MY STORY
Growing up, I had the luxury of learning public speaking at a very young age. At the tender age of 7, I was encouraged to go up on stage in front of 100 people to participate in a storytelling competition. At the time, I was too young to understand social judgment from others, so to be completely honest, it wasn’t actually that difficult. Year after year, I participated in one of these competitions every year – telling a fictional story, and like many speakers, continued training on good body language, vocal variety, stage presence, the whole 9 yards. I grew up performing classical piano, which was always stressful, so I’m lucky I had more opportunity to work through performance anxiety than most others.
Most people would think that I was a very social person given the amount of speeches I had given up on stage, but the truth was, I was very socially anxious.
You know what I couldn’t do?
I was the guy who wouldn’t speak to others unless spoken to. Even then, it was terrifying to craft an “appropriate response” There was always this little voice in the back of my head that would tell me “you’re wasting their time if you approach, they have better things to do, people think you’re weird”. And it’s because of social judgment over the years that crafted this mindset. I’d constantly shied away from engaging with people.
That was when I noticed that public speaking and social communication were two very different fronts. While I continued to find solace in public speaking, I realized that I only excelled when I didn’t have to inject my personal opinions into the content. It was comforting to know that I had full control over the process, and that there wouldn’t be any interruptions during my speech. Moreover, let's face it. In a social scenario, anyone would walk away if you monologued for five minutes.
It wasn’t until University where I started taking action. There had to be a way to become more confident, I was mesmerized by the natural flow of communication some of my peers had who just seemed to effortlessly draw new relationships, connect, and excel in asking for what they wanted.
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During my last year in university, I made a pact to go and approach one new classmate everyday for 100 days. The results were shocking. I realized that most of them were quite receptive to me introducing myself. Everything I had previously believed in was shattered. My previous notions of how they would perceive me were completely incorrect.
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In short, I simply assumed what would happen before I even tried. It was then, I came to the conclusion that “just because you believe something, does not mean it is true”. It is almost a disservice to automatically assume how someone will behave towards you before giving it a go.
I was hooked, I needed to go and find more avenues to practice communication. I ended up fully committing by finding a career path that aligned with communication, eventually finding my way into software sales. Over the course of my career, I’ve made over 30,000 cold calls with the sole purpose of pitching an idea to clients in order to book meetings and sales. At a certain point, it sounds crazy, but I was recording every conversation I had during the day in an excel spreadsheet and documenting the success rate of lines I was using.
But you know what I discovered?
I discovered that there is a natural pattern to all conversations, and once you unlock this pattern, you will become rock solid in all of your interactions and always know what to say. Through sales, I learned to handle rejection and understand that the secret to becoming “authentically you” is to accept the fact that people will in fact disagree with you, but more often than not, putting yourself out there will yield more positive than negative results.
Later on in life, I came across a ton of socialites who struggled with public speaking. The nervous energy of dozens, hundreds, to thousands of eyeballs glued to them was daunting – they thrived off immediate feedback and adding witty responses to a conversation, the fear of standing up alone with nothing to latch onto was their personal struggle. Things became full circle.
That’s when I realized, communication is such a vast topic, and just because someone excels at one front, doesn’t mean they excel in all of them.
I started coaching these individuals on public speaking, and through my own devices in my social interaction journey, I now am proud to be the founder of Charismaki, an organization dedicated to helping you identify your communication gaps - and blossom into the individual you strive to become.
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As a coach, I have an 'in your shoes' perspective of knowing what it's like to struggle with anxiety, and will be with you every step of the way to become an adaptable speaker.