How Drawing Ties Into Public Speaking
The following chapter is from Tough Love: 101 Short Stories, Essays, and Insights to Improve Communication Skills
If you told me a few years ago, that drawing would make me a better public speaker, I’d laugh at you.
But nowadays, you’d have my ear.
‘What changed your mind?’
When I saw the improvements firsthand.
I was a big drawer growing up.
I would always draw Dragon Ball Z characters.
As I grew up, I eventually evolved into portraits.
I loved drawing people & bringing them to life.
Then out of the blue moon one day…
I stopped.
No clue why.
I think it was because I started to believe that drawing was for little kids.
So, I cut out that habit & began replacing it with other hobbies.
By the time I entered Toastmasters a few years later, I was a mess.
A poor public speaker who could not even speak for 1 minute without making a fool of himself.
It was hard to talk about it because I didn’t know the main reason for the nerves myself.
It was something I found difficult to put into words.
I thought, ‘Why not put the nerves into pictures?’
And just like that, I began my drawing hobby again.
I began drawing images of what I felt.
Truth be told, the images didn’t make much sense.
Yet, it still gave me clarity.
I remember one of the images I drew was of a boogeyman chasing me before my speech.
That’s why I got nervous.
Lowkey, the picture was ridiculous.
But it allowed me to make sense of my speech anxiety.
Once I could see the boogeyman was more comical than scary, my paradigm began to change regarding the nerves.
Drawing gave me clarity.
Now this may seem pretty mind blowing to you, who knows.
But it isn’t really.
Our brain thinks in pictures, not words.
When I was drawing, I was going through a process of RECONNECTING vs. learning something brand new.
That’s when a very obvious realization came.
I was born with the power to imagine.
No one ever sat me down and gave me a class on it.
It was just always there.
Anxiety is imagination at work.
The movie being played just happens to be negative.
Through drawing, I tapped into the imagination and grabbed hold of the narrative.
That’s where drawing came in.
Life changed when I decided to stop being a moviegoer to a movie producer.
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