Unfortunately the video feed was not working properly and I am unable to see myself on the screen. However, I can discuss my performance based on the audio feed.
My first speech was on the topic of "obesity." I approached this by outlining steps we can take to prevent future cases of obesity. My main message of the speech was that we needed to fix this issue and reduce cases of obesity. However, I did not explicitly state the previous sentence. I kind of jumped right into the things we can do to fight against obesity. The organization in my speech was pretty good since I gave three examples. An additional thing I could have incorporated to utilize more time was to give a personal example in dealing with obesity or with knowing someone who dealt with obesity. Now, at that time I could not think of such persona examples, but one example I should have mentioned was the case of my younger brother. When we were young, we would indulge a lot in fast food and other kinds of junk/frozen food. I didn't become overweight, but I would say my younger brother became overweight, not obese. He eventually lost all this extra weight by participating heavily in sports and various kinds of physical activity such as swimming, lacrosse, and football. That was definitely one personal example I could have mentioned.
An interesting thing to note is that I heard in the audio feed besides the "um"s and "likes" was the occasional throat-clearing. I did not realize that I have this horrible habit of clearing my throat often whenever I got caught up. Now, I'm not sure if I did this in the past but I caught on to this probably because I'm only focusing on the audio part of the presentation. Lauren also brought this up. I also said "I guess" a couple of times, which Haris brought up, and ended the speech with "Yeah, thank you very much." A very poor and abrupt ending. This was definitely something not to do.
My second speech had such an awful start. Way too many "um"s before I was able to bring out the main point. I need to super confident in the beginning to draw my audience in and focus on me. Midway or a little before then, the audio in the feed got cut off. From the video, I saw that I made eye contact a few times but not enough. It's strange because I feel like I make more than enough eye contact during my presentation when in fact I give very little. I should stay away from the paper and focus more on conversing with my audience. What frustrates me the most throughout is that I haven't made much progress in terms of fixing my issues of "um"s and "likes". I do realize that I got rid of saying "pretty much" which was very prevalent in my first two speeches. I still remain very nervous in front of everyone despite enough practice (although not applicable in this kind of speech). I'm not sure if I can ever fix this issue 100%.
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