Hi,
Today I thought I'd share a small win for the newsletter. As of today The Slice is being sent out to 2058 of you. To a few of you, it may not really sound like a lot of people, but I guess in todays day and age, reaching 2k people can be easily done on Twitter or Instagram effortlessly. It gave me a real perspective when I thought about putting that many people in a room and saying a speech.
When I was in high school I did a toast masters course. It's basically a public speaking course that comprises of you making 10 speeches that each cover a certain area and goal that helps you become a better public speaker. Each speech you make needs to be said in front of an audience and for each speech, its either a pass for fail, so it's safe to say you will do a few speeches more than once.
I did this because when I was a child, I developed a very bad stutter and it made me very self-conscious to talk in front of people or even a large amount of people for that matter, and for a long time I even went to speech therapy. Thankfully by the time I got high school, the stutter wasn't really there anymore (it kinda was and it kinda wasn't) but I still wanted to be a better speaker both in everyday conversation and in front of a large crowed of people.
Somehow I managed to finish the program and for my final speech I spoke for 7 minutes in front 1500 people. It was nerve wracking to the say the least, but a weird feeling knowing that I spoke for that long and in front of that many people without having any "ticks" as I like to call them.
To think now that I'm writing to over 2k of you is pretty insane, and it made compare the current size of The Slice to the amount of people I spoke in front of. To help give you a better idea of crowd size, here is a little blog post that helps you
visualise crowd sizes and as somebody that had a tiny speech disorder, it was definitely a highlight in my life. And yes...I have now grown out of my stutter, but sadly there are a lot of people that don't :(
Important: I'd like to ask you a bit a favour. I have a survey that I would really appreciate if you could fill out. It will help me a lot to find who I'm actually writing to and how the newsletter can improved. You can fill out the survey here - Nic