PROvakta, the Public Speaking Club of IIM Raipur, hosted Mindset coach and TEDx speaker, Mr. Harsimran Singh for an inspiring guest lecture on the topic ‘Express to Impress’. Mr. Singh is a corporate trainer and the founder of ‘The Thought Foundation’. He conducts workshops to enable people to develop the right mindset using techniques from Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Coaching. He has coached over 12,600 people across educational institutions and corporations like Reliance, HUL, etc.
The session began with Mr. Singh telling the students how he overcame his own fear of public speaking. “First step is the hardest. Take it now.”, said the speaker as he elucidated how left leaving a 6-digit salaried job at Nestle and established ‘The Thought Foundation’ to realize his passion to help others overcome their speech anxiety and develop self-belief. He then spoke about the importance of effective body language and how to build confidence through power postures. The speaker also emphasized the significance of non-verbal cues and voice modulation to make a powerful speech. He educated the students on the hazards of using fillers or crutch words such as ‘er’, ‘like’, ‘ah’ or ‘um’, and how to reduce them. He also spoke on how to gain emotional mastery and rebuild one’s belief system. He told the engrossed audience that speaking and thinking should go hand in hand, and how fluency in the latter will automatically lead to fluency in the former.
After the lecture, Mr. Singh demonstrated how taking pauses at appropriate places in a speech can drastically reduce fillers by conducting a practical exercise where students were asked to introduce themselves as Mr. Singh gestured them to pause wherever required.
This was followed by Table Topics, an extempore competition on abstract topics like ‘What’s in a name?’, ‘Tinder is the new matrimony’, ‘A doctor a day keeps the apple away’, etc. The participants were given two minutes to speak and the winners were awarded prizes.
The students thoroughly enjoyed the address, actively participating in all activities, and gained huge insights on how to handle any interview, group discussion, informal interaction or formal meeting with confidence.
The lecture was also attended by Prof. Dhananjay Bapat, Chairman Student Affairs, IIM Raipur who thanked Mr. Harsimran Singh for the interactive and informative session.
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