Lone Wolf Speech

BRAINSTORMING:

Connecting with Audience:

I am going to do my best to engage with the audience by just speaking about what I think my flaws are in a professional workplace.  I am going to try to keep the audience entertained as much as I can.  I will also add a couple of other things that will make this speech more fun.  I was hoping that I could either add in a game or two of some kind or I might find a video that will help explain some of my flaws in a professional setting.  

Selected Topic:

I am choosing to speak about becoming a better version of myself in the professional world.  I am choosing this because I have been in school and working on my academic self for years now and by next year, hopefully, I will have graduated and moved on to the working world.  I know I can use a lot of my academic skills to help me succeed at a workplace.  I also know of a few different things that I could do to help the flaws that I have to help me be more successful and to be more reliable to my customers when they need me.

Outline:

• Beginning of speech:
  • Start off the speech by explaining what I study and what I would like to do with my degree
  • This will show and help explain why I want to work on these particular flaws I have to help me better succeed at a job
  • Go into what I think my flaws are and why
  • Can explain how I think I can help better those and overcome some of these issues
• Middle of Speech:
  • Do an activity or show a video to keep the class engaged
• End of Speech:
  • Go over how I think I can grow and and why I think its possible and that it will take a lot of time
  • Thank everyone

REVISED OUTLINE:

• Work on professional self
• Couple key things I can improve on
• Fluently speaking/Not stumbling over my words 
  • Using less filler words
  • Stop pausing for so long after every thought 
    • Causes customers that you are dealing with face to face to not feel as much trust 
      • Happens when someone stumbles over what they are saying
    • Future could entail me to speak to customers
      • If I want to inform them of something and want them to keep coming back I have to gain there trust
      • If I stumble over what I was saying when giving advice it will seem like I do not know what I am talking about
• Presenting myself
  • Struggle with confidence 
    • Need to know how to present myself in a confident, but friendly way that makes people feel comfortable to come up to me
      • That’s how you get more customers and loyalty by being friendly and helpful to them
        • None will come up to you if you have a bad posture, attitude, or you are shying away from people
• Conclusion 
  • This all circles back to the main picture of doing my best to gain the most trust I can out of my customers 

DRY-RUN VIDEO:

MY BEST ADVICE:

I think my best advice that I had given to someone was going to be very beneficial to help improve the speech that they had.  It was a simple piece of advice, but I told my group partner that if they project their voice a little more.  This will just add the small missing piece of their speech to help empower it even more

WHY ITS MY BEST ADVICE:

This was my best piece of advice to give to someone to help and give them something to think about when practicing. By projecting their voice it will help keep the audience engaged in what they are talking about at that time.  It will also just make the overall speech seem and feel a lot more powerful because they would have a lot of noticeable compassion in their voice.

BEST ADVICE FROM PEERS:

I did get some great pieces of advice, but there was one that really helped me.  I was told that I had good flow throughout the speech, but I might need to pick up the pace a little bit, which I will do.  The best piece of advice though was that it seemed like the end of my speech was cut a little short and it felt as if it had come to a screeching halt which is not what you want in a speech.

WHY ITS THEIR BEST ADVICE:

I found this to be very helpful because it showed an area I needed help with that I did not entirely realize myself.  By them telling me that piece of advice it me think about other speeches I have listened to and they have always had a great closing in order to keep the audience satisfied without having any questions or felt like they were left hanging out to dry. Also instead of them just telling me that they had actually tried to help me figure out what a good way to end my speech was.  It felt great that I wasn’t just told this needed to be fixed, but instead was helped through the process.

REFLECTION AFTER EACH PEER REVIEW:

After doing my first run my group had said that it felt like I was having a conversation which made it easier to listen to.  They also felt like I did a good job relating or giving certain scenarios to help further explain my speech.  I personally think I did a good job with not looking at my computer screen too much making my eye contact to be pretty good.  I was told a couple things that I could work on to help my final speech.  I was told I need to project my voice a little more to make it easier to understand what I am saying.  I also realized that how I closed the speech was not great because I would basically just cut it short, so all of the flow that I did have just ended abruptly.

After doing my second run I found that I had a good ending to the speech, but it didn’t sound natural and was just too simple.  I had said something along the lines of “And in conclusion” and continued to wrap it up.  I need to find another way to end the speech.  I also saw and was told that I was swaying back and forth while delivering the speech which could be a distraction to the audience making them focus more on the swaying than the actual speech.  I did see that my eye contact was pretty good and I stayed away from looking at my computer screen for most of the time.

FINAL OUTLINE:

• Work on professional self
• Couple key things I can improve on
• Fluently speaking/Not stumbling over my words 
  • Using less filler words
  • Use Football Analogy
    • Player running with ball gets hit and fumbles the ball
    • Becomes other teams ball
    • Causes teammates to lose trust in you
    • Same thing with fumbling over your words
  • Stop pausing for so long after every thought 
    • Causes customers that you are dealing with face to face to not feel as much trust 
      • Happens when someone stumbles over what they are saying
    • Future could entail me to speak to customers
      • If I want to inform them of something and want them to keep coming back I have to gain there trust
      • If I stumble over what I was saying when giving advice it will seem like I do not know what I am talking about
• Presenting myself
  • Struggle with confidence 
    • Need to know how to present myself in a confident, but friendly way that makes people feel comfortable to come up to me
      • That’s how you get more customers and loyalty by being friendly and helpful to them
        • None will come up to you if you have a bad posture, attitude, or you are shying away from people
• Conclusion 
  • This all circles back to the main picture of doing my best to gain the most trust I can out of my customers 

REFLECTION OF PROJECT AS A WHOLE:

I thought overall the Lone Wolf Speech was fun and was very different from a lot of other projects I have done for other classes.  I liked the fact that we got two prompts to choose from so that there could be different things people could talk about.  I liked the process of making this speech because it helped me see where I was at with it long before the final was done so I could make it better and improve it, but I think having the second ‘practice’ run was the most beneficial because I felt like I was done with my outline before videotaping myself saying the speech.  If we had not had the second practice run then I wouldn’t have gotten the feedback necessary to improve my speech, especially the closing of my speech.  As I said without the feedback then this would have been a very dry and boring speech so having that amount of peer review was very helpful.  I think with future projects I would most likely go about it the same way, but one thing I would change is to possibly be a little more prepared with the dry runs of the speech so there could be some smaller things that people could point out that I might not have noticed.  Overall I had a fun time doing this project and I think I did better than I was originally anticipating.