If you ask any of my friends or family they’ll tell you I enjoy talking. I can’t get enough of it. Nintendo Direct comes out, won’t shut up about it for weeks. Big NBA trade and I’ll blab about it for months. Despite how much I enjoy talking, I’ve always had trouble with one thing, speeches. Teachers would tell me I was good at them but I would get nervous to get up and well, talk. This was all until I decided to take advanced speech my junior year of high school.

I lazily walked to first period, name tags spread across the desks so I sluggishly wandered to find mine. Right in front of the teacher’s desk, just perfect. Nobody was in the desk so I scanned the room looking for where they might be. Across the room, I saw a short, older lady getting her papers together, it was Mrs. Markano. 

Mrs. Markano gave us a unique way to give ourselves feedback. She would film our speeches and have us watch them to evaluate ourselves. All I could hear was my mind’s alarm going off. Well this is just perfect, I get to experience me fail twice. While I wasn’t too comfortable while I was actually watching the video I was still able to actually see a lot of things I didn’t notice while I was giving the speech. I was able to notice my lack of eye contact throughout the speech and notice I never really moved around the stage. This ended up being the best form of self improvement I could ask for.

It was only the first week but Mrs. Markano was already helping me to be more confident, even if she didn’t know it. My confidence would grow as the year went on. We were given outlines of what to talk about but the topics themselves were ours to choose. This allowed me to talk about my favorite movie, the history of my favorite band and even express my opinions on political issues. This freedom and confidence were a result of Mrs. Markno’s teaching style and, most of all, who she is as a person.

No speech helped my confidence more than the inspirational speech. I was now confident in my speaking but had trouble moving around on stage and bringing my piece to life. I looked at this speech as a challenge. it was one that allowed me to talk about myself who made me into who I am today while also giving me the opportunity to leave my comfort zone. I decided to write my speech about picking each other up and talked about times in my life I was knocked down. I was scared, the speech could easily go wrong and cause me to fail. To my suprise, she loved it! She said she loved that I was able to express myself and be confident in doing so. Funny enough she was the reason I was able to do so.