Public Speaking

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by Quinn Bradlee
Friday, March 05, 2010

Public speaking is a funny thing to me; I hated it at first and am still not a big fan of it; I still get a little nervous whenever I have to go and make a speech. I just spoke at George Washington University and there were only six kids there, but I was still a little nervous. The professor there asked me to tell my story first, though I didn't really know where to start, but I just began talking and it seemed that everything transitioned into itself.

The biggest crowd I have ever spoken in front of was 1,700 people and that was at the Lab School Gala in Washington, DC. I will never forget it; they sent somebody to get me and my parents and then we went on stage after the speaker of that evening had introduced us. My mom spoke first and then she introduced me and made me read the end of my book, I could barely speak; my heart was in my throat. My parents and some of our friends who we invited were sitting at two of the front tables and they had told me that they were going to give the loudest ovation... they certainly did that.

At the end of my speeches I always feel much better about myself, it gives me great confidence in myself; I feel that I can do anything. Now that I have spoken in front of a really big crowd of people, I feel that I can speak in just in front of a bigger crowd. There was also a time when I was at Gow, I spoke at the LD Center in New York. My parents had lied to me, they said that there were only going to be 250 people there, it turned out that there were 650 people there. The same thing happened to me, where I was nervous but at the end I felt like I could take on the world. After I spoke, people started coming up to me and to talk and they gave me their cards; there was even one person who gave me an offer to go to University of Arizona and travel with them to lecture other students about learning disabilities.

Sometimes there are things in life that seem to be worse than they really are, and for me public speaking is one of those things. If there was any speaker that I could chose to be it would be my father, because it seems that he is so liked and respected; that is the type of person who I hope to be. I might even make a career out of public speaking one day. Public speaking is actually not as bad as it seems; it's just like anything else, the more you do it, the better you get at it.