How to Manage Your Anxiety and Speak Confidently
Are you a confident speaker or are you letting your nerves get over you? Here’s how MARKCubator helps you to overcome your nerves and speak confidently.
Recently, MARKCubator has just launched its first monthly meetup session for international students to improve their public speaking skills, and English communication skills as well as train themselves to be critical thinkers. The session allows you to discuss and present various topics related to career directions, the Marketing industry, job hunting journeys and more. Moreover, expanding your social networks and making new friends through these sessions.
Here are some of the highlights of our first meetup session which was held last week on the 2nd of September:
1. Confident Boost to Speak Publicly
Public speaking ability is essential in different aspects, from personal to professional. Effective communication shows to be a crucial asset in our lives, from being able to express your thoughts, and opinions to your friends to presenting significant information to your company.
The first step is to be comfortable speaking to strangers at a personal level. Our students are motivated to step out of their comfort zone and shyness, beginning with a simple “Hello”, they had the chance to get to know each other and built up some small conversations throughout the sessions.
The second step is to get over the difficulty and anxiety of expressing and delivering your thinking to a larger audience. Students are highly encouraged to discuss the topic question in English and write down their ideas on the concepts around the topic. Thus, training you the ability to think, talk and express yourself in both written and verbal communication.
2. Presentation Skill is Critical
Along with public speaking skill, presentation skill is also an important factor to become a good communicator.
Presentation is an outstanding way to contribute to your English learning experience. It allows you to practice all language areas including vocabulary, grammar and tone.
In MARKCubator’s discussion session, our activities are designed to give students limited preparation time but are expected for students to express their thoughts on the spot. This nurturing environment will help students to overcome their fears, encouraging them to speak up and perform better to gain proficiency in the language.
At our meetup, every single student had the opportunity to learn how to present their ideas in front of the audience, being able to utilise eye contact during the presentation and using their body language comfortably to express their thoughts.
Millie - one of our attendees states “I have never spoken in front of the group, I am very scared right now”.
After much encouragement from the attendees and Dr Theresa, Millie took her step out boldly and expressed her thoughts and ideas for the first time. This nurturing environment encouraged her to push herself forward and overcome her fear; contributing to the effectiveness of our meetup activities.
3. Practise Critical Thinking with Mind Map
International students tend to prepare and memorise scripts for presentations. This often results in script reading, the pressure of memorisation, no eye contact, and a lack of engagement with the audience during the presentation.
To help the students gain confidence in the presentation and reduce the need to depend on scripts, we designed a mind mapping activity. Such an activity teaches students how to use a mind map to organise their thoughts, narrow down their ideas and key points to be able to perform better in presentations.
Mind mapping is a visually brainstorming technique that strengthens your thinking and creates more meaningful engagement. Students are actively engaged in the process of brainstorming, developing ideas, generating thoughts and discussing with each other while building mind maps.
MISS THE LAST SESSION?
Don’t worry! You are INVITED to our October Meetup Session on the 7th of October, 2022.
Come and join us if you want to practise your English speaking and improve your presentation skills in a safe, nurturing and fun environment. As we are all facing the same problem, everyone is welcome to join in and laugh at each other’s mistakes! :)
If you are stuck, we’d love to help you craft a strategic career pathway specially designed to help you land your first marketing job in Australia.
Feel free to contact us or register for a consultation session!