Coming into this term, I knew I had strong verbal skills as a presenter as well as communicator within my group. One of my strong points in my communication is speaking abilities and confidence in presenting. Although I thought I knew everything I needed to know about verbal communication, I was mistaken.
With communicating effectively in the group, I thought most of the verbal communication came from speaking about my ideas and advocating for them. When the first midterm evaluation came out, I got a lot of positive feedback in my creation of my ideas and advocacy for them. “Great in providing ideas that helps towards the progressing with the proposal.” Although my ability to advocate was very strong, I was weak in my inquiry and did not engage other members with questions to further develop the discussions and proposal. “Increase inquiry to get the group to think about why an idea is good or bad.” Inquiry inspires discussion, which leads to better all around discussion and communication.
For the second half of the course, my main goal was to ask more questions to bring about more productive conversations as a group. I never realized how hard it was to balance between being an advocator and being an inquirer. The balance is key to verbal communication and the more effort I made in this aspect, the more I understood the importance. “Brian worked on his drawbacks in the first feedback session.” This wasn’t necessarily just about inquiry but when talking with my group during both midterm session and final session of peer reviews, they said that I improved drastically with my ability to inquiry.
In regards to my ability to present publicly, my group noticed that was a strong suit for me. I have a lot of energy when I speak and I am very passionate about the topic I am presenting on. In both blog posts titled, “It is Still Snowing” and “The Final Speech” I discuss my speaking abilities with giving the intro and conclusion for both presentations. The only drawback with my first evaluation on the presentation was that I “yelled at the audience.” I realized that passion needs to be channeled and through working on my presenting skills and that passion can sometime be over the top and harm the presenting skills. Through working with my group on the final presentation, I toned down my passion yet kept it strong at the same time. This ultimately led to a successful presentation and my group noticed my performance. “He helped strengthen our oral presentation with his skills.” I realize that practice and knowledge make the presentation more relaxing and knowing the material by heart makes that passion more relaxed and focused.
Moving forward, with working as a group, I need to continue finding that balance between inquiry and advocacy. It isn’t the easiest balance to find however it will lead to more production among group work. With presenting, the only issue I had with the final presentation was that it was scripted, which ultimately means I need to be more relaxed speaking and be naturally confident with what I am talking about.