The fear of public speaking (and how I overcame it today. Yayy!!)
Okay, well, to begin with, I have social anxiety and it makes it really hard for me to excel at delivering presentations. I have a short presentation tomorrow and before this evening, I thought I was about to implode due to my extreme anxiety but I feel better now since I worked hard to master the content of my presentation. I even asked a friend of mine to watch me talking about the topic and overall, I did a really good job. All I need to do is just to slow down my speed of speaking a little bit and make more eye contact with the audience. It came as a surprise to me that my biggest fear- my English pronunciation ain't a big problem hehe It's great to rehearse multiple times before the presentation happens. Even though I'm a bit exhausted now but I'm glad that I've done my best to prepare for tomorrow presentation. Hopefully, the audience aka my peers won't be the monsters who always try to drag me down when I make a mistake in the presentation. Probably, they won't be that mean, not as mean as I think they can be since people don't really care about me cept when I do something out of the ordinary, or even when they're critical of me, it's more likely to be a passing notice or that's because people simply have problems and they're not feeling good
I'm so glad that you have been able to make this accomplishment! I too have a fear of public speaking, and I went through something similar not too long ago. Thank you for sharing this!
@AChildAtHeart
Yay! That's awesome! I often watch presenters while remembering the ones I had to do in the past. I think much of your audience will also be remembering their own presentations of past or what they're about to do especially if they haven't prepared as well as you have. :)
@CoinFountain haha thank you for the enouraging words My presentation ran smoothly today. I showed the whole class an interesting trailer of my team's documentary film and people were really awed by it. The lecturer was really impressed, I must say It's great that I succeeded at my presentation today
@AChildAtHeart
Hurray! :D
@AChildAtHeart Awww I'm happy for you! I wish I could be like you and overcome it. I used to be much confident before, but then I became super self conscious and I get super stressed out before presentations. And I started to prefer pitches to presentations, because there would be less people. Though there might be friends, I honestly feel more conscious around friends than strangers. But thank you for sharing this! Hope your 2nd presentation went just as well :) Keep it up, love! 🙆
@KSWQueen Thank you for sharing your experiences of public speaking. I can relate to what you're going through because I, myself, have the tendency to overreact so I can imagine how challenging it is for you to give a speech in front of people
@AChildAtHeart Yes, and especially being a Media & Comms student, we have loads of presentations. Not sure if indiv or group is worse, tbh. All the best though, I hope you'll be able to improve as you have more experience and practice with presentations, and then one day overcome all these completely :)