My Challenge in Public Speaking

There are many essential skills in life we need to be successful and be able to survive in everyday life. We need these skills for learning, work, and life. There are two main skills, which are hard and soft skills. Hard skills refer to the practical abilities and job-related skills or knowledge we need in order to perform our duties effectively. On the other hand, soft skills imply the personal qualities that help us succeed in the workplace. These two types of skills are broken down into many more different skills. We develop hard skills through the education and practices of the job. Whereas, soft skills are gained and developed through our life experiences, various and life-long professional and personal experiences. For me, right now, I am studying at the School of Global Studies, majoring in Global Studies and Social Entrepreneurship. Through my learning at this faculty, some of the hard skills that I have developed and still developing are research skills, academic writing skills, interview skills, project management skills, innovative skills, and many others. On the contrary, for the soft skills, through school and outside school life, I am still developing my communication skills, stress management, decision making, leadership, critical thinking, and others. One of the important soft skills that I really want to improve is public speaking.
Public speaking is considered the most significant skill in communication that requires being enthusiastic and engaging with the audience. It involves having excellent communication, speaking, teaching, and persuading skills. This is quite challenging for me personally because I am an introvert who is silent and I don’t really have many words to say. Though I have the ideas that I want to share with the group, speaking them out is still a difficult skill for me. This is due to the fact that I don’t like to express me and like to be independent, and enjoy being alone. However, this can also be a negative factor since in the workplace they need people who can work and communicate in a team.
Therefore, I try to improve it by getting out of my comfort zone and get more experiences. During my high school, I taught small kids in my village at a pagoda. It was such a great and unpleasant experience at the same time. However, I really learned a lot from it. I taught them for almost four years, so basically during my whole high school years. This teaching experience is definitely a stepping stone in letting me know the outside world. I learned to communicate with the kids, other student volunteers, and the head of the school. It was quite difficult to control them at first because there were so many of them. There was a class that I have to teach like 30–40 students, and they were just young students who liked to play and talk a lot with their classmates during the class. As a result, I had to come up with ways to keep them quiet and under control. So, it actually helped me develop problem-solving skills as well. I learned and experienced through teaching the English lessons to the students and helped them when they did not understand some parts of the lesson. It also helped improve my English skills too since I’m not a native speaker and I am learning it as a second language at my school. Not only that, I got to assess the students’ ability through exams and quizzes.
Another experience I gained was my internship during my high school as well. That time, I got to travel outside of my hometown and went to another province. So, I met lots of new people. I worked with students from foreign countries and improved my communication with them. I got to know more people, both the locals and the internationals. It was my first time ever talking to strangers outside of my ‘safe zone. I could not bring myself to speak to them and socialize with other people who I did not know. It was hard for me to start the conversation first unless someone started to speak to me first. But, I think I learned a lot in the social world of approaching strangers and trying my best to keep the conversation going. Although it was tough, it was worth it and I got to know and learn a lot of new information and knowledge from those strangers that I never knew before. The most exciting part was that it was the first time that I got introduced to a game called UNO that the western people like to play. I enjoyed playing with those students, and it made my time there interesting and fun and built stronger connections with the others. I also learned about what those international students were like in terms of working both physically and mentally. They were quite strong since the food that they ate in their countries contained lots of nutrition, which was why they grew up well. They were so much taller and bigger than me although they are younger than me while I was a small girl yet I am older than them. They gained the physical advantage when dealing with heavy physical jobs. Moreover, I got to know about western cultures like the food they eat, the music they listen to, their religion. I learned that the child can live away from home after they are 18 years old, the time that they go to college and enjoy their independence.
I have tried to participate in many volunteer events so that as I get more exposure and experience outside, I would be able to be more communicative. Until now, as I am in a university outside of my country, I am still trying to develop and master my shy and silent self. In my university experience, I am working with Thai students as well as other international students such as Taiwanese and Vietnamese. During classes, we have many presentations, either in groups or as individuals. Those really help to practice my public speaking a lot since I have learned how to present myself to the group of audience, to the people who are not my national, who I don’t know well enough. At first, it was quite nerve-wracking because I get anxious in front of many audiences when the attention is only on me. My hands were all sweaty, and my stomach cramped up. However, as I experience more and more speaking from presentations, the group works, and interviews, I learn to get comfortable and have more confidence in myself. I believe that in the future I will be able to break my own limit and master this communication skill in public speaking in future working places in order to bring out the best of my ability.

We all should try to engage with the outside world especially the introverts who are afraid to socialize. We should get out of our comfort zone and learn more about the interesting things outside that are waiting for us to explore. We should learn to speak out and let ourselves out. It will help us to improve our communication skills and public speaking that will lead us to become a great leader and become successful in life.
References
Liwanag, P. (2020, November 30). Hard skills vs. soft skills: Examples and skills lists. Retrieved March 27, 2021, from https://www.jobscan.co/blog/soft-skills-vs-hard-skills/#:~:text=Soft%20Skills%20(and%20How%20to%20Use%20Them%20on%20Your%20Resume),-by%20Paige%20Liwanag&text=There%20are%20two%20types%20of,of%20the%20job%20seeker's%20capabilities.
Doyle, A. (2019, December 28). Important public speaking skills for workplace success. Retrieved March 27, 2021, from https://www.thebalancecareers.com/public-speaking-skills-with-examples-2059697