The Daring Book for Girls - Andrea J. Buchanan [123]
Exercise
If you are waiting around while others speak before you, it is helpful to step outside the room just before you speak to calm yourself down with deep-breathing exercises, breathing in slowly through your nose and breathing out through your mouth. If you’re too nervous to breathe, you might channel that energy into a quick set of jumping jacks, or shaking out your arms and legs. Then take some deep breaths to feel calm and centered. This is something you can do in practice and in performance.
PRESENT
It’s not about you
Remember as you begin your presentation, it’s about your speech, not about you. It’s helpful to concentrate on the message—not the medium. That way instead of thinking about all the different ways things could go wrong as you deliver your talk, you focus yourself on the content of your talk and about getting those points across.
It’s all about you
Whether or not you crumble out of nervousness or do fantastically well thanks to sheer nerve is completely up to you—in other words, it is in your control. When you’re incredibly nervous, you have the opportunity to harness that energy and transform it into vitality and enthusiasm. Take a deep breath and dive in!
QUICK TIPS
Keep it short and sweet.
Slow down: Don’t talk too fast.
Look up! If it’s too scary to look at the audience in the front row, look at the people in the back of the room.
Smile: Look confident, even if you don’t feel confident.
Pretend: Pull a “Brady Bunch,” where you imagine everyone in the audience is sitting there in their underwear. Find a friendly face in the audience and pretend you’re only talking to that person.
Practice: Join the debate team, dare yourself to speak up in class, give a speech in front of a mirror. The more opportunities you have to speak in public, the easier it gets.
Biggest asset: Self-confidence. Act as though you have a right to be there—because you do.
It’s all good
No matter how you do, it is always good in the sense that every time you speak in public, you gain experience. Use this to build your sense of self-confidence: if you’ve done well, you now have proof for the next time around that you can do well. And if nerves have gotten the best of you, you now have proof that the worst has happened and you’ve survived. Either way, you know that you’ve done it—you’ve spoken in public once, and you can do it again. This confidence-building is crucial, because having confidence is the key to speaking well.
Telling Ghost Stories
SO: YOU’VE PITCHED YOUR TENT, set up your campfire, and toasted your s’mores. Or maybe you’ve made a sleep-over fort at your best friend’s house, played Truth or Dare and Bloody Mary, and gotten out the flashlights and sleeping bags. What next? Two words: Ghost stories.
Everybody loves a scary story, especially late at night around a flickering campfire, or in the dark of an unfamiliar living room with a small flashlight illuminating your face. And you may have noticed, if you’ve been on a few camp-outs or sleepovers, that many of these stories have similar themes: a ghost out for revenge or literally haunted by grief; a lonely road or abandoned house; an element of shock or surprise; and just enough true-life details to make it all seem believable in the dead of night.
Some stories involve real people and places—and supposedly real sightings—like the ghost of Queen Anne Boleyn, second wife of King Henry VIII, who is said to haunt both the Tower of London, where she was imprisoned and beheaded in 1536, and the Hever Castle