TED Talks, AKA How Our Entire Class Gave Presentations Without Fainting or Throwing Up

So TED Talks. Thank the Lord that’s over with. Congrats to our class for a super successful run (see title). While I had hoped this would stay within the confines of the One Button Studio, unfortunately all TED Talks are meant to be publicized, so here you go.

As I now cringe and hit “play” on my computer to rewatch my TED Talk, this is what I see:

-Probably should have done a hair check before I started… superficial point, but still.

– Looking at the camera/eye contact in general: based on this camera angle, where the heck am I looking? It honestly seems like I’m looking down for quite a bit of it, and I’m not sure if I made a lot of eye contact with the audience because of that. I definitely should have looked at the camera more.

– For the camera, I’m not standing in that nice little box where I’m fully visible.

– BIG NO-NO = admitting something is not accurate in the presentation. I should definitely not have mentioned that one of my pictures was out of order, and that threw me off so much. Definitely affected the flow of the talk.

– Not a big fan of how much I say “uhm” and sort of stutter. I know that it was entirely due to the fact that I was nervous, but also point for the future – I need to learn how to make my speech flow without having my lines memorized. I get flustered way too easily the moment I don’t remember what I wanted to say.

– That awkward moment when I don’t account for people laughing at my jokes, which also throws me off… At least people laughed?

– Things I liked about my presentation: I actually really enjoyed the parts of my speech where I knew my lines well. I was confident, and I had good voice/tone modulation, and I had enough (hopefully not too many) hand gestures which overall made me seem like an engaging speaker. I think that public speaking is something I’m going to have to practice in order to attain a higher level of comfort/flexibility when I present, but overall it was solid content and a reasonable presentation, so I’m generally okay with it.

As a whole, our group of presenters actually did a wonderful job with their presentations. Almost everyone had interesting visuals that were not PowerPoint presentation-style, and everyone spoke clearly and threw in some jokes and other catchy pieces to make their talk interesting. I think we captured the essence of the TED Talk genre pretty well.

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