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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. ;)

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