Public speaking

Readers of my Houston Chronicle blog may remember a post I wrote about my terror of public speaking and how I've tried to overcome it. After over a year in Toastmasters, I feel a lot more confident, although I haven't spoken outside the club too much lately and I worry that my improvement may just be because I feel more comfortable with the club members. Well, the next test will be this Thursday, when I will give a brief talk about Islam at the Interfaith Ministries women's gathering. My Toastmasters meetings are on Tuesdays and last week I asked one of tomorrow's scheduled speakers to let me take his place so I could practice my speech and get feedback. He was kind enough to do so. The only issue is that the TM speech will be 5-7 minutes and I may have to go longer at the event on Thursday. No problem, though. My issue has always been finding a balance between memorizing a written speech (or at least parts of one) and speaking naturally and not letting myself be thrown off if I forget part of what I memorized. This time I'm going for preparing a structure and then allowing myself to speak naturally on each topic I'll go over. Since I'm familiar with the topic, I'm thinking that will be a good strategy. Well, tomorrow's TM meeting will be the test.

The measure of my increased confidence is that I no longer have a feeling of dread at the prospect of public speaking. I hope it's not false confidence.

I need to learn how to do this well, because part of what I'll be doing in support of the bookstore is speaking to people, in small or large groups or even individually, about the store, its mission and how it will benefit the community. I have to learn to do this well.

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Light of Islam is a nonprofit bookstore whose mission is to provide the Houston-area community with accurate and accessible information about Islam and Muslims. Find out more at http://www.light-of-islam.org/.