CHALLENGING CONFERENCE

CHALLENGING CONFERENCE

      New week, new challenge. This time we pretended to be teachers and presented activities at the conference. The choice of activities was random, which means, even if you didn't like it you had to love it and persuade people to 'buy' it. Quite an interesting, challenging task. We got some information about the activities and had two trials to present them. The first one was (almost) spontaneous speaking, while the second took place the other day and therefore we were prepared. I think, this not only gives us experience in both types of speaking, but also helps us compare the results and make conclusions (which I am doing now).

     The interesting insight  - I was much more satisfied by my first performance when I watched it for the first time, that very evening. I could see myriad problems, which were easy to detect and correct, there wasn’t a question to change or not to change. But it seemed pretty OK, and as I watch it now it seems...worse. 
      
    Not to be too wordy I'll quickly point out the biggest problems I had in the first version.

• Too many signs of nervousness
• I misspoke several times, forgot things
• Grammar mistakes (which blow my mind - maybe you have, maybe you don't)
• No eye-contact
• The content of speech is not persuasive enough

    But, I must say, I felt much more enthusiastic that day than the previous week and as a result it looked nicer and I seemed more open to the audience. I was standing, gesticulating, tried to vary my voice. The main problem was the lack of time to write, to learn and train, because speaking on the spot is not available yet.

When I got this time what changed?

The most important thing for me is certainly the speech content, as I enjoy writing and tend to be very responsible about it, so I rewrote the text completely, trying to be more persuasive and make my sentences more beautiful. It sounded not as good as I expected, but better.

The next thing is  self-control -I look much more confident in the second version. Watching me being so confident after the first one was even weird, so I guess am proud of myself. 

I made eye-contact as much as I could, many of gestures were helpful and looked natural.

I was not misspeaking all the time, grammar was okayish.

But not everything came up to my expectations.

      I seem to be disconnected, somewhere else in the universe, but not with the audience. It looks more like reciting the learned thing. It surprised me, because it felt very different from my perspective. 

     I trained to vary my voice at home, but still was too concentrated on the text. And despite all my effort to stick to it, one phrase suddenly left my mind and, shocked by this, I couldn’t act spontaneously which was really unprofessional. I was going to say “show you care about the thing they care”, by the way. 

     To conclude, I must say, I am pretty content with the result. The progress is undeniable, though only one night is difference. Still a little bit dissapointed, as it was not convincing enough even for myself. But great news is that among the three speeches the last one is the best!

Thanks for your support!