by Rohit Kishore Gupta

I am in Melbourne Australia working as a Business Analyst and Capital Programmer with Syncronised Software.

My journey to fluency was forcefully started on 7th March 2004 when my parents especially my mom forced me to meet a therapist. The reason being is my past experiences with doctors had alwaysbeen a nightmare, right from reading a book in front of a mirror or tastingyour Mama’s thumb on Wednesday or eating green color food on Wednesday or putting some lolly in my mouth while speaking or speak as if you are singing.

During the first meeting, my therapist analyzed my problem and he told me that you don’t have to read books in front of mirror and do some stuff which I have done in the past. It will be all new therapy and it actually left me wondering if he would be able to help.

My first official day of therapy was on 12th March 2004 but the damage was already done. Meeting on 7th has already left some questions in my mind. What new techniques? What new therapy? Then things were moving along fine right from the word ‘Go’ and slowly slowly R.K.Gupta became “Rohit Kishore Gupta”.

From my Group Therapy sessions, I learned the meaning 8 Characters making one word “ATTITUDE”. This has not only helped me in improving my speech but changed my lifestyle, my way of thinking. I used to be negative in life, I used to find faults in others as I wanted to hide my problem. Here at my Speech Clinic, I figured out the best way to cure any problem is accept that you have a problem and if you do it then you have already achieved 50% results (i.e. of 100% only 50% is left).

From Group Therapy, I learned to improvise on my skills. Also my Speech Clinic is just not any speech clinic, it is an organization which creates your personality by bringing out YOU from YOU (which is hidden).

My latest experiment which I would like to share with everyone:

One day I was sitting on my bed and was going through my DIARY and came across experiments which I had done in past. I realized, I have been struggling a bit when I was facing interviews, so I thought to experiment with Interviews. The very moment I decided to apply for jobs only for the sake of interviews not for finding a job. I applied around 30 jobs on the very day and then waited for the calls to come by. After two or three days I was getting calls from a lot of consultants who discussed about the roles and package and some of them asked me to come for face to face interview. I used to go for the interviews and tried so many ways to calm myself. One thing which I realized was, I wasn’t able to control my excitement of answering questions. I used to rush thinking that If I will take time then I might not get selected. At that time I didn’t had anything to loose, so I took my time and started recording my conversations on my phone without letting them know. So after the interview was over I used to hear them 1000 times and analyzed what mistakes I made. Then this process went on for months and months until I was able to control my self. My emotions, my excitement. Like before I never had fear of stammering or feeling ashamed, I always tried to overcome the situation by hook or by crook. But after joining the clinic, my attitude has got changed and this time I decided to tackle is situation. So, after 4-5 interviews, I started to relax myself, when Interviewer is asking me some question then I just stopped to answer abruptly. I used to give a gap of 10-15 secs after he finished his questions and then used to start is slowly slowly. Key was I used to answer 100 questions in 30 minutes interview which I drastically reduced to 50 or 100 questions were now answered in 60 minutes instead on 30. After getting involved in more than 50 interviews I actually felt confident about myself and stopped it. By the way I got 8 offers from those interviews but I rejected them as some of the jobs I actually didn’t liked or I just made some excuse like salary is not good or the work place.

This experiment might be hard for everybody to try but if you can get a chance to try, JUST GO AHEAD. You will enjoy it.

I sometimes struggle with my speech when I am over excited but always try to make myself calm. This excitement is in me from my childhood. From my bad and good experiences, I am trying to calm down and hope one day I will achieve what I want.

I was recently in New Zealand for my company’s project work at the client and there were several meeting and seminar and I felt good about it. My speech was 8/10 and I am going next month as I have a big presentation over there. Will give you guys an update on it.