Tackling your fears head-on: why I started the podcast

In this episode, Sujani delves into her personal struggles with speaking in public and how it affected her career in public health. She reflects on her initial reluctance to speak in various settings and her journey of self-improvement through the creation of her podcast.  Sujani shares that by creating opportunities to practice speaking, she was able to progressively build confidence and improve her communication skills. She emphasizes the importance of small, consistent steps toward facing and overcoming fears. Her transformation led to better engagement in conversations, more profound connections with colleagues, and the ability to speak up in meetings, which were once daunting tasks. By sharing her story, Sujani hopes to inspire listeners to embark on their own journeys of self-improvement and career advancement, proving that the challenges we face can become the catalysts for our triumphs.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to PH Spotlight, a community for you to build your public health career with. Join us weekly right here, and I'll be here too. Your host, sujani Siva from PH Spot. Hey, welcome to another episode of the PH Spot podcast, and welcome. Today's episode is going to be just me no guest today and I want to tell you about how I used fear to improve on a skill that I felt I really needed to grow in my career, right.

Speaker 1: 0:41

So this podcast that you're listening to, I started this podcast just over four years ago and pH Spot has been around over, you know, seven years, and so I started this podcast to actually face my fear of speaking right. Yes, there was that primary objective of bringing career stories and career journeys to our community so that people could learn kind of firsthand from their peers and people they look up to in the field of public health. The secondary objective kind of for this podcast and for me to do this was actually to face my fear of speaking. I've been wanting to do the podcast for years prior to that, but it took me a very long time to gather my strength, almost a year of constantly thinking about it and then to actually get behind the mic and hit, publish right, and to date I've released over 150 episodes, and so that has been essentially 150 opportunities to face my fear and practice this skill. It was terrifying at first, right, so I'd get behind the mic, I'd stutter, I'd do multiple takes. But when I look back at this journey of the past four and a half years 150 episodes I am so glad I made the decision to face my fear because I'm so much more comfortable, my fear because I'm so much more comfortable speaking in front of large groups, small groups, meeting people, just jumping into a conversation, and I just love the person that I've become now that I feel a lot more comfortable to speak to people.

Speaker 1: 2:40

And for you to really understand how much I hated speaking to people and I'll tell you, kind of briefly at least, what my childhood looked like, right. So I used to be terrified of speaking to people, and I don't know why, and this was both in personal settings and professional ones. So whether it was on stage in front of a large audience or to my colleagues around the boardroom when I got my first job, or even when I was in university and I was volunteering at a dental office and I had this job as a secretary. I hated picking up the phone at this part-time dental office job and I was an undergrad at that time. I can even kind of go back to my childhood when my older sister was actually my spokesperson at times when we were out with friends or at family events and she kind of would step in to speak for me because I was quite shy, I didn't want to say hi to people or engage in any sort of conversation. So when I tell you that I absolutely hated speaking to people and that I was shy and terrified like that's the extent of it, right and when I tell people this story now they are very surprised that I used to be that person right.

Speaker 1: 4:06

And so I guess the lesson here is that if you really wanted to, you know, know, improve on a skill that anyone can work on, improving that part of themselves. I, you know, kind of like on the flip side of that, I'm someone who completely believes that you should work on your strengths and really improve on those areas that you know that you enjoy and and have just skills that you've built over time and you're really strong in those areas. But I think there are some areas that we fear, or not so great at that. It might be a good idea to just work towards improving those in those areas a little bit right like, even though I do these podcast recordings, I can go in front of a group, talk to people, jump on zoom calls, run webinars. I don't love it, like I wouldn't do these things if I didn't have to. So I think it's to say that I don't need to be this keynote speaker at a massive conference. That's not kind of the aspirations I have.

Speaker 1: 5:21

But I did identify that by being quite shy, not speaking up during meetings, I was really losing out on opportunities. So I had made a conscious decision to myself to say that you know, I really need to improve in this area so that I can speak up in the boardroom, I can speak up during meetings, I can express what I'm thinking in a way that my colleagues can understand, or, you know, people in the Peach Botkin community can be inspired and motivated. So there was that goal. So I want to kind of ask you if there's something that you're afraid of doing and if you could just have a marginal improvement in that area, could something look different? And if you could just do one thing to maybe improve on that what would it be right?

Speaker 1: 6:28

And, like I told you, getting in front of the mic was not easy. It took me a whole year right. Some days I'd turn on the recording button and I'd freeze every single time I hit record. I had to do multiple takes and you know, when I think back to some of the older episodes, I absolutely did not want to go back and listen to my own voice there. But I pushed through it all because I knew that I absolutely needed to improve on my communication skill and that opportunities to practice this skill were limited and I didn't have enough of them in my job. So what I did is I created my own opportunity.

Speaker 1: 7:11

Right, and that's what I want you to do. I don't want you to wait for opportunities to improve on those skills. I want you to think about how you can take control of your own career growth and how can you help yourself. Push through that fear, open up opportunities for yourself, build up in this area and really see where that takes you. Right, because you know, four years later, here I am.

Speaker 1: 7:38

I can turn on the mic, I can jump on a call, I can walk into any room, big or small, and strike up a conversation with zero hesitation and, most importantly, I do this with a lot of joy and not fear like I used to have right, and sometimes I will tell you I don't recognize myself because that's not who I used to be, and I really like that.

Speaker 1: 8:01

I'm able to have conversations with people, connect with them at a personal kind of like human level and really get to know individuals, which I feel like I didn't do when I was younger and, you know, maybe I had missed out on meeting and getting to know some very interesting people. So here I am today through this podcast episode, encouraging you to not let your fears or lack of a certain skill get in the way of growing in your career, and I really hope that my story can act as an inspiration for you today, and I'd absolutely love it if you could declare to me you know, write to me, tell me via email or direct message on LinkedIn what skill you'd like to commit to improving or a fear that you're going to face, and I want to be there personally to encourage you so that we can get you on the other side and really see what opportunities open up for you. All right, so you got this. I'm cheering for you and I'll see you or I'll be in your ear on a future episode.