Take My Breath Away

“If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else’s, we’d grab ours back.”
~~ Regina Brett

Today was a momentous day for me. As many of you who have been following my blog may know, I’ve been making my way through the Toastmasters program, working on both the Competent Communicator (CC) and the Competent Leader (CL) certifications.

I completed my CL earlier this month, which felt great. I mean, now I can actually say I am a competent leader…the certificate says so! See? Here I am, super happy after opening my big envelope from Toastmasters International when it came in the mail.

Well, today I completed my final speech for my CC certification. This was a tough one for me, because it’s the “Inspire Your Audience” speech and has to be 8-10 minutes in length. All my speeches up to this point have revolved around some aspect of happiness, so I decided that with this one, I was going to put it all out there and share MY story. My story of how yoga came into my life, and how it helped me to deal with some pretty heavy stuff.

I was so nervous! The Toastmasters club I’m part of is held at my company, so everyone who is a member is someone I work with. And today, we decided as a club to use this as a demo meeting, in hopes of attracting some new members. So now, not only would I be sharing my story — my very PERSONAL story — with the people I’ve gotten to know rather well since joining the club, but I was also having to share it with anyone who happened to stop by to check things out.

Yesterday afternoon, I started to realize that I was getting sick. I had a fever, sore throat, headache and aches/pains. Oh no! Talk about pressure! I woke up this  morning not feeling any better, but at least not feeling any worse. I figured, “Well, I know this stuff. After all, it is MY story. So I just need to give it up to God and do my best.”

We were fortunate at today’s meeting to have our speeches video taped, which is great! I really wanted to see how I came across, to see if I relayed the message I really wanted to. Usually I post the text of my speeches here for you all, but since I have a video to share, I figured maybe you might want to see how it really came off.

Now, I will admit that I forgot a couple of things, but I don’t feel that them missing detracted at all from my message. And I was SUPER  happy that I didn’t get too emotional and cry. 🙂

So without further ado, here is the link to my final Toastmasters speech, titled “Take My Breath Away.” I’d love to know your thoughts!

Namaste,

Melanie