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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But then Karen came back to the stage and she looked at me and said, Yasir, you're in a new country. You don't know anyone. This is the first time you've spoken in front of an audience. Congratulations. And then everyone started clapping. Now I'm new. So I'm thinking, is this a Canadian thing? I've heard these people are nice, but did they listen to what I said? Because that was pretty bad.
And afterwards, I'm still beating myself up over it. And I'm going to walk out the room, never coming back. And she just catches me right before I do. And she says, Yasser, are you coming back? And what do we say when we don't want to say yes? We also don't want to say no. We're always in the middle. I'll think about it. I'll let you know.
I'll check my horoscope, ask my grandma, check if the universe is perfectly aligned. So I said all those things. And she said, Yasser, when I was your age, I was the exact same. I was really afraid of public speaking, too. But if you come back next week, I think one step at a time, it might change your life. Now, I didn't have friends, Hala. So I said, okay, you're my only friend. I'll come back.
Why not? So I came back the week, the next week, the next week. And eventually she says, Yasser, you're making progress. You want to try out that public speaking contest? Contest? Are you trying to kill me here? I'm just here to make friends. And I won the contest. Wow. And that's where it clicked, Hala, that this is not my personality. It's a skill that I did not have.
Months later, I had done 40 workshops. I became a TEDx speaker. 10 years from that moment, now I'm coaching some of the biggest CEOs in the world. So how did all this happen? Complete accident.
This is a topic very personal to me, Hala, because a big reason why I got into public speaking was all the rejection that I got in my dating life. I still remember I went on this one date. And first of all, it was extremely hard for me to get a match at all on Tinder. It was just, I could not get. So when I finally got it, I was like, hey, she has two eyes and a mouth and ears. I'll take it.
So I showed up on the date. I'll never forget. She met me. She looked at me up and down and we sat down. Within the first two minutes, she looked at me and said... yeah, this is not really working. Listen, I'm just going to go.
Can you imagine being lonely, not getting any validation and just being hit with that? I was just sitting there by myself the entire day, sinking in on just hating myself, loathing myself the entire time. And I couldn't figure out what it was. And after I got on a lot of the other days, they said, Some of the days I even asked for feedback, believe it or not.
I said, hey, out of curiosity, why don't you want to... Yasser, you sound like you're trying too hard. You sound way too eager. You talk too much. You're trying to impress me with your stories and it's just too much information too fast. Just slow it down a little bit. And when you were talking with the voice, sometimes what happens with people is they're so eager to impress that they talk a lot.
And when they talk a lot, they talk fast, they mumble, they go high pitch, and they're trying to get your approval. And because of that, you could almost sense it and you back off a little bit. Even now, I talk on the faster side, but I've had to train myself, hey, slow it down and be more sure of what you're talking about. Be as sure as you are as the color of your hair.
I used to say things like, hey, so this is what I did. Isn't that interesting? Don't you find that? I'm seeking your approval. But if I said, I went to this thing, I did this thing, and that's how I feel, I'm so sure of the fact that I'm talking about it, I don't question myself. But sometimes you can feel it. You can probably tell me more about your dating experience than I can.
Maybe that's what you felt. Who knows?
Well, think about it like this. Take your favorite song, Hala.
Pull up the lyrics and just read the lyrics. How good will the song sound?
Terrible. But that's what most people do with their voice. They just show up and say the words. They don't use their tonality at all. And they don't realize how annoying it might be until they go on a date with you. And then they realize, hey, why isn't she texting me back? Maybe I'm annoying.
Where do you want me to start? There's all kinds of public speaking anxiety. Most of the ones that I field, they have nothing to do with public speaking itself. They have everything to do with how we view ourselves. One of the most influential coaches I've ever had in my life, he said, a lion doesn't need to sharpen his claws to know he's the king of the jungle. He just knows he is.
So if you constantly need to practice your public speaking just to feel good about yourself, that's not a public speaking issue. That's a self-esteem issue. And I realized this when for four years I'm learning all these public speaking techniques and I'm realizing, hey, I'm on stage. I'm doing well. Why don't I feel more confident? Why do I still feel less confident?
I just have less filler words now. And the missing ingredient was I did not have self-esteem. I didn't have self-confidence. I didn't believe in myself. So for a lot of people, the fear doesn't come from the speaking itself. It's how they perceive themselves and therefore project what other people feel about themselves.
I guarantee you, if someone feels good about themselves, they're not afraid what other people think about them because their opinion about themselves is more important than the opinions of other people. So that's one. And two, it's just a skill gap. If you've never done something before, it's going to be inherently scary. And if you ask the average person, how often do you do public speaking?
Twice a year, once a year. I do one meeting. Of course, it's nerve wracking because we just don't do it.
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