I suck at public speaking. Like I’m literally so bad at public speaking that I cannot recall a single good attempt at that.
My first memory of messing up speaking in public is probably from 3rd or 4th grade.
I remember I had to speak behind a podium.
I did complete what I was speaking about but I was so anxious during all of this my legs were shaking pretty badly.
Ofcourse, the podium did save me some grace but one of my friend was sitting at an angle where my legs were visibly, were able to see them without obstruction and they did mention that to me later that day.
The second instance that I can remember is actually pretty recent.
This happened to me during my 10th grade. At our school, we had a reading club.
It wasn’t really a choice, you were required to read books, heck we had 15 minutes of time before our lunch where we had to read a book in our teacher’s presence.
One of the thing you had to do was speaking about the summary of the book in the morning assembly in front of the whole school 💀.
Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE reading books, but this kind of “authorative” approach ruins the whimsical fun of exploring books yourself.
Anyways, back to the story, I was reading “Origin” by Dan Brown at that time.
(It’s a really well written book, I would really recommend you to read it!).
When I was ~60% through the book, my class teacher approached me about speaking about it in the assembly.
I was able to dodge the request at that time by just saying that I need some more time to complete the book.
She was fine with this and gave me a week to make some progress.
But I continued dodging for a whole month and half.
That was when she got fed up with me, and said ”[My Real Name], you just cannot delay it any longer, I’ve put up with ur shenanigans for way too long now. It needs to be done today, or else you’ll be getting a week long detention”.
So I guess I was fucked, huh.
That threat wasn’t the worst that life had planned for me at that moment. Turns out, The wife of the director of the school was going to be a part of the assembly that day 😭.
The moment I went on stage, fear got the better of me and I started stuttering. Atleast my legs didn’t give up on me that time, but what should’ve been like maximum of 2 minutes of my yapping, ended up being a 10 minutes disaster of the wife trying to get me at ease 😭.
My class teacher didn’t really talk to me for the rest of the day, she probably felt the guilt of making me fuck up this bad.
For the longest time I believed that my peers forgot that this happened until, one of them mentioned this moment in a really mocking way that it shattered that little bit of self-confidence that I had in myself for the longest time…
The third instance was during the entirety of my 2nd Semester at Uni when we had “Communication Skills” as once of my courses. We had Speech, Discussion, Book Review and Project Report as the assignements/project that had speaking parts.
I had such expections from myself for this but I don’t believe I fulfilled them…
The topic of was speech was ”[My Country] of my dreams”.
I’m gonna be honest with you, I’m not really a patriotic person.
Anywho, I had a really hard time try to chain my thoughts regarding this but I ended up about the lack of freedom of being able to express one’s individuality.
Yet again, it was bad.
I had to restart in the middle of my attempt cause I forgot some of my material. And the content of my speech just fucking sucked.
The topic for the group discussion was “Euthanasia”. I won’t go into much details given the sensitive topic, but my group was full to introverts so yea, it didn’t go well, but atleast my instructor did compliment me this time lol. 😝
For the book review, I read “Pachinko” by Lee MinJin. I had the book on my radar for soo long so it was a good excuse for me to pick up the book. Once again, It’s a good book, you should give it a read and/or watch the drama!
For the presentation part of the book review, my instructor asked me to skip the summary of the story and jump straight onto my opinion on the story. If you haven’t figured it out already, I am a big yapper and need to give context about everything, I just can’t help it.
And Panchiko is a story, where you need to give context given how inter-connected and complex the story is. So, I kept wandering into summarizing the story while trying to do the review which probably messed it again for me 😭.
You might be thinking, “So, yea, this post is just about this mf crying about how bad he is at public speaking”, But I interject! We, here at Savy Tech Inc.1, are all in for personal discovery and growth and this next instance is one example of that.
About the Project Report, we weren’t assigned a topic. We were free to pick up any topic of our choice.
We had to prepare a full typed, structured and formatted report on the topic and presentation on the same. A lil bit of context before I get back to the anecdote, at my Uni, the pre-requisites for both Circuital and Non-Ciruitial Groups of Major are done at in alternative semesters. Given I have Mechnical Engg. as my major, my friends from Comp. Sci. took the Communication Skills course in the semester prior, so they leaked the details for the course-work to me ahead of time.
So, I was preparing for this since my first sem at uni.
If you don’t know, I’m a big Music Shill.
Writing about music was one of my motivation behind starting this blog (which I haven’t fulfilled until now…).
One of my purchases on my first paycheck was IEMs2, just so that I could feel my music better.
As of right now, out of 128GB of my phone’s storage, a total of ~62GB is occupied by music, ~40Gb by MP3s and FLACs and rest by Apple Music downloads.
I created all my social profiles with the main intent of following artists.
Heck, I have a dedicated profile for logging my music listening. 🤭
So, naturally I picked a topic which was about my interest. And it was about “Evolution of Methods of Music Archival”. I researched about the topic so religiously 😭, I prepared the presentation so well and I even use LaTex to write the report itself ❤️. I went all out on it.
And when I actually submitted and presented the report, I felt so full of enthusiasm and satisfaction. Even my instructor asked be a couple of question which I was able to answer in detail 😭. That was definitly my first best experience with in a long time…
But fortunately for me, it doesn’t stop there!
Last semester (my 3rd), I changed my Club to the coding club, and all the sophomores of the club are required to host a workshop for the freshmen.
Me and a friend of mine picked “Introduction to Linux and Terminal” as our workshop.
As I have been basically living in the terminal for the past two-ish years, I have gotten super comfortable with working in it.
So It was again my area of interest/expertise!!
But this presentation was different. Unlike the previous presentation, This was more like a Technical Talk.
At that point, I had gotten into watching a lot technical talks and I kinda knew some of the things which I needed be doing to make it a success.
Even though it was my area of expertise, I was still somewhat nervous of presenting. Adding to this was that we only finalized our presentation 15 minutes before the workshop began 😭.
Either way, Even thought we were super nervous about it, I feel like we ended up doing the presentation pretty flawlessly.
That really gave me that ounce of assurance that maybe this “public speaking” is that bad, huh.
I’m still scared of talking to a crowd. And, I don’t know if I would even end up making or working with software which would be worthy of having a talk over, but I’ll be looking forward for opportunities for the same in future and hope I slayyyy, and not make new material for a part. 2 to this… 😭
