great time working there. But I remember sitting in that interview and she looked at me and she said, Why should we hire you? And after everything I had gathered from listening to the other interviews and what I had learned throughout the whole process, I looked at her and I said, You hire me because I'm the person on your team that can have the conversations with other employees nobody wants to have. And when I tell you her eyebrows raised and she looked at me and she said, Tell me more, it was at that moment I felt like I had a really good chance of getting the job offer. And honestly, it was the thing that moved the needle. Because three weeks into that job, she walks into my office and she says to me, Remember when we talked about why should we hire you? Okay, here's why. So you have to lead with value. If you think your passion is what's gonna get you the job, my friends, I need you to dig more deeply. I need you to go deeper into

Closing Reminders And Resources

John Neral 20:10

exactly why. Why that passion is so important and how you are demonstrating it. Passion is personal, but value is professional. I'm not saying you shouldn't care about your work, and I'm not saying that being passionate about your work is bad. What I'm saying is that your passion is emotional, it is internal. You have to shift the conversation and make the value, the results that you've achieved, the value you're going to bring, make that external. That is what hiring managers and companies and HR reps and recruiters want to hear in this job market right now. So, my friends, I hope I gave you a lot to think about. So don't forget, I've got that 15-minute free audio debrief. You can check the show notes, visit johnner.com for more information about that. Grab the free audio debrief, let that give you some more perspective on how to navigate this job market and this whole mid-career journey. And until next time, my friends, remember this. You will build your mid-career GPS one mile or one step at a time, and how you show up matters. Make it a great rest of your day. Thank you for listening to the MidCareer GPS Podcast. Make sure to follow on your favorite listening platform. And if you have a moment, I'd love to hear your comments on Apple Podcasts. Visit johnnarrell.com for more information about how I can help you build your mid career GPS, or how I can help you and your organization with your next workshop or public speaking event. Don't forget to connect with me on LinkedIn and follow me on social at John Daryl Coaching. I look forward to being back with you next week. Until then, take care and remember how we show up matters.