5 Minute Pitch - A self assessment essay
This was always going to be a challenge for me as I am not very confident in my public speaking ability! I tend to accidentally blend two (or more!) words together, create brand new words altogether, and/or regularly trip over my own tongue, all because of nerves. It’s a vicious circle though, because I know if I was more confident in my ability to speak in public, I wouldn’t get so nervous, and these kinds of errors would happen less regularly.
To begin with I was standing at the front of the room and I felt like I was visibly shaking with nerves. Because there was a long pause before I began my pitch, I started to over think everything, and in the process of doing so forgot about my introduction! So we come to my first major error. My first word is “Cool!” which is not a good start, then after introducing myself I completely forget to introduce my company’s name. Even though on the screen behind me, the iSignia logo is huge, I still feel I definitely should have started much stronger and clearer. For example; “Good afternoon, my name is Jessi Dimmock, and I am a digital artist and designer. I’m here to talk about iSignia, which is my idea for a jewellery design business with a technological edge.”
Despite my slightly stumbling start, I think my pitch went better than I was expecting. After my initial 2 minute pitch, one of the things I realised was that if I was going to be selling a brand that I wanted to be classy, expensive, unique and iconic, (even despite me being a new-age technological artist), I could not turn up to a pitch wearing skinny jeans, trainers and a baggy hoody. This time I wore a maxi dress with a cropped denim jacket, and tried to hold myself with more confidence. I definitely am not shuffling and looking at the floor/my notes as much as I did in my 2 minute pitch, and I appear to stand taller and straighter.
Once I got going, my confidence was helped by having the presentation as visuals behind me. My audience were focusing their eyes on the screen rather than directly at me. I’m quite proud of my visuals, I think they gave a really good sense of the iSignia brand as a whole; clean and simple, yet still with all the necessary information. I chose to have the logo on every slide just to really keep that image at the forefront of my audience’s minds. I feel I put enough information on each slide to describe my product; images that were relevant and engaging, and of course the key points to reiterate what I was talking about, but also not so much that the audience had to spend the time reading and not listening to what I was saying.
As I pointed out in my evaluation of my 2 minute, I did still “um” and “ah” quite a lot during this pitch. This is partially down to nerves and stumbling over my introduction, but I also realise now that I should have practised a lot more. I only practised the whole presentation twice, and both times were not in front of an audience. If I had practised more, I would have been more confident in knowing what I had to say and when, and therefore there would have been less verbal fillers. Another word I used too much was “basically”, a repeated reflex I am definitely using as a filler while I organise my next thought.
Another improvement from my initial pitch was my timing. My speech was slower which made me easier to understand, and the pitch easier to follow. I was also only 7 seconds off my 5 minute target. This I was definitely quite proud of, as I managed to say everything I needed to, and didn’t need to rush the ending.
Having the flash cards was a definite improvement. I spent the previous pitch looking at the notepad in my hand, essentially ‘reading’ my pitch straight off the paper. I think I used it as an excuse to not make eye contact with my audience as I was feeling nervous. This makes me seem very unconfident and unprofessional. This time, now that I had the flash cards, I only glanced down to make sure I was on the right track, but I was speaking freely from keywords and phrases, making me appear more confident in my idea and my company as a whole.
Overall I feel my pitch went well and was well received. When looking around the room, I could see that most people were paying attention and looking interested, which, considering it was at least an hour into our presentation afternoon and my audience had listened to about 8 other presentations before mine, was quite reassuring. I’m glad I spent a lot of time on my visual presentation as it really helped convey the strong brand image that surrounds iSignia, whilst being informative, and effective at visually complementing what I was saying. I was overall much more confident and presentable than I was at my 2 minute pitch, my appearance and my speech had improved considerably, though verbal fillers were still evident throughout. After a quite stumbling start, I managed to regain my composure, the rest of the presentation went relatively smoothly and I finished within the set timeframe of 5 minutes.
