Almost 3 years ago, I took one of the biggest risks in my career - I accepted the SA role in AWS. The odds were against me, but I took a gamble. You see, the role involves something I dread: speaking. Yes speaking, and not just public speaking. Nausea, chills, lead feet, stuttering, and worst of all, a foggy mind - all of these manifest whenever I have to talk to an audience of more than 7 people, to anyone important to me about something emotional - even if its my parents, or to an authority - which for a business would be someone in mid level management and up. So, talking to the CTO of a startup used to trigger this ridiculously irrational fear.
To understand why this is so, allow me to take you 3 decades to the past when I was in fifth grade - back to the time when I had to first speak in public. As a kid who spent most of his time talking with adults, it was only natural for me to have a rather adult perspective of things. Apparently, I impressed my language teacher as this perspective leaked into my essays. What she missed though was that my compositions were always short. We were usually given an hour to write these essays. But unlike my classmates who can easily fill an entire page, I’d struggle getting past the half page mark. It always felt like there was nothing more to write about the designated topic. And even if there’s more, I would usually need the 1st 30 mins to ideate leaving the next 30 to be insufficient to fill a 1-pager. But never mind that, she still picked me to represent our class for the extemporaneous writing contest during Language Week. What’s unique about this event though is that it’s not only about writing. I also had to read to the entire school what I wrote within the 1-hour time limit. To make matters worse, the speech had to be more than 3 minutes. So, I definitely had to fill more than an entire page on a topic that I could not prepare for in advance.
Then, Language Week came. Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t able to write enough to fill a 3-minute talk. In fact, I wasn’t even able to finish writing out my thoughts about the topic. Worse still was that I could not get it over with immediately. After separating us from the rest of the school for our writing time, we had to wait for about another hour until each of us were given the spotlight. And it didn’t really help that the stage has been taken by so many talented speakers from the different events. So just imagine how much pressure built up inside me until it was my turn to speak on stage. At first, it went well. I just read through what I wrote not thinking about the crowd. Then, I reached the end of my essay and it was clearly hanging. What happened next is not something I’m really proud of… I cheated. I went on talking like as if I was still reading my essay. But really, I was already in impromptu mode. Naturally, everything went horribly wrong. I suddenly became aware of all the eyes on me. At first I just felt cold. But then, I started feeling nauseous. And finally, the worst came - my thoughts went blank but not my emotions. I distinctly remember hearing myself stutter several times. Fortunately, I still managed to conclude my talk. But that last minute felt like eternity to me. That must have caused some trauma for me because from then on I started dreading speaking.
But, let’s fast forward 20 years. I found myself taking a couple chances to speak in public. But those occasions only happened because I wanted to impress my girlfriend back then. Remember I said in the beginning that I took a gamble - a calculated risk, when I joined AWS as an SA? It’s because I knew I gained a little bit of courage to conquer my fear. So maybe that would be enough to not really suck at the job. But that still doesn’t make me an effective speaker - even if we’re only talking about a virtual engagement with a CTO and his team. Far from it. In fact, during my first few 1:many customer engagements, I would find the audience disengaged. I know this because there were quite a few dropouts. Also in their respective Q&As, I’m usually met with silence. It’s like as if, people just stayed out of courtesy and didn’t have much take away. The few questions I did get were clearly from the handful that were truly interested in the topic - never mind the ineffective speaker.
Things changed a little since last month though. I found this TED Talk about functional storytelling. Then, I researched more about it. And I finally applied it in my last 2 1:many engagements. And what I found is that the percentage of dropouts reduced quite significantly. And maybe more telling is that the Q&As were more vibrant. All thanks to functional storytelling. Oh by the way, that girl that I tried to impress almost 10 years ago is no longer my girlfriend. She’s now my spouse.