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TWP #79
When I was in my second year of university I developed a legit phobia of public speaking. Things like reading passages aloud to the class became horrifying sweaty ordeals.
One time the professor asked me to read a poem in old English and about halfway through it, the fringes of my vision went dark and I almost fainted. I said “I’m getting nervous” and stopped reading it. The girl next to me patted me on the back like “you tried”
Later, a different professor asked me what I had written about for a book essay we had just handed in. the class sat there in silence waiting for what was probably an entire minute as I struggled to remember a single characters’ name and eventually had to say “I can’t remember”
i eventually traded my English degree for a design/illustration course, where we pitched ideas and presented work like every day for three years, which was harrowing until I eventually figured out my strategy for public speaking which I will detail in the next tweet
Prepare like your life will end if you are missing a single detail. Write everything down, never leave moments where you will be forced to improv. Have imagery up for people to see, and if you can, at the very least have text prompts up there that you can use if your memory fails
And put SOMETHING funny in any pitch somewhere. Getting literally any laughs from a crowd is a instant way to relax yourself by like 70 percent, it is immediate and I leaned on it very hard as often as I could.
Funnily enough I ended up in animation, storyboarding, a job that requires constant pitching of material. I learned to lower my terror level by realizing that no matter what, all I had to do was read what was in front of me until the episode was over, good or bad
And now I’ve pitched my own pilot to tv networks and shit! They didn’t buy it but I still did it! So uh yeah. Weirdly I used to love reading aloud in high school? Maybe because I considered myself a strong reader though, whereas I was intimidated by university students? Who knows
One other tip for anyone in a position where they have to present stuff: get an appropriate amount of sleep. I’m sure that a LOT of the anxiety I felt pitching stuff came from the high level of exhaustion I was already wallowing in before pitch nerves even came into the equation
Anyway this comic is funny
