Today's guest on the Transformational Pathways Podcast is Christina Pooran, Treasury Analyst for Sanne Group. Arriving in New York after spending her whole life in Guyana was a major shift in Christina’s life. She had to balance being a full-time student and working too and, after a while, craved the college experience which he simply didn’t have time for. She found a community which welcomed her in the Toastmasters club of her college. She thrived and enjoyed the fact that she could share her own stories and learn from others’ experiences at the same time. However, Christina also shares the traumatic experience of blanking in front of an audience, walking out of the room, and experiencing a crash in her confidence. Christina would refrain from public speaking for a couple of years after this. However, like a true Toastmaster who takes challenges head-on, she decided to give public speaking another chance after she graduated. Today she shares her inspiring story of building, losing, and regaining her confidence through Toastmasters.
HIGHLIGHTS
01:59 Growing up in Guyana and moving to New York
07:22 A fascination with the moon and her emotional arrival in New York
12:17 Working and studying full-time and joining Toastmasters as an extracurricular activity
17:17 Being welcomed into Toastmasters and doing her first Table Topics
23:14 Toastmasters is a platform for sharing and learning
26:41 Losing her confidence and walking out of the room and the audience
33:19 Facing her fear of speaking in front of an audience and overcoming it
39:52 Joining a bilingual Toastmasters club
42:16 Keeping an open and mind listening to each speaker and their stories
44:17 Growing with Toastmasters and working on areas for improvement
QUOTES
10:01 "There's the other side of the world in Guyana where people who have seen you for all this time can't bear to let you go. So here I was sort of stuck in that limbo. Should I be happy that I'm here, or should I be sad that I'm here?"
15:43 "To be honest, I wasn't looking to go do speeches. I just really wanted somewhere to be, somewhere to go, so I can feel that I was a part of college outside of the academics."
23:46 "It's such a good platform. the way you can share and you can learn from people. So people go there and yes, they are improving their public speaking skills, but they're also sharing something that people in the audience would have never known."
31:51 "From that day on, I never went back to speak in front of an audience because there was this always lingering fear that okay, this happened, and this will probably happen again."
34:34 "Are you waiting for some miracle to happen for you to say, oh yeah, let me do this. I mean, I guess I realized that if I don't make that effort to work at it, I'll always be a prisoner to this fear."
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