If you’ve ever listened to one of my mom’s stories about me when I was younger, then you know I’m a bit of a hypochondriac. I spend most of my time thinking, which usually leads to me overthinking certain scenarios. I’ve actually learned not to think about certain things until they happen, or to just go first during presentations. That way I don’t have time to be scared or to panic or overthink. Recently, during the end of my junior year, I had to give a speech in front of my classmates and their parents. Fortunately it wasn’t ALL of my classmates, as there were four hour-long blocks during which you were assigned to give your speech, and there were multiple rooms where people were presenting.
That meant that there was a small chance I would be giving my speech in front of anyone other than strangers, which terrified me. To make matters even worse, my voice was almost completely gone as the result of a fever that I was still recovering from. As I walked in, my teacher notified me of someone who wanted to go further up the list, as she was a lot further down in the list than she would have preferred. I sacrificed myself, like a true gentleman, so that she could go ahead of me. Little did I know, she was slotted for the second to last speech. I would now have an entire hour to think of all the different ways that I could mess up.
I had practiced my speech over and over for at least a week, but now it felt like my mind had suddenly blanked and lost all the information it once held. Suddenly, out of nowhere, it was my turn. My speech topic was on importance of choices and consequences. It could have been on how good my recent restaurant hood cleaning was, by I’d rather just let you find out for yourself. From what I hear about my speech giving, I didn’t actually do that bad. I looked at the audience when it was necessary and I looked comfortable, according to the written comments left by audience members. I guess what I’m trying to get at is that worrying about what was going to happen didn’t change anything. I worried about it the whole time and still did fine. Being worried about things won’t change anything, so don’t worry about it. Just focus on what you’re going to do so that you don’t mess up