Public Communication
Posted on October 26, 2020
Public speaking has always been an instrumental part of my schooling career. Although I haven’t always particularly liked it, I have grown to really enjoy presenting and sharing with my peers.
My first experience with public speaking was a presentation to the entire year level and their parents about my artwork. It was 2015 and I was in grade 5 at my previous school, American International School Dhaka. This was around the time of Exhibition, the project at the end of elementary. It was around the time when the Bangla New Year was going to be celebrated. The teacher of our Bangla class had us make artwork for it, which is called alpona.
The school also announced a competition for a motif, designed by a student, to represent the PYP exhibition for that year. On a whim, I entered what I had done for that class not imagining that it would get anywhere. To my astonishment, I won the competition and my design was used in all posters and advertisements for the event. In hindsight, I think it was my attention to detail of representing various PYP exhibition themes as well as the associations with artwork for Bangla New Year that wowed the teachers.
The school, as usual, had an assembly for the community to inaugurate the PYP exhibition and I was asked to present my design. I was asked to talk of the inspiration and explain how the design relates to being a PYP learner. Making a speech required an articulate explanation of my creative process.
This was the first time I was to speak at an event of this size to explain to a varied audience of primary school children, teachers, school administrators, and parents the ideas behind the design. I had been given only a few days to come up with my speech and was expected to speak at this event. I did manage my speech but did not have too much time to rehearse it. Needless to say, on the day of the event I was very nervous with butterflies in my stomach. The whole Grade 5 class was asked to sit up on stage while the auditorium was filling up. To my dismay, the audience was even larger than I expected as a lot of the parents ended up standing around the edges.
When I was being introduced, a strange calm came over me almost as if I was in the “zone”. As I had reflected deeply when designing the artwork, I was very clearly able to explain the various components and how they related not only to each other but to our culmination as PYP learners. My ideas were well received especially by the parents. Many of them came up to me after the ceremony to congratulate me but also to compliment me on both my ideas and how I was able to articulate them.
Looking back at the instance in my life, I realize that at that time, that speech was momentous especially for a 11-year old. Reviewing the actual speech, I am proud of my composure and that some of the ideas put forth are quite elegant. I am now able to appreciate how the PYP and especially the exhibition allows learners to take a step back and look at a bigger picture. Best of all, this fostered the idea that each individual can make a difference in their community or society even with small intangible steps. That experience highlighted to me that even simple things can lead to meaningful impacts. If there is passion and perseverance, age is not a barrier to communicate with a larger audience and community. This experience helped me become more confident, not only in my public speaking skills, but it also led me to seek active larger roles in theatre, performing on stage to various audiences.
When I came to NIST, I didn’t get too many opportunities to speak publicly in my first year, nor did I have the confidence to take any of them. However, towards the end of the year, I was invited to the GCD Student Steering Committee. I had to finish two GCD posts in order to join, which I did over the course of the summer. As Y11s, a portion of our role was to help out in our advisory GCD lessons. We were split into pairs depending on our homerooms. As I was in 11C, I was with Kenshin. However, Kenshin was a GCD ambassador and was not always doing the same task as I was, so I sometimes was on my own in terms of GCD advisories. At one point, we had to give a presentation discussing how to write, share, and submit reflections. We practiced it, and I practiced with Kenshin. However, we encountered a problem and Kenshin was asked to help with 11D. This meant that I had to do a whole presentation for the rest of my class on my own. I was, understandably, very nervous about it and wasn’t sure I could handle it.
I spoke to the other ambassadors, Hannah, Jasmine and Juliet. They all said that they really thought I was ready and that I knew what I was doing, so I shouldn’t worry. However, I was still nervous and tried to prepare. I asked a few of my friends in my class to answer the questions I was going to ask as part of an activity. They all agreed to answer if nobody else in the class wanted to answer. At this point, I was feeling about as ready as I could feel at that point. I arrived at advisory about 20 minutes early and made sure everything was ready for the presentation and the activity. It came time for the presentation. I took a deep breath, and I saw my friends giving me a thumbs up from their seats. Emboldened by their support, I began presenting and, to my surprise, my classmates were actually engaging with the presentation. When it came time for the activity, my friends did not once have to volunteer because nobody else was volunteering. At the end of the presentation, 20 minutes later, I had forgotten my nervousness and was just enjoying interacting with my whole class. At the end of my presentation, I sat back down with my friends and asked if I did okay. They enthusiastically said yes and the teachers complimented me on the presentation.
I spent the rest of the advisory period helping out with posts and encouraging people to submit. I spent time with every single student. To my surprise, many of them benefited from the activity and completed their posts. Later that day, I found out that my homeroom had submitted more posts than any other homeroom. That was a moment of immense pride for me, because it meant that my presentation was effective in teaching how to effectively write and submit posts.
Since then, I’ve had numerous experiences speaking publicly: MUN conferences, presentations, speeches, theatre, and many more. I am now much more confident in myself and my abilities, but I always remember my previous mindset. I believe that my nervousness and initial aversion to public speaking came from a fear of failure, especially because I felt that I should be more than capable of succeeding. I think I viewed it more as an ordeal than an experience. With practice, my mindset began to change as I learned from others around me and began to emulate their habits. Speaking the way someone else would actually lessened my inhibitions, as I stopped feeling accountable for “failure” (which I stopped believing in) and began to enjoy speaking.
I used to believe that a speech was just a means of transmitting information in a way that didn’t bore people to death. Perhaps this is because I hadn’t really been subject to a truly powerful speech in my early life. However, I now understand that speaking is about connecting with others: emotionally, intellectually, etc. It’s about empathizing with the audience and speaking to them in a way that they will respond. That, I believe, is the essence of being a global citizen. That understanding is exactly what one might develop in any of the other elements, just at a larger scale.
Although I’ve never really lost the nervousness or worry before a public speech, I have also never lost the thrill that comes from a well-received presentation. I hope that I can continue to hone my public speaking skills going forward.