Yasir Khan
speaker
254 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 4 Mar
Yasir Khan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
If you think about how we learn a language, especially when we're babies, how do we learn? We learn from our parents. We learn from people around us. We subconsciously absorb it. How many toddlers are going to language classes? I imagine not many. Maybe Elon Musk did. I don't know. But we don't learn through courses and classrooms. We learn through exposure.
So similarly, what kind of material are you exposing yourself to every single day? What are you reading? Who are you listening to? If they're listening to your podcast, I imagine they have a very rich vocabulary.
The moment you start listening to all these things and they sink into your brain, you won't even realize you start saying things that you've heard in podcasts, but you don't even know you heard it somewhere. Until someone says, oh, I've heard that somewhere. Where did you say that from? Because subconsciously, all of this is sitting in your head.
So you have to really carefully guard what you allow in and what you don't allow in, in terms of your intellect.
The most important thing that I feel storytelling does is just memorable. People just remember for much longer. So if I asked you, do you want people to remember what you said? Yes. Okay. Do you want to share your message in a way that people remember it? Yes. Then you must do it in a format of a story. How many of your three-hour lectures do you remember from college, Hala?
Exactly. How many movies since you were a child do you remember?
And all of those are stories. I imagine none of those were 30 bullet points from start to finish, right? No. So you have to learn to create imagery and you have to get people to feel something. If they don't feel anything, they will not remember it. And I'll give you a really strange example here. When I was a kid, I had a costume party when I was about seven years old at school.
And I had this crush on a girl and she was going to dress up as Pikachu. So I said, okay, what goes well with Pikachu? I'm thinking of all the best costumes. And for some reason I come up with Bugs Bunny, right? So I show up as Bugs Bunny in the moment and I'm trying to impress her. And she says, oh, Yasser, of course you're Bugs Bunny. Like, oh, how did you know?
Oh, because of your two large, ugly front teeth. And I didn't forget that for 20 years. That one single sentence for 20 years because of how she made me feel in that moment. And the reason I say that is because that story I've told so many times to so many people that, hey, the words that come out of your mouth, they're important. What you say might not be what they hear.
You might say something as a joke to somebody, but they might remember it for a very, very long time. So that's why when you're telling a story, similarly, you can have positive words, positive phrases that people will remember for a very, very long time. For example, Karen, in the first meeting that I ever met her in Toastmasters, she said, it takes one small step to change your life.
I still remember that. It's been more than a decade.
There are three things that I talk about, the three R's to be remembered. The first R is your story has to be repeatable. If I hear the story, can I hear it long enough to then repeat it to someone else? So if you've heard your favorite stand-up comedian, you have this bit that you like. Oh, he has a great bit on dating or great bit on whatever. You can repeat it to other people.
If I can't repeat it, I won't remember it. So first thing has to be repeatable. Number two, does it relay emotion? Do I feel something when I hear your story? I can tell you about how I got into my car and I got gas and I came back home. What's the point? It's a pointless story, but is there a point to it? And you'll be shocked how many things you can make sound emotional.
Like earlier, we talked about cleaning the dishes. And just with the volume, we made it sound a little bit emotional, right? Someone asked me in a conference of 500 loan officers, napkins, and we made napkins emotional. So can you talk about that with emotion? Can you resonate and relay your emotion? And number three, I feel like this is the strongest thing when it comes to storytelling.
Can you reframe an existing belief? If your story tells me what I already know, It's not changing my belief. Can you take me from point A to point B and reframe how I look at the world? That's what a good story does. So three things. It has to be repeatable. You have to relay emotion and it has to reframe your beliefs.
Add one more quarter to that. You said something really amazing there. You said about how they change their belief. A quote that I love, because I created it, is good speakers tell you what to do. Memorable speakers make you question what is true. They make you change your beliefs. And if they don't make you change your beliefs, then you're not going to see the world any different.
I haven't done a great job of that, to be very transparent with you. I'm always talking about tips and tricks and all these things that I never really talked about it much until my clients started telling me, hey, I love that one video you made where you talked about your ADHD. I love how you talk about, oh, that... You mean you actually like that? That's not filler content?
And then I started tapping into that quite a bit more. I don't know what it is with me, Hala. Maybe it's my childhood, but I feel like if I tell people stories where I struggled in the past, it's going to be a downer and people will feel worse off. But I've learned over time, if you share your pain, it's almost always in the audience's gain.
So now I've started leaning into it more and more. So it's only recently that I've been talking about all the mess ups I've had with my clients, all the terrible advice I've given them, how I used to be anxious with my public speaking, and now people are starting to relate to it. So I imagine my following might grow a little bit faster now.
But to give you an honest answer, I didn't use much storytelling in all this content up until now.
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