Resotech Case Study

Session 2

• Gaurav Jain

This week was my first session in the course Behaving in Public. For a 9am class in the winter the start to the class was rather welcoming. The initial warm up helped us shake off the morning drowsiness and get energized. While walking around, I got to establish eye contact with the peers and base a connection for the rest of the class.

We then moved on to some stretching where you explained the concept of grounding yourself and the analogy to a tree. A tree has its roots grounded deep into the soil. In a similar fashion, for us it is essential to have our feet firm and strong on the ground to be able to flourish and prosper.

The voice modulation activity allowed me to witness the entire breadth of my pitch and how a confident convincing voice has to come deep within your stomach. I have always been a heavy speaker with a loud voice and this just reassured me.

Moving on, the ball passing exercise was quite a challenge for all of us. However, with time, we all adjusted better. The trick is to maintain you calm and concentrate. In a real-world scenario, we have to communicate with multiple people and often at the same time. The presence of mind at that moment will allow you to maintain simultaneous channels of communication.

The human tossing exercise allowed us to relax and taught us to have faith in others around you. I am intrigued if faith in others is essential for a good public speaker and it would be grateful if you could elaborate further. I may have not completely grasped the purpose of this task.

Towards the end of the session, we finally moved on to practicing some public speaking. In the class environment, as part of the audience I paid special attention to the various aspects/features of the speaker like pace of walk, body language, eye-contact, utilization of space, speech articulation, loudness etc. All the above significantly influence the impact a speaker leaves on the audience and how he develops his speech delivery. While speaking, we often tend to focus on the content of the speech and forget about the other above-mentioned elements.