I’ll admit, it was a rather unpleasant and uncomfortable experience watching my Ted Talk, especially during the times I faltered. Nonetheless, I think there are many things I can learn from my talk, which I can hopefully address in future speeches.
1). I realized that I have a tendency to flail my hands a little too much, especially when I looked nervous or forgot what I had to say. While I think hand gestures are important, I may have diminished its effectiveness by overusing them. In the future, I think I should practice in front of a mirror or a small audience more often to overcome my uneasiness and hopefully keep my hand gestures to a minimum.
2). My eye contact with my audience was poor, especially since I turned around multiple times to look at my visuals. I think I may not have been as familiar with my speech as I had thought. The next time I give a speech of the same nature, I think I will certainly practice more and make sure I am familiar with the order of my visuals so that I do not need to constantly turn around.
3). I am not sure if everyone observed it, but I did forget some of my speech towards the last two minutes and spoke impromptu. And while it was not as gracious and fluent as I would have liked, I am happy with what I was able to string together in a mildly cohesive manner. As a future note, I think I should learn speeches on the basis of bullet points as opposed to memorizing a three-page speech. Memory can fail all of us at times, so I now feel that “memorizing” may not be the best way to give a speech. Instead, it may be beneficial to give a speech based off a rough outline.
4). A quirk that I realized about myself is that when I am nervous or drawing a blank, I cross my legs. It happened multiple times during the talk and while the video does not show my legs, I can see myself swaying side to side. As in my previous comments, I think one of the best solutions is repeated practice.
Overall, I think I had a decent speech, but there were certainly many things that I could improve on for the future. Hopefully as I gain more experience in public speaking and continue to critique my work, the quality and delivery of my speeches will continue to improve.