Transcript:

Welcome back to the Smash system podcast. I’m Nino Prodan. And in this episode, I want to talk a little about developing your skill. Before I started a podcast, before I really started doing anything where I was talking online, I was terrible at public speaking. I wouldn’t say Sam great still, but back then I was awful. Ivan ran for local office without the ability to speak publicly. I was terrible. And it took me a while to understand why. And I finally figured out the event that kind of triggered this in my head. And I was in seventh grade I was asked to read out loud and have this problem reading under fluorescent lights. It’s something with the spectrum of light that it produces, and it really bothers my eyes so much that I can barely see the words on the page. I only read one paragraph, but after about two sentence says my reading slows down so much that at first I start reading from Word to word. And then it gets so bad that I break down to letter to letter. So it took me about 20 minutes to read this one paragraph while standing up in class. And as I’m reading, I can feel the anxiety the anxiousness in my classmates. At first it’s annoyance and then involves into pity. And I’m very empathic so I can feel this as I’m trying to read as I’m stressed out, sweating, clammy hands, holding the book in my in front of me. tunnel vision only able to see like one letter at a time. And that feeling sets itself inside my brain. What my brain does is it relates anytime I stand up in front of a group of people to speak, that I’m not safe, that I’m being judged. I’m going to fail at whatever I’m doing. So later in life when I go to speak in front of people, my brain tells my body that I’m not safe. And what happens I get an adrenaline rush. And when you have an adrenaline rush, your brain is actually cut off. You can’t think clearly. Because your body readies itself for action readies itself to run or fight. So all your blood leaves your brain and goes to your muscles. And what I learned is I had to create a safe environment for myself to reprogram my brain not to react that way anymore. Because I wanted to speak in public, I wanted to speak to people I want to make a difference. And the only way you can do that, in my mind at the time was speaking in public. And so what I did was set up a challenge for myself. I told myself, I would do 100 videos on Instagram. And these videos are only allowed at the time. We’re only allowed to be one minute long and I kind of just picked up pics from something out of my life or something out of the life of my coaching clients at the time. And I would do a one minute video and post it on the first video I did wasn’t that great? It turned out to be okay. But it was after about 70 takes 70 takes do a 40 I think it turned out to be about 40 seconds. So that 140 second video took me about two and a half hours to create. And I didn’t have any other goals in mind when I did this. I my only ambition was to grow myself was to put it out there and help change my brain. If I if I had ambitions for a lot of views or anything else to help me judge myself, then it wouldn’t be safe. So I needed to keep the bar as low as I could. So my brain would stop reacting when I spoke in front of people and so I did 100 videos During that time, I also joined Toastmasters and began speaking to people in person standing up in front of people. And because all the work I did while I was doing videos on Instagram, it only took me about three speeches to really get comfortable in front of people. And then after a year of that, I even got a gig to speak in front of people. So my point here is, it’s not about being good at something right away. It’s not about getting numbers and getting a following, and making lots of money right away. It’s about growing the skills that you need to make t