Why are you worrying about things that might not ever happen? Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer, practicing law throughout the United States at our offices in St. Louis, San Diego, and Washington, DC. The Serenity Prayer goes like this. "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." When you are dealing with the USCIS, or when you're dealing with the state department, keep the serenity prayer in mind. There are so many things out of your control as you go through the immigration process, that you will drive yourself literally insane if you focus on it, if you obsess about it, if you drive yourself crazy wondering about it. There only a very few things that you can control when you go through the immigration process.
One thing that you can control is how strong of a case you file. The things that you can control are working hard, gathering evidence, making sure your forms are perfect, doing everything you can to get your application and the case submission to be as strong as possible. The next thing you can do that you can control is getting ready for your interview. You should be watching our videos on how to get ready for your interview. We have tons of resources on our YouTube channel about how to get ready for your green card interview. You can read over the questions on the 45. You can read over the questions on the I-130. If you're going for naturalization, you can read over the test questions and you can read over the N-400. You need to know your case backwards and forwards. This is another thing that you can control.
The last thing that you can sort of control is how you perform at the interview itself. If you go in there all wishy washy, all wimpy, all wussy, all just sort of, "Ooh, Ooh, I hope I don't get crucified by this mean immigration officer," then you're going to set yourself up for failure. But, if you go in there with your head held high, and you look around and you say, "I got this, I got this. I've been waiting too long to crumble today in front of this officer. I'm going to hit it out of the park," and just be ready for their answers. Treat them like a regular person. That's all they are, is a regular person, just sitting behind a desk. Granted, they have some authority over you, but you can't control who they are. You can't control what they think about. The things you can control during your interview are how you breathe, and how you answer, and how you speak, and how you listen. Listening is a really big deal at immigration. If you can control your listening, you're going to be much further ahead than most people.
Then, we need to forget about the things that we cannot change, and we need to know the wisdom to know the difference. The things we can't change are which officer we get, which day our interview is at, what timer interview starts, whether the officer is mean mugging me the whole time during the interview. I love that phrase, mean mugging. It's one of my new favorite phrases. That is, if they're staring at you looking mean at you, you can't control that. All you can control is how you do. I say this as someone who deals with people going through this process every single day, that it really is a character study. You see some people with a great mindset, going through confident that their case is going to be approved, and then you have other people who lack all confidence, and they spend their time getting all bent out of shape because their case is taking too long. You can't control it. You can't control when your interview comes. You can try to do things maybe to speed it up, but as we've mentioned on numerous other videos, requests to expedite are really BS. Let's focus on the things we can change and the things that we can control.
If you have questions about this, give us a call (314) 961-8200. Email us at [email protected]. Be sure to join us in our Facebook group, which is called Immigrant Home. If you like this video, we ask that you please share it out on social, that you subscribe to our YouTube channel, and that you join us every Tuesday and Thursday, usually at noon central time, where we answer as many of your immigration law related questions as possible in just under 60 minutes. Thanks a lot. Peace out, we'll see you next time.
