A couple days ago, at our weekly Toastmasters meeting on Tuesday, my sister Annette gave her Icebreaker speech. This was her first ever prepared speech, and the assignment of an Icebreaker is to tell the audience something, anything, about yourself for about 5 minutes straight. We've been going to these Toastmasters meetings for 5 weeks now, and it's a really small club, just about 10 people besides us come regularly. But you would not believe how CRAZY-SCARED Annette was the 2 days prior to her speech!!!Of course, if I had been in her place, I probably wouldn't have acted any different. I mean, this is public speaking we're talking about here! This is human-kind's number one phobia ever! Standing up in front of a crowd, no matter how small, talking, and praying like heck that you don't mess up your lines, because you think everyone will laugh at you or boo you off the stage. Well, all I can say is that I'm grateful it wasn't me, but at the same time I felt a little guilty, because this was my twin sister who was having panic attacks! Oh, how I wished it were me having to go through this ordeal instead!
Honestly, Annette wasn't all that prepared. She had absolutely no idea what to talk about herself. Think about it. How are you supposed to condense the highlights of your life in between 4-6 minutes? Even if we are the youngest members in our club, therefore with the shortest lives, this doesn't make the task any easier. Far from it. 18 years is very difficult to squeeze into one brief little speech.
But as you can see from this blog post here, my sister survived with little to no trauma. She posted the video we took of her speech with our handy-dandy Flip that we borrowed from our dad. It's not exactly the best speech in the world, but I was proud of her because she was up there! And she never fainted, or broke down crying, or tripped over her words in the slightest. Yeah, she um-ed and uh-ed a lot, but this was her first speech, right? She's supposed to make mistakes, because then she'll be able to improve upon those mistakes. And everyone was smiling at her and they applauded her in the end, so it couldn't have been all that bad. ^_^
Well, now that that's all over, next Tuesday it'll be my turn to take the podium. Uh-oh. (gulp!) *scream* RIIIKKESSS! +,+
3 comments:
Good luck on yours!
Man that would be terrifying! I don't think I could do it.
But it would be an experience!
Best of luck to you Bettina~!
I can make up a thirty second speech on the spot and sound smart. It's pretty fun.
But a five minute speech would be harder for me. I have trouble talking about myself, and so I tend to gloss over details to the extent where just a minute has gone by and I'm done telling my life story.
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