A QUICK CHAT ABOUT NERVES, ANXIETY, & STAGE FRIGHT IN PUBLIC SPEAKING | CELEBRATING THE LAUNCH OF WAYTHROUGH

“There are always three speeches for every one that you give. There’s the one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.”

Dale Carnegie

A number of months ago, I was in a Working Together Committee meeting with Richmond Fellowship – the organisation who provide my Support Workers – and we were told it would be our penultimate meeting due to their merger with Humankind. I had no clue what they were on about and since Richmond Fellowship are usually good with communication, I was so worried this meant that Humankind had already had a bad influence on things! It wasn’t long later, however, that I received an email from the Humankind Communications and Marketing team, basically saying “we hear you like comms and marketing…?!” And I’ve been involved in the merger’s creation ever since! So, I was absolutely honoured when I was asked to give speeches at two of the launch/reveal events and to even help the Vice Chair with the actual unveiling of the new charity’s identity! With both events now finished, I thought it time I write this blog post...

FIVE SCARIEST MOMENTS OF MY LIFE | HAPPY HALLOWEEN 2019

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along”

Eleanor Roosevelt

Halloween is all about making people jump in shock and scaring people half to death; but no one ever really uses the opportunity to talk about how fear can be positive and beneficial too! Being afraid can be a natural reaction to a situation – think along the lines of ‘fight or flight.’ So, for this reason, I didn’t want to use this post to only discuss the really negative parts of my life; I also wanted to talk about how positive fear has been for me sometimes… How it has often resulted in something positive:

1.    The time I stopped breathing in 2008

I had a weekend job at my local Primark (a huge retail store) and had been folding clothes when I got a huge pain in my tummy and passed out. I remember paramedics coming and giving me morphine and then they took me to the local A&E where they gave me more morphine. After seeing a Doctor they decided that I needed to be transferred to the local Gynae ward at another hospital and en route, in the ambulance, they gave me more morphine and then failed to tell the new hospital how much I’d had and they gave me more. 

TWO TOP TIPS ON PUBLIC SPEAKING | NORTH TYNESIDE WORLD MENTAL HEALTH DAY 2019

So, it may not be World Mental Health Day until the 10^th of October but I’ve actually already attended an event to celebrate the occasion with North Tyneside Launchpad at Cullercoats Crescent Club, where I was very kindly asked to give a talk on social media and blogging. With this year’s World Mental Health Day being around the theme of suicide prevention, I decided to center my talk around the life-changing benefits and consequences that social media can have on someone. After discovering the UK suicide statistics (there are over 800,000 suicides in the UK per year and it is the leading cause of death in 15-29 years olds) and having my own experiences, it’s something I’m very passionate about so talking to a crowd of strangers about it seemed do-able! 


I still remember my very first public speaking event at the Time To Change Story Camp in London and I called my Mum as a hysterical, anxious mess and told her there was no way that I could do it! But of course, I ended up giving the speech and it wasn’t such a total disaster that I didn’t say ‘no’ to all future invitations to do some public speaking! And in continuing to give talks and speeches, I’ve learnt a few things that I thought I’d share because I’d like to encourage you all to share your own experiences publicly because I’ve seen how beneficial it can be for others.