Stage Time

There is no question in my mind that stage time is the single best avenue to self-confidence.  When I joined Toastmasters, I sat in the room and watched others give speeches for a very long time before I got up the courage to give my Icebreaker.  I agonized about giving a "good" speech, and actually had my husband design a costume for me.  After my Icebreaker, it was again a very long time before I gave my next speech.  Each time I did speak, I was petrified, clutching onto the lectern for dear life, white knuckling it, jelly-kneed, blushing mercilessly, my voice cracked, my tongue was dry, and I'm sure I forgot half of what I wanted to say.  It didn't help that what I wanted to say was contrived, a manufactured "speech," something designed to impress my audience and pack as much information as possible into my allotted 4 or 5 minutes.  In retrospect, of course, I can see the error of my ways, but at the time, that's what I thought I needed to do.

I did manage to go through my 10 preliminary speech projects in the Competent Toastmaster manual, though the very last speech I gave required a tall shot of whiskey! But by the 10th speech, a lightbulb went off, perhaps aided by the whiskey, though I had that brilliant idea before the drink.  The idea was to state exactly what I felt when reading the manual instructions for that speech, rather than try to fit myself into a set of impersonal instructions.  The manuals are guides - they are not Bible (and it might be argued, even if they were, they would be open to interpretation).  As guidelines, they give us ideas and lead us to practice and polish various aspects of our presentation skills.  But where they clearly oppose a natural tendency, we may as well explore that tendency and include that in our speech.  In so doing, we are presenting ourselves, our genuine selves, our own ideas, and are not trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.