I don’t like giving speeches. I actually hate doing that. You can even say addressing groups of people, gives me a sour dose of claustrophobia… Given a choice I would avoid it like the plague… Yet a while back, I found myself in front of a group of charming people. With everyone’s eyes was fixed on me…
48 hours prior, had possibly been the most stressful time of my life. I was in a situation that only I could blame myself for and had to grin and bear a lot of things that I usually wont. What made it worse was that I wasn’t being kind to myself either.
There in possibly the lowest point of my self confidence, I had to motivate a group of people. How do you give someone something that you don’t believe you don’t possess? If answering that question wasn’t hard enough, I was sick and had a sore throat to spice up the situation.
I don’t remember how I started, and frankly have no recollection of what I said. In many ways I felt that I was speaking to myself, giving myself the courage and strength to just keep moving forward, one step at a time. All I knew was that I had hit a chord. Once I was done there was a battle cry and optimistic smiles all around.
That moment reminded me of a blog post I wrote ages ago about Elephants in chains… As we get older I guess we all get conditioned into believing that we are capable of doing only certain things, we out grow our chains but forget to break free…
—
I still don’t like giving speeches. I still hate doing that… But now I know, I am not that bad at it :)