Skip to main content

I Was 3rd in an English Speech Competition!

This actually happened quite a long time ago. And I know what you guys are going to say. "You grew up in Australia! How on Earth could you get (just) 3rd in an English speech competition in Indonesia competing against Indonesians who don't really get to experience what you've experienced?!" Well first of all this competition was held by the Sebelas Maret University, a very known university in Solo, Central Java so there are a lot of fluent English speakers there. Secondly, delivering a speech is not just about speaking. It's a whole lot more than that. Anyway, right now, I guess I'd tell you how it went.
So on the preliminary stage all you had to do was just deliver a speech in front of an audience and three juries. You're only allowed to bring a cue card and not the whole text (which is quite common in speech competitions). So on that staged I guess I delivered my speech well enough (even though I was s**ting myself because I'm not used to being in front of a lot of people). My speech was about entrepreneurs (I don't really remember exactly what it's about but it's basically something like that). Not long after, the announcement came out and I went to the final round with 9 other contestants. On this round, it was required for us to be quarantined in this room where we had to take a draw to determine the order of our performance and our theme and then we were given 15 minutes to build our speech content. I was to perform fifth with the theme about extracurricular activities for creativity or something like that. After I got the theme, I immediately worked on building my case. To be honest I was feeling quite confident about it because the theme wasn't that hard. After some time, my name was called. I went up to the stage and delivered my speech. I was feeling quite comfy up on stage. After I delivered my speech, each of these three juries gave me a question. As far as I'm concerned, I answered them well enough. So after that I went to take a seat amongst the audience whilst I watch the other competitors who hadn't went up on stage deliver their speech. After all of that, it was time for the announcement. It was quite tense, but eventually I turned out to be on 3rd place. To be frank I was quite disappointed in that because I really thought I had nailed it. The only explanation that I could come up with was that I was a little nervous up on stage and I talked too quickly with the body movements of a salsa dancer. But at the end of the day, I was quite happy to have achieved that.

So what I'm trying to say is that speech is a lot more than just speaking. If you want your speech to be successful then you have to practice a lot and keep a cool head on stage. For you guys having to deliver a speech or maybe a presentation in front of a large audience, just remember, once you start talking it really isn't as bad as what you've thought. ;)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Speech Script: Being an Introvert

Hey, Guys. I thought I'll share another speech script today. I used this script when I was competing in a competition held by a Senior High in Bantul, Yogyakarta Special Area. I got 1st in that competition so I think this one is pretty good. And I also wanna say that in this speech script I slipped in a little personal story of mine. So it's gonna be a little hard if you're going to copy it haha... So here you go. I’ve always felt that I’m different compared to most people. At least compared to most students in my school. On break time, they like to gather in groups and gossip about someone or chat about the current trends. I prefer not to. If I necessarily have to get involved in a group chat outside my class, I always try not to do the unnecessary. Not to talk too much. Some people say that I’m shy and weird. Some even say I’m arrogant and antisocial. The truth is, I’m an “introvert”. So ladies and gentlemen, the honourable judges, and my fellow competitors, this morn
1 comment
Read more

Creating Contents and Getting it Out

Whether it's writing, typing, or making videos, getting stories out there into the public is a form of content creating. The stories in the form of words that you write or type and the videos that you film and produce will be seen by people and therefore your content would serve it's purpose. It could be an entertaining story, or something that has educational value, or anything. Content creating is very fun and it could "force" you to keep pushing your boundaries until you find new ones. Personally, I am a big fan of content creating. Youtube videos, blog writings, news, all that sort of stuff. I think it's one of the easiest ways of sharing positivity to other people around the world (although there are definitely pricks out there who uses this opportunity to spread negativity and fear). As long as you're contents are intended to affect people positively, content creating and content sharing would have so many benefits not only to the creator, but also to
Post a Comment
Read more

My Not So Professional Take on Indonesia's Education System

    So recently I just had this little realisation. I was about to call it an epiphany but I thought using that word would be a dramatisation, so for the moment let's just call it a minor realisation. So I live in Indonesia which if you don't know already, is a developing country. We have so many things to be proud about like our astonishingly diverse culture and our unique culinary taste. But education isn't one of those things. Education is far from those things. Like our education sucks. I don't exactly know the reason to that. I mean I haven't done a research or anything but I might have some ideas and hypotheses to the situation. The human resource, the gap between islands Firstly, I think the problem comes from the not-so-advanced framework of the whole education system itself. Indonesia comes 4th globally in terms of population. There's about 250 million of us. And yet, our education system doesn't have enough human resource to support
Post a Comment
Read more