BELOW: Bulldog Bulletin Archives

What it Feels Like to Give a Speech at Stanbridge

-By Ian Mackenzie, Bulldog Blog creator, editor and Stanbridge’s go-to idea man

​What's up Bulldogs? It's your blondest Bulldog Blogger Ian Mackenzie here. In this post, I'm going to tell you about the various speeches I’ve made across my time at Stanbridge, what it felt like to give them, and how you can improve your ability to speak to an audience. I am also going to explain how I soothed my anxiety and my stage fright. The capability to keep my emotions on stage took many hours of work for me. Now, I've gone over how I give speeches, and man, Ian sure talks a lot but what's the point?! I’m going to show you four lessons real soon, calm down Mr. exclamation point.

Alright, Lesson One: Practice!! I cannot emphasize this enough. If you want to give a speech that people other than your parents will applaud, then review the words you’re going to say constantly. That means P-R-A-C-T-I-C-E. Don’t try to memorize the whole speech. Just don’t. Or if you are more experienced at giving speeches, you could have the paper in front of you for reference, but only look at it when you need the exact words from your speech.

Lesson Two: Make sure you are slowing down and enunciate clearly. If you are like me, then you need to slow down that speedy mind of yours, as well as that tireless mouth. Don’t forget to check on that every once in a while when you're giving a longer speech. 

Lesson Three: if you stutter or say the wrong line, there are two ways to deal with it. 

1.   Pretend it never happened and continue what you were saying. 
2.   Go off of your script to make the incorrect lines you stuttered suddenly make sense.

-What not to do?
Stop the entire speech and say something like, “Sorry I messed up.” This shows the audience that you are less prepared or willing than you first let on.  

And finally, Lesson Four:
Try to make as much eye contact as possible. If you look down at your paper too much, the audience will lose interest way faster.

Simple as that. I hope this was helpful to you. Maybe you can apply some of these skills to your everyday life. Why not give it a shot?  See you in the next post!

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