Let’s Be Bold
Something I really hate is public speaking. This semester I had the “privilege” of taking The Principles of Public Speaking (PPS) as one of my core classes for my major.
Keep in mind something I really hate is public speaking. In my PPS course, many of our assignments and grades come from speeches we HAVE to present in class.
So far I have presented three speeches which were all, in my opinion, total L’s. After returning to school from spring break, my professor gave us another speech assignment. This speech was supposed to be an impromptu speech. An impromptu speech is a speech that has to be made with little notice.
The topic of our impromptu speeches was our favorite show or movie. For my impromptu speech I chose to talk about my favorite show, Being Mary Jane, because Mary Jane’s career in television is goals.
I decided the reasoning behind all of my previous crappy speeches was because I didn’t prepare enough for them. So, I decided to start working on my speech the same day I got the assignment. Now, what was different about this speech was we had to have some type of visual, so I decided to do a powerpoint, like many other students.
So, after preparing for the speech and practicing almost a thousand times I felt I was ready.
I went to class nervous, but excited at the same time. After the first six people volunteered to go the professor started picking students to give their speeches and she “spontaneously” chose me.
My heart started pounding I went to the front and I put my flashdrive in the computer, nothing was popping up. After whole 3minutes of me trying to figure out why in the hell my flashdrive wasn’t working, one of my classmates yelled, “your flashdrive is the wrong place.” After removing the flashdrive I put it in the right slot. Then I had to turn on the screen to show my powerpoint to the class.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to get the powerpoint on the screen. My professor’s computer desktop was more advanced than I was. After another whole 3 minutes of me trying to figure out how to get my powerpoint on the screen, this guy in my class yells “somebody get this girl a study guide!” The class, including the professor start to laugh at my lack of knowledge in operating technology.
Seriously dude, I already have my own personal vendetta against public speaking, but you had to make even worse by humiliating me in front of the whole class.
I haven’t been able to let this moment in my head go, it’s been haunting me for the past couple days.
I finally realized that maybe it wasn’t the content in my speeches that was lousy, but it was how I delivered them. I wasn’t bold enough. I didn’t have much confidence when delivering my speeches.
Being Bold in today’s society is a major key to being successful. Maybe if I would have went into my speech with more confidence then I wouldn’t have fell apart the way I always do when I give my speeches.