A record breaking sales head has public speaking fear. And surprisingly, he is the number one salesman of the company. Whenever he is asked to speak in front of a crowd, he sweats and shivers. He becomes extremely nervous. Can you believe this? It sounds unbelievable, right?

Have you also faced same situation? Or similar feeling in a different situation?

He is a very successful Head of Sales in a top notch MNC.

One day, he met a man, whom he shared his secret problem with, (which he has never done before with anyone)…

Wait a minute, before we go ahead & figure out, let me ask you a question.

Do you really know why you do what you do? Many times we all believe that yes, we know. Sometimes you may laugh at what kind of question is this? It’s a common sense that we all know what we do and why we do it.

We do several things in a day and we obviously know why we do it. For an example, we know why we smoke, because it is a stress Buster. Isn’t it? Well in that case, there are set of people who do not smoke & still manage tremendous stress beautifully. Or even better, there are people who do not have stress, yet they keep on sucking those bursts of cloudy smoke. We rationalize our answers, but do we really know?

Okay, just one more.

Do you really know why do you shop? You can again rationalize saying, because I need these things for certain purposes. May I ask then why do we buy things beyond our shopping list.

Let’s dive in a little deeper. Why do we keep on accumulating things we don’t even use, but still buy? You may find some rationalization for this.

Now back to the story of a successful salesman with public speaking fear…

Actually I was the man whom he met & later shared his secret problem. His story will make you think that we don’t know why we do what we do? Mostly, even though it seems as if we know.

My name is S K Magic. I have a keen interest and educational background in human psychology. Along with other certification and experience in the personal development domain. I offer counseling and personal life coaching services. I like to experiment and creatively combined the best part of different techniques to produce the transformational impact. This story is one of those success initiatives with one of my clients. I have omitted the real name for privacy.

It was a nice day with a fine weather and a better mood. I was invited to someone else’s seminar. As the day started, on a jovial note with the lead man introducing himself. The wave of introduction started from right to left. I mostly choose my seat in one of the first three rows. Soon, it was my turn to introduce myself. As I introduced various aspects of myself and revealed that I work on people’s subconscious mind for better results. This piece of information caught attention of a man sitting in audience. He started waiting for the right opportunity to interact with me personally. Finally he got hold of me around lunchtime. He wanted to know-how can I be a help to him on some challenges he faces in his corporate career.

His name is Peter. He is the vice president of sales in a successful logistic company. He was very curious to know something. How can I work on his subconscious mind to sort out some habitual problems he has and make him succeed? I invited him to one of our yoga studios, where I was a visiting therapist. He told me about his problem. His problem goes like this – Despite having several years of experience and expertise in his field, whenever he faces or addresses a crowd, he trembles inside. He has been managing teams and good amount of clients and has reached to a senior position. Still, he feels nervous when he attends meetings, conferences, ceremonies, etc.

After listening to his issues, I told him I can work on it, only if he is OK with my conditions. He was more than OK and eager to know my conditions. My conditions were told to him as below. First, don’t over expect too soon. Second, don’t underestimate the power and value of various techniques just because of its simplicity. Third, it would be a joint goal to reach the desired outcome. Which means we both needed to trust and willingly take part like a coach and coached in any sport arena. I also told him it might take more time to find the reason for the problem than to solve it.

Well, ultimately, he was ready with all of my terms. After our consensus, we started our sessions, which were planned for over a few weeks. In few initial counseling sessions, I figured out his history, frequency and the patterns of the problem. I started designing sessions accordingly.

To my great surprise, I applied a number of methods over three weeks and failed to achieve the outcome despite effective techniques. However, he reported a lot of positive changes in his lifestyle and was quite satisfied. We could not hit on his specific problem yet, but he wanted to continue and was enjoying these sessions with its additional benefits. Some of these sessions happened at the Yoga studios, some online, and some weekend sessions at his farmhouse. In one of those weekend farmhouse sessions, I used two powerful tools. I combined meditation and hypnotic trance techniques together and designed the session.

This time, bang on, we hit the right spot. I will tell you how we discovered and solved it.

While he was under session, we went through different phases of his life from adult to young age to childhood in order to find the origin of the problem. What we found was surprising and has a story of its own.

That origin incident went like this – when he was a small kid, one day he was about to perform a speech on a stage on some occasion.

On that day, the hall was filled with parents and guests. The ceremonial program had started. In due course, the various performances from students were lined up. When his turn came, he went on the stage. He was nicely dressed up by his mother and well prepared for his performance.

When he was about to start, suddenly something happened and the entire crowd started laughing loudly, almost like a scream. He couldn’t understand and got extremely scared, started crying and peed in his pant. As he was on the stage and the crowd was facing him, he thought that his performance opening was so bad that everyone had started laughing badly. His mind registered this scary experience. Whereas in reality, coincidentally, something hilarious happened. Actually, someone slipped near the stage on the other side. The entire scene was so comical, that everyone burst out laughing. And this boy thought all were laughing at him.

Now back to the present. Whenever he faces similar situation, his subconscious mind replays the recordings of that as a scary experience and his body responds accordingly. As a result, he trembles inside. Then I used another method to establish this new insight into his mind. Basically, we transferred or replaced the child’s version of misunderstanding with the recent version of adult understanding. That is how we solved the problem. Because of additional sessions, he achieved many successes. Now, he is the director of sales division. He still takes sessions for overall better living & positivity.

Please mind, this problem wasn’t because of his lack of experience, knowledge or authority in his field ( he had ample of all these). But he used to think that these were the reasons behind his problem. He blamed himself for the sweats and shivers in front of a crowd. But, was it a reality? What we found changed the way he thinks now.

Now back to the question we started with. Do you really think, you exactly know why you do what you do? THINK TWICE.

There are many actions we do frequently, not knowing why do we do that? For example, 0n a nice day in a fairly pleasant situation, something minor happens & suddenly you burst out of anger, wondering, why you did that, whereas there was nothing much wrong logically.

Like our moods or weather, many times we exactly do not know why. Still, rationally, believe as if we do.

• S. K. Magic