One Bite at a Time

As one who doesn't get particularly nervous giving speeches, I tried to be sure and focus on at least one thing that I could take from these early, introductory videos and build upon it.  Specific to our next speech, I found that Janine's tip about finding a subject that interests me particularly stood out.  The whole time that I have been brainstorming about what to give my Culture Speech about I have been thinking to myself, "What topic would interest my fellow students the most."  As I have barely gotten to know any of you (not to say that you all didn't do a fabulous job on your Intro Speeches) this was certainly the wrong tactic to employ.  When watching the videos it dawned on me that the primary purposes of my speech were to inform the audience about me through my culture and hopefully to entertain them.  If my topic is something that I am passionate about I will certainly feel more at ease and will give a much more interesting speech than if I am struggling to read their collective minds as to what they want to hear.

In Julie's video I picked up that she was using her hands a lot during her speech.  She was far from flamboyant with them, yet it was enough to draw my eye until toward the end of the video I noticed that she had been looking at her notes a lot.  As one who's eyes are too often drawn to my notecards, I now realize that this would be an excellent strategy for me to employ that will serve the dual purpose of keeping my audience from getting bored, as well as to distract them from eyes if I am looking down at my notecards too much.  Bit by bit, I already feel that I am improving at public speaking.

"How does an ant eat an elephant?  One bite at a time." -Anonymous

Personal Challenges in Public Speaking

As I have never been one to feel any level of speech anxiety, I suppose that any apprehension that I have toward public speaking would be on a micro level.  I do not wish to imply that I am a great public speaker with little room for improvement; rather that I am generally comfortable with public speaking but still have a lot of fine tuning to do in regards to the process.

The area in which I could use the most improvement would be organizationally.  I am a pretty disorganized person generally.  I never use a calendar or schedule and tend to just keep everything in my head and do things as they need to be done.  This can lead to the unfortunate circumstance of something being forgotten and letting myself or others down.  As this relates to public speaking I usually am better at speaking off the cuff and when it comes to a fully preplanned speech if I have not gone to the trouble of writing it out in its entirety and memorizing it verbatim I end up in a spot of trouble.  I struggle with writing outlines and especially with filling out and reading off of note cards.  This can lead to uncertainty about my ideas.

I also have noticed in the past that while I do not necessarily get nervous or feel anxiety I can get rattled when I make a mistake.  This has applied at times to other forms of public performance, as well as public speaking.  When I make a mistake I act as though the audience has a written copy of my speech and know exactly what I have said incorrectly or left out.  I suppose this could be a form of the spotlight effect, as I am placing more emphasis on how closely everyone is watching me than they actually are.  I will often retrace my steps and draw unnecessary attention to a mistake that would likely otherwise have gone completely unnoticed.  This also could lead to internal noise for my audience as they become distracted thinking about why I reacted the way that I did.

I'm looking forward to the opportunity to work on the more technical aspects of speech writing and presentations, as well as to become more comfortable moving past the mistakes that I make.

For Starters

Greetings fellow students reading this not so much by choice as by assignment.  I will do my best not to make this to painful and perhaps even to venture in to the realm of being interesting.  How to post a biography while remaining anonymous..?  I suppose it would be best to just describe who I am, rather than run through a collection of dates, locations, and specifics.  I have never lived outside of California, although I have lived in both Southern and Northern California and have spent a fair amount of time in the Bay Area.  When I graduated high school I was not a very big fan of school in general.  I graduated with a high GPA and high test scores, it wasn't that school was too difficult for me.  Perhaps it is more accurate to say that achieving good grades wasn't difficult, but having the discipline to force myself to do the things that I did not want to do (e.g. homework, studying) was incredibly difficult.  I attended one semester of community college and received very poor marks.

I decided at that point that it would be best for me to join the work force.  If I was going to be doing things that sucked, at the least I should be getting paid for it.  I now have a job that I really enjoy, although to say that I love it or that it is fulfilling would be stretching the truth a bit.  I decided to go back to school to at the very least acquire an Associates degree.  So far I am happy with that decision, although I am not at all happy with a return to the days of sacrificing my free time to do homework.

Throughout my life I have always been comfortable speaking in public and being the center of attention.  In elementary school I regularly performed in talent shows, usually singing.  In high school I took a drama class and acted in a few of the schools plays, even once getting the lead role.  I gave a speech at my high school graduation which was quite funny.  That's right, I can actually be funny.  Hard to believe right?  I promise to attempt in future posts to bring a certain level of humor which is admittedly lacking in this post.

My main goal in this class is to acquire the necessary units and get an A.  Honesty is the best policy, right?  In addition to that I also wish to work toward abolishing my crutches in everyday conversation of using the word "like" and occasionally saying "um" or "uhh".  I think that I do a good job of establishing eye contact during formal speech, except that when I have note cards I look at them far frequently.  This is why I prefer not to use note cards, but at times they can be necessary or required, so I definitely need to work on effectively making use of them.  Good luck to everyone else in this class.  I look forward to your insights and critiques and will do my best to make my posts worthwhile reading material.

"We are all all we've done." -Cap'n Jazz