The Results are for LIFE! My Journey Toward Eloquent Speaking

by Violet Paone, NCFCA Alumna

Throughout my life, I have never been a clear and confident speaker. Even as I watch old videos of me speaking, it’s sometimes hard for me to understand what I was trying to say and I have to rely on context to understand what I am saying. I’m not sure if my issue was a speech impediment or not, but I definitely struggled  to communicate because of how I spoke. It was not uncommon for people to ask me to repeat sentences, raise my volume, or to speak slower. Looking back, I now realize that I struggled to enunciate my words properly and as a result, a lot of my words would run together and sound slurred (not a good mix for being understood). Especially when I would get excited about something, my problem tended to get worse and people really struggled to understand me. However, in my mind I thought it was all coming across perfectly clear and I didn’t realize I had a problem.

Part way through my high school years things started to change. During that time my family heard about and joined a local club training for NCFCA speech and debate competitions. Although at first I didn’t realize how much help I needed with my speaking, it wasn’t long before my coaches identified my problem and started to work with me on various techniques. 

Joining speech and debate was both a blessing as well as a challenge. I had so many ideas and words I wanted to communicate, but I started to realize that I just wasn’t able to get them all out in an understandable way. This truly started to frustrate me at a certain point. Having an impediment to effective communication while you’re in a competitive communication league seemed overwhelming at the time. Just trying to understand what the problem was and how to improve it was very difficult for me, especially since I wasn’t able to differentiate whether I was speaking clearly or not. 

After the first few months of speech and debate club, I hit a low point. During that week’s club meeting, the feedback for both of my speeches and my debate that evening had highlighted how I really needed to really work on enunciation and how it was difficult to understand what I was saying. I remember that several sections of one of my speeches were unintelligible to one of the coaches. Plus, even outside of debate club, during that week I felt that people kept asking me to repeat myself or say things clearer.

By the end of the week, I was pretty discouraged and frustrated. I remember telling my parents that I wasn’t making progress and was ready to give up on speech and debate. However, they encouraged me to keep going, even for just a little while more and emphasized how I needed to find a way to tackle this problem (both for the NCFCA and also for communication in my everyday life as well). So, I decided to dig my heels in and really try to conquer this difficulty. I figured that even if I could be just a little more understandable, it would be worth it.

After that, things seemed to get better. Of course I’d like to say it was all downhill from there, but in all honesty it still was a journey. It took a lot of practice, encouragement, tips from my coaches, and additional time to improve. A few practical things my coaches recommended was to make sure I opened my mouth wide enough while speaking, really enunciating each consonant while talking and taking time to make sure each word was properly formed when I spoke it. 

It took persistence, patience, and a conscious effort to build the right speech habits to replace my old ones. However, eventually I started to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I was making progress and although I would still fall into my old speech habits every now and then, it gradually became less and less.

By the time I was part way through my second year, I had made a lot of progress and was getting the hang of improved articulation and enunciation. I finally started to see results from my efforts and was able to progress more at NCFCA tournaments. After my first year in the league where I never broke in any category, during my second year I ended up advancing to out-rounds both in Lincoln-Douglas debate and in ALL of my speeches. In addition, I (somehow) ended up snagging second place at a national mixer tournament, which gave me enough points to make it to Nationals in digital presentation!

Looking back, it wasn’t an easy journey, but it has been one that I am so thankful for. Not only did this effort to improve help me in NCFCA, but I feel it revealed and improved my voice for life in general. I now realize that my time in our local club was a golden opportunity to tackle the problem that held me back for so long. Having amazing coaches who not only identified the problem but gave me encouragement and ways to overcome my impediment was such a blessing. I am so thankful for those friends and parents, as well as others who encouraged me along the way.

So, to all those who are somewhere along that journey of trying to work through speaking difficulties and trying to climb the mountain in front of them, don't give up! Keep on going even when you don’t feel you’re making all the progress you want to see. It’s worth it, even if it goes slow at times; you won’t regret the time you’ve invested in learning this life long skill.