At Nerd For Tech, our core team members have been in a stage where they used to feel low on confidence while speaking in public or speaking to someone from the professional world in English.
While building this community for the past 1.5 years, we have learned so many things in the process & that’s why we have decided to start a Soft Skills club at our community to help those who feel the same, as we used to feel.
Join the Slack channel 12_soft_skills on the slack community & keep reading to know more about it. Before moving ahead, here are our current community & work status-
LinkedIn Community — 6.9K Members
Medium Publication — 4.5K Writers, 7.3K Readers, 15K Unique Daily Visitors
The Real Talk Show — Original podcast series where we have interviewed 25+ guests, some were Optical Engineers from NASA, Software Engineers from Google, Mechanical Design Engineer from Tesla, A Global Product Design lead from Netflix
ELA (Explore -> Learn -> Apply ) — To build a culture around Collaboration & Practical Learning | Check out this blog post for more information
Slack Community Space — To make things more scalable & organized.
You can find more information about us here at www.nerdfortech.org
Our presence as communities in different domains & areas: NFT — AI & Data Science |NFT — Computer Engineering | NFT — Technology | NFT — Game Development | Instagram | Twitter
Problem Statement —
Look at the challenges we have been through & you might as well relate to the situation. When there’s an opportunity to speak in front of people, ask questions, or speak with someone professionally over a call or in person.
You might go through these phases —
You just want to get out of this situation.
Heartbeats fast & there’s a tickling in your belly.
Unable to spit out the word & stammers a lot.
Unable to deliver your idea/speak efficiently, keep using filler words (uhh, basically, you know, I mean) e.t.c
There may be tons of other ways we all experience this state when we feel low. Unfortunately, the series of such events plants a seed of low confidence & it haunts an individual for the rest of his/her life.
First of all, you don’t have to treat speaking in English as a skill or a necessity. It puts pressure to learn which makes the process boring & full of pain. Think about it, how exciting it is to speak in English, as it opens a door for you to collaborate with someone on a project, idea, initiative who’s living on a different continent in a completely different culture & you two can share your thoughts with this language & do wonders.
Imagine, you want to build a rover for Mars & you have figured out everything, except you’re stuck on its electrical mechanism to open up the solar plates to charge the batteries of a rover.
But, there’s an engineer in Nigeria who’s got expertise. So isn’t it cool & exciting to be in touch with the engineer & figure out the solution together?
Okay, now you must have imagined the vast possibility once you have started practicing writing & speaking your ideas efficiently in English.
Yes, you heard it correct, before speaking, it’s easy to master writing. Since writing allows you to think & it gives you more time to express your thought.
Tips & Practices — Okay, here’s the list of some basic tips & practices which have helped us to speak well & confidently.
Have a clear idea in your mind before delivering it. Try to structure your entire thoughts in bullet points.
Before speaking/writing in English, speak out loud the thoughts in your native language, which sets the initial highest bar with you.
Try to have a conversation with yourself in your mind. We all talk to ourselves in our native language, but from this point in time, talk to yourself in English.
Start documenting your thoughts on LinkedIn posts/Medium articles or anywhere digitally. Like we mentioned above, it’s easy to express in writing as you have time to think. You can share your viewpoints on any philosophy, your recent experience, or anything else. Broadly this practice will push you to deliver your ideas efficiently.
Don’t forget to use the free extension of Grammarly, which will point out the basic grammatical mistakes while writing.
Once you’re proficient in writing, parallelly start reaching out to people for any kind of collaboration, this will help you with building networking & professional relationships. LinkedIn is the best platform for networking.
Once you have connected with someone professionally, you can set up calls over Zoom/Google Meet to have conversations efficiently which will boost your confidence eventually.
Okay, here’s the last tip, start reading books. We’d suggest you read biographies & autobiographies. Check out the 05_book_club, a slack channel in our community to engage with others who’re book lovers
Community Events— Practice makes a man perfect
Here‘s an event we have in our mind so that as a community we can engage & shape our skills while applying in the real world, join the slack channel 12_soft_skills to get updated.
It’s Me — A virtual event, where you’ll be given 45 secs to speak something interesting about yourself, you’re working on. Then for a 10 secs time window, If no one showed up to interact with you, it’s over for you. You’ll continue to speak until every 10 secs time window after you speak, there’s someone who wants to interact with you.
You can have a 3.5 mins call with our founder, Harsh Mittal. You can have a conversation with him & at the end of a conversation, he’ll give out feedback. Check out this blog for more - here
We’ll soon update the complete processes about these two events in the slack channel. So don’t forget to join the community.
If you have any suggestions or ideas or feedback. Don’t hesitate & get in touch via mail(nerdfortech000@gmail.com) or DM us over LinkedIn or join our slack community & send a message in the #02_suggestions channel over slack.