Posts Tagged ‘Betta Kultcha’

Bangs & a Bun: Live & Direct!

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

If you follow me on Twitter, you probably would have heard me talking about Betta Kultcha a few weeks ago. Betta Kultcha is an event here in Leeds, where people do five minute presentations on something they love/are passionate about/interested in. The presentations are done with PowerPoint. You put together 20 slides and they change every 15 seconds. 20 x 15 = 5 minutes.

I had been asked to do it a while ago and before I knew what I’d let myself in for, I signed up. I then spent the next few weeks putting together my slides and presentation and generally crapping myself. I decided to do my presentation on the back story and run up to my phone call with Idris Elba. It was called The Wire and How It Makes Dreams Come True: A Tale of Baltimore Drug Gangs and Internet Stalking.

I made the presentation the day after I’d had two wisdom teeth out in a pretty painful procedure. I had a face like a chipmunk (the extreme close up camera angles in the above video are not helping the situation) and I was in a lot of pain as I was talking. I was nervous and it shows. I’ve never really done anything like this before. I’m a blogger for goodness sake. I’ll happily chat away to people from behind my computer screen all day, but to actually get up in front of a room of 60 people and talk for 5 minutes? Well, I may as well have been doing it in front of a packed out crowd at Wembley Stadium for how nervous I was.

But it’s one of those things I just had to conquer. Facing my fears and all that. If I never speak in public, I’ll never get better at it.

So, the above video, with my chipmunk face and nerves, is my first attempt. It’s a little cringeworthy for me to watch and I was hesitant about putting it up here, but hell, if you searched for it, you’d find it anyway, so I thought I’d embarrass myself on my own terms.

So I hope you enjoy my silly story and that my public speaking skills just get better from here on in.

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