I sat down at our dining table Monday night with a four-cheese pizza Hot Pocket and a peanut butter and grape jelly Uncrustable. A feast, some would say. This is what happens when you move away from your mom.
I also had my laptop at the table, ready to research a topic for one of my upcoming presentations. Being an engineering major, I usually don’t have too many on my schedule, but for some reason the stars aligned this semester and I have one in almost every lecture.
Luckily they’re not too soon, especially since I’m already buried in work that I should have been keeping up with the past few weeks. But they do start the first week of March, so I’ll have that to fret over all break.
Public speaking is a necessary skill in a lot of professions. Maybe you don’t need to be the greatest at it, or even do it that often, but there’s probably going to come a time when you’ll need to stand in front of a group of people and say something.
Everyone gets some pre-game jitters, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but some carry those jitters into the game and others don’t.
I always had some butterflies in my stomach before a baseball game in high school. Once I was on the pitcher’s mound, though, I was the most confident one on the field. Probably in the zip code.
It was impossible for me to see it going any other way than my own. Sure, maybe once in a while it didn’t. But that’s where being able to have a short-term memory comes into play and you end up bringing that same confidence to the next game.
Trying to present something to a room full of my peers, many of whom I talk to on a regular basis? Forget it. I’m more like the Rudy of public speaking, and instead of everyone chanting my name in support as I walk to the podium, it’s just me staggering to the front of a silent classroom preparing to embarrass myself.
OK, it usually never ends up being that bad.
But in my head, it IS that bad, and then some, right up until the moment I open my mouth. Then, somehow, I remember that I’ve done this kind of thing before. I still don’t transform into the most confident speaker, but at least the world doesn’t end.
I remember when taking a semester-long class for public speaking in high school, we had to recite a piece of dialogue from a movie or a speech that someone else wrote, and my buddy chose the scene between Owen Wilson and Will Ferrell in “Wedding Crashers.”
As ridiculous as it was, he knocked it out of the park. The only way it wasn’t going to be the dumbest thing anyone in the class had ever seen before was if he gave his speech in the most over-the-top, flamboyant way possible, and he did.
It was pretty simple why he was so comfortable up there. He was always speaking in front of people at work. He owns his own start-up landscaping business now, and even though he’s not necessarily pitching an idea to a room full of business execs, he needs to get his ideas across to a team of employees.
That’s why I’m looking at all these presentations this semester as an awesome opportunity instead of a burden. Maybe if I keep up all the practice, I’ll become the Tom Brady of public speaking. As much as that makes me shudder as a Bills fan.