We all know the feeling: standing in front of a room, sometimes on a stage, often in front of rows of people, some enthusiastically nodding along to your talk, most gazing blankly, so that you wonder if they're even paying attention. If you're lucky you have notecards to guide you along, maybe even a partner to share the spotlight with, but the nerves can never fulling disappear.
If you're like me, you're hands are probably sweaty and shaking so hard you're amazed the notecards haven't gone flying away. The room definitely is way too hot and your lunch is attempting to crawl its way back up your throat. These are the terrible symptoms of public speaking (at least in my experience).
To this day, surprisingly, I've only actually given a few speeches, the biggest, scariest, and most recent being my community service presentation in ninth grade. There have been several smaller presentations peppered throughout the last three years, but none required as much preparation, time, or garnered as many nerves. Within our first couple months as high schoolers, we were expected to present to several teachers our work in the community as part of the first of the FLEX program, a program that involved a different community related project each year and culminated with a senior project required to graduate from my high school.
If I recall correctly, these presentations, to be given alone, had to be around seven minutes, given in professional attire, and the evaluators were said to deduct a point for each verbal filler used (though I'm not entirely certain the validity of the last statement). I prepared the entire summer doing the physical service helping with summer programs at Animal Friends and spent several hours writing my speech on notecards and putting information on my slides. I was so nervous while giving the speech that after I finished, my friend informed me she could see my knees shaking from the back of the classroom. As it turns out, this presentation was completely useless, as Chartiers Valley got rid of the FLEX program the very next year, and students were no longer required to present a senior project before graduation. What the speech did accomplish, however, was inspiring me to avidly avoid public speaking as much as humanly possible for the rest of my life, hence my lackluster public speaking "resume."
Any speeches given since have involved similar reactions as my first, with sweaty, shaky body and uncomfortable nausea. Though I've been able to suppress the shaking so as not to be obvious to a crowd, I still emulate nervousness through awkward repetitive movements and quiet talking, habits I have even when simply talking to a stranger or someone I'm not 100 percent comfortable with. Not only would I like to train these habits away to improve my performance in public speaking, I'd like to not look like an absolute loon while talking to people that aren't my friends and family.
