KOCHI: When Shajahan Aboobaker was ridiculed and rejected as a child for his speech disability, he vowed to turn his life around and become a professional speaker. Fast forward to now, Shajahan is one of Kerala’s most sought after psychotherapist and corporate trainer. He received the Change Maker Award for helping motivate people and aiding them with mental health, at the E -Unnathi summit recently.
Despite collaborating with several NGOs to counsel individuals who have fought trauma and bring them back to life, Shajahan refuses to let the tag of a ‘motivational speaker’ bind him. “One can’t bring a change in someone out of the blue. An individual should have a burning desire within them, which propels them forward; this could either be a dream or a rejection they’ve faced. All I do is to help them find the same, which in turn motivates them. I assist them in eliminating their mental hindrances, enabling permanent changes,” he says. He receives calls from many who attend his classes, thanking him for the inspirational words.
For someone bent on helping others find answers to their solutions, one can’t help but wonder what drives Shajahan forward. “The primary reason is my mother. She has suffered long and hard for me. Her first child had passed away at a tender age. The over-expectations from being a second child in such a family, and the misery upon seeing the ridicule that I had to go through for my speech disability always worried her. This, and the fact that I was determined to garner an audience that would pay to hear me speak, drove me forward,” Shajahan explains.
The corporate trainer uses a blend of hypnotism and psychotherapeutic techniques. “I figure out an individual’s problems using these methods. I also believe that being positive all the time is hard to achieve. Life is riddled with negative experiences. What matters is how you learn to react. I would say that it is necessary to go above and beyond and grasp the technical possibilities. Only then, the procedure becomes genuine. Hence, my perpetual research on psychotherapy and hypnotherapy,” he quips. At a time when the internet provides training videos in plenty, is it worth paying to hear a person speak? “During a face-to-face training, the verbal energy and speaker’s frequency levels complete the communication,” he adds.