Thulasi Pius

Giving the personal speech in class was a very different experience for me compared to our monologues.  The monologues were fun to do when we really got into it.  Honestly I was a nervous wreck before giving my personal speech and it was not fun.  I started out thinking I was going to be fine because I believed in the message I was giving and I had gotten my speech memorized perfectly but that was not the case.  After going up there and being put on the spot made me hesitant in what I was saying.  The difference in the two speeches was most likely the content and the way the speeches were prepared.  The monologues were written for us and the emotions are already put into it, all we had to do was deliver it.  Our personal speeches however, had to be about us and we had to put in what emotions we wanted the audience to see.  Watching my speech made me realize a lot of things that I was doing wrong.   When delivering the speech I never realized that I swayed left to right.  After watching the video I saw how I shifted for right to left almost every other sentence.  I also need to work on my volume.  I couldn’t hear me speaking in the video with my earphones.  I had to watch it on my desktop with my speakers.  Volume is definitely a problem that I’m going to have to fix.  Watching everyone else’s speeches made me realize the issues that I have to work on.  They talked clearly and with very strong posture.  It drew you into the speech and made you want to listen.  Watching my self trip up on words and fidget every now and then made me realize a big factor that I was missing.  Confidence.  I need to work on handling my nerves when in front of an audience.  That is one of the biggest feats that I need to overcome to be successful in public speaking.  Some things that really make a speech unbearable is being monotone and adding in unnecessary “ums”and “likes”.  It makes the speech boring and the speakers doesn’t fully reach the audience.  The image below portrays how my nerves get to me once I get in front of the crowd, no matter how prepared I am.