Last week I spoke to the local Rotary club on stress. I had a cold, nothing severe but it did feel like my nose was as big as a horse’s and packed full of cotton, and my mind wasn’t as clear as it might have been. Between that and the woeful state of my office, I didn’t notice when my talk outline fell out of the box of odds and ends I was taking for the talk (the usual sort of stuff: a big spanner, a screw, a brain model and some copies of my book).
I had done what I usually do for a talk, written it out in full as a kind of trial run and then summarized it in an outline, which I was going to take with me. But when I stood up to speak, there the outline wasn’t. That’s all right, I thought, I know what I planned to say, and I started in with the story of my trip to Australia which I blogged about recently.
The talk was in full flow and I was defining my terms, using the three-part definition of stress from Kim and Diamond – and when I got to the end of the second part of the definition, I suddenly realized I’d forgotten what the third thing was. I’d already said there were three, it was too late to pretend otherwise, so I launched myself on the sentence which started, “And the third element of this definition of stress is…” without knowing what came at the end of it. Fortunately, by the time I’d got to the end of the sentence I remembered what it was.
It’s that you don’t feel in control of the situation.
(I don’t have any point particularly, I just thought it was a funny story.)
Technorati Tags: public speaking, stress, memory
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