I used to be an English teacher. Back in those days, I would get nervous for the first day of classes; but on a day-to-day basis, I didn’t think too much about speaking in front of a group of people. If you have to do it that often, you don’t have time or emotional energy to spare on getting nervous—you just do it. <\/p>\n
I’m out of practice, though. The past four years, I haven’t been teaching. I’ve been working in administrative support in schools. So, yesterday, when I had to speak in front of the whole school during morning meeting, I had jitters, serious jitters. I could feel my heart pumping. I could feel my throat getting dry. I got a headache the night before. Theoretically, I knew I could do it, but I also knew I was four years out of practice, so I was worried I’d choke. <\/p>\n
Of course, I didn’t do my nervous self any favors. First of all, I am not one of those people who can memorize a speech or just read off a piece of paper. I don’t like creating PowerPoint presentations in which the text is there on the screen and all I do is read it verbatim to the audience. Frankly, I don’t even like notecards. I did do a mock write-up, but I strayed from that significantly during my talk. That was a brainstorm more than anything. I like being extemporaneous… I guess that’s the problem I’ve created for myself. <\/p>\n
In the end, though, I managed to pull it off. I’m no Obama, but I didn’t freeze up or lose words. I somehow got through all my points and said Um<\/i> maybe only five or six times (instead of fifty times). I’m glad I got a chance to speak to the school. Thank God that’s over with, though!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I used to be an English teacher. Back in those days, I would get nervous for the first day of classes; but on a day-to-day basis, I didn’t think too much about speaking in front of a group of people. If you have to do it that often, you don’t have time or emotional energy… Continue reading Public speaking jitters<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,11],"tags":[173,222,265],"class_list":["post-248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-life","tag-jitters","tag-nerves","tag-public-speaking","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}