My main purpose for this topic is to encourage my team mates to speak up more openly in the coming open house meeting. In my last meeting with Maneck I had a small discussion about public speaking and how even I have had this public speaking phobia from school. I never wanted to take part in any public speaking event. But since the time I have started working I feel I have to overcome my fear and be more active in heading meetings, presentations and associate myself with various other activities at work to be a more confident person.
If you Google "Public Speaking", you will see an innumerable sites pop up. And all of them begin by saying how public speaking fear is rated as one of the biggest fears people face. It’s even ranked higher than the fear of dying for some of us. My natural reaction to this is that either these websites are trying to make us feel dependent so we feel no option, but to enroll in their courses and hence make their bottom line figures more appealing. Or it could be another way for these companies to feed in on our anxiety and fear.
Public speaking fear to me has nothing to do with speaking at all. If you could walk a stage to deliver a speech in-front of a large unknown audience and confidently remain mute just staring at the audience, you could have delivered the best speech ever. The key point here is to have so much confidence in you that you feel you can take everyone staring at you and still utter nothing.
As long as you have spoken with more than two friends of yours deeply engrossed trying to put your point across, you have delivered a speech.
Language has got nothing to do with public speaking. You could deliver your speech in any language which will make you feel confident. It’s just a platform and we can customize our platform the way we want to. Even if anyone of us is comfortable in speaking in Hindi then one should go ahead with that. But since English has become the language of business, globally, it’s a good idea for us to start practicing English.
And remember everyone makes mistakes, logically or grammatically. . It’s ok to make mistakes and I sincerely wish I had been more active when I was in school so may be someone had noticed my mistakes and corrected me.
I plan to take up the next open house as my opportunity to overcome my fear and I expect rest of my colleagues to do the same. When we have an introduction session or any discussion then it would be great if everyone can speak up and put their point of view across. Trust me more than making our open house a good event it would be you who will benefit with this initiative of opening up and speaking their minds. Every one of us should keep making an effort to improve ourselves and I feel we have ample opportunities being in obelisk to do so. So let’s not lose out on this chance.
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WOW!!!! I never knew the fear of public speaking was sometimes more in people than fear of dying, seems a little true though.
ReplyDeleteI have seen people and executives high up in rank in organizations falter and get nervous before a speech or a seminar.
I have started to believe now that the key to and effective speech is to talk about something you feel passionate and confident about.
Every person can research and collect data about a topic, he or she has to talk about, but the conviction only comes with belief and confidence. I am sure everyone here at Obelisk would realize the importance of this and we would have great speakers in our organization.