Don't Freak, It's Public Speaking...

Hello, welcome to week eleven,

Today I’m writing on something most people dread, and this is public speaking. I will be honest when I read that we would need to be doing a seminar which involved public speaking I almost ran for the hills. Just the thought of speaking in front of a crowd is enough to make me disappear quick smart, but, I had committed to doing the paper and it would be time to deal with it.

Once we had got into the group and received the information regarding our seminar it became obvious that the idea of recording ourselves for the seminar would be easiest. Our group is spread wide, we also all work and have family commitments, so we organized a weekend evening and we smashed it out. It wasn’t without its troubles; four of the five members were obviously struggling with the talking despite it being only to our group and the camera.

We had Nathan in our group, who was extremely confident in his ability to speak and he seemed to thrive on leading us through this. We all had our troubles forgetting words, stumbling on words we had used a thousand times and having the ability to make our speech flow. As a team I believe we really pulled together, we understood that the majority were struggling so there was never any pressure applied, the atmosphere remained in good spirits which helped immensely and we did very well. Some will no doubt see our seminar and see all our faults, but, I believe we all learnt from this, we all grew from it and I personally came away with more confidence in myself and my ability to speak. If you had asked me to speak to people I do not know, even just to a camera, a year ago I would have laughed and left the building before you would realise.

I found the beginning of this recording to be very frustrating for myself. I knew my topic, I knew the statistics and leading into the session I was confident in myself. I started my first section of my talk and made a mistake with a statistic, this hit me hard, I lost my thoughts and felt as though I knew nothing. I quickly regained focus after some group laughs, mainly at my cussing of myself. I gathered my thoughts and controlled by breathing. I think I did well overall, I stepped up to something that has always been a stumbling block for me and I feel good walking away from something that was a very good learning process for myself.

I quickly would like to take a moment to thank my group, we have worked well throughout this entire semester but most importantly for myself, they made this seminar assignment the best it could be. They were supportive and kept it very relaxed which helped immensely.

Ryan.