“If you are pretending, we notice immediately. Then it doesn’t matter what you said — what matters is that it wasn’t really you,” says rhetoric teacher and Gestalt therapist Donaldas Duškinas. In his view, speaking is not a skill you can simply learn — it is a way of life.

Duškinas invites people to start not with oratory exercises, but with the relationship they have with themselves. True change begins when you tell yourself: “I am who I am, with my strengths and my weaknesses. Only then can you speak in a way that you truly believe in yourself.”

According to Duškinas, speaking sincerely is often blocked not by lack of knowledge, but by traumatic experiences from childhood: “First grade, reciting a poem, you get stuck — the class laughs.” That emotion stays for a long time, sometimes for life. Yet growth begins precisely in that fear.

As adults, we still face a “class” — though now it is called an audience or a market. The question is: do you want to sell, or do you want to help someone buy? One focuses on oneself; the other focuses on what you can give. Value appears only when what you create truly meets the world’s need.

Duškinas reminds us of the Japanese concept of ikigai: do what you love, what you are skilled at, what the world needs, and what people are willing to pay for. But even if all of these align, acceptance is not guaranteed.

In the podcast Beyond Economics and Back, psychologist D. Duškinas and the president of the Lithuanian Free Market Institute (LFMI), Elena Leontjeva, discuss how to overcome fear, accept yourself, not be afraid of the crowd, and persuade others with what you truly believe.