How I Overcame My Fear of Public Speaking | Danish Dhamani | TEDxKids@SMU

My name is Donna SH and my full time job is counting people's arms and counting us and it all started on my first day of school after my family moved from Pakistan to Tanzania. I was busy drawing my dream cars in my notebook and all of a sudden I hear a voice in my direction, teacher Daanish, could you please get up and introduce yourself? She had put me in trouble. She was in this foreign land. 30 pairs of eyes looking at me. How would you feel when a teacher puts you on? At the time of this kind of situation my mind went blank my heart started racing I stayed silent I started hearing giggles in the classroom and then tears ran down my cheeks that was the first time I felt the

fear

of

speaking

in front of others the first time I felt the

fear

of

public

speaking

a few years later, I was in college here in the United States, that fear still stayed with me, it wasn't slow, it was part of my soul now, when I was little, I had many other fears.

I was afraid. of the darkness, the monsters under my bed, the cockroaches, and I don't mean the tiny cockroaches here, but the big flying cockroaches that I had in my house in Pakistan, in Tanzania, but I

overcame

these fears. I outgrew them as I grew up, but

public

speaking no way. I was still scared, but I decided enough was enough. I decided to do something about it to take that step and find a solution, so I went to the one place on the Internet where we all look for problems: our solution to our problems. I Googled how to overcome the fear of public speaking.

The first link told me about the great things I could be if I

overcame

this fear. He sounds like a leader. Get a great job. Share your ideas. He offers a TED talk. Change the world. The second. The link showed me all the different ways I could overcome this fear. Hire a speech coach. Talk in front of the mirror. Take online courses. Attend speech clubs such as Toastmasters. That's when I realized I'd been wrong all along. I thought you were either born a public speaker or not, I was wrong. I realized that public speaking is actually a skill that can be taught, which means that if any of you here want to speak powerfully like any of your famous public speakers, yes, we all can, now we can some of these.

The solutions work for me, others are not so much like hiring a speech coach which was out of my student budget, but online courses, that's where I learned how to vary my pitch up and down, how to speak quite, very fast, so you could get someone excited or slow them down. just to get someone's attention and I practiced I practiced in front of the mirror at least that's where I had a friend who thought I was good for the Toastmasters speech club that was fantastic. I was able to go in front of others and I got feedback on what I did right and what I did wrong, so I did all these things and I realized that first I was stuck in this cold, dark hole where the fear of public speaking followed me, It knocked me down and here was this promise of sunshine of green pastures without anxiety, but the path from here to here was all over the place.

I had to do all these things and I thought there had to be a simpler way, there had to be a way I could go from here and I jumped up here, so I went back to Google, the fountain of all wisdom did some research and I started learning and reading a lot about artificial intelligence about these personal assistants that we have in our pocket, like Siri Alexa, that understand what we say, hey, Siri was. At the next meeting you have, they will understand what we are saying. What if they could also understand how you are saying something and analyze your voice?

What if they could be your speech coaches? What if every person in the world anywhere in the world had their own personal speech on demand? speech coach, can you imagine a world where anyone has this help to help them overcome this fear of public speaking to help them speak powerfully to help them share their ideas that is the idea that God has started that is the idea that helped us to create or I aural AI a mobile application that counts your arms and to us a mobile application that gives you personalized lessons a place to practice them quietly in privacy and an application that gives you instant feedback using artificial intelligence now a year and a half ago when my partner and I started building this, we weren't experts, all we knew was that we wanted to build something, we wanted to create a solution, we weren't public speaking coaches, we weren't public speakers, we weren't data scientists, but we had the power of the Internet. , so we read a ton of research. articles on computational linguistics we talked to hundreds of speech coaches trying to understand how they give feedback on their speech we watched videos on machine learning and artificial intelligence so we could code all this stuff and create this app because we believe we can use technology to help people to become better versions of ourselves and the reason I share my story with you today is not to tell you to go out and build or be an entrepreneur.

What I'm saying is go out and face your fears, don't bury them deep. inside, if you have a problem, look for a solution, if nothing exists, create that solution, if you don't have the skills, go to Google, find how you can improve your knowledge and create something for me. It all started when I was little, the first time I felt the fear of speaking in public. That's what drove me to act. That's what prompted me to go on this journey to become a better speaker. This journey has no end. You will never see the finish line.

In fact, there is no finish line in public speaking. you can always improve remember you can always become a better speaker you only stop if you tell yourself you are good enough thanks for the way i was recording my speech let's see what feedback or i give ok so i had some filler words like you know and um my pace is okay 107 worse for a minute not that bad good energy and then some feedback or I was giving almost perfect I think I need to practice a little more and he says it looks like you'll be hosting a TED talk in no time and my 30 a plus speech and my transcript and I can even play my audio and listen to it alone, check it out