The 2012 National Public Speaking Competition organised by the Public Speaking Academy that took place on 11 August 2012 saw the first prize in the Secondary Category go to our own Rachel Chew of O1.
The topic Rachel shared was on taking chances, her passion for theatre, working with words, her bold decision to enroll in SOTA and her rewarding experience thus far.
Congratulations Rachel!
Want to guess what I did just now? I spent the morning creating a soundscape for the production of “The Crucible”. What did that consist of? I was trying to find the right sound for the background of a scene in order to get an audience to believe that they were sitting in the middle of a village in Salem Massachusetts in the 17th Century.
How did I end up doing that on a Saturday morning when I could have been studying for my exams?
A few years ago, I took a chance.
I made an amazing decision to go to SOTA. Everyone thought that I would go to a more mainstream school but I chose instead to go to a school that no one knew a lot about.
I chose to study theater.
Now I had no training in theater before. I barely knew anything about the subject but I loved words and I loved working with words and so I chose to do something that would allow me to work with the things that I loved.
I did not know what I was stepping into. It was completely foreign and it carried through to my first class when we sat around staring at each other wondering what we had gotten ourselves into.
Flash forward three years and I am standing here telling you that what I did was a good thing.
Not taking theater or coming to SOTA of course, but taking chances.
What is so good about taking chances?
Taking chances gives you more to explore and opens up new worlds that you have never imagined. It gives you a whole new world to discover. It does not matter if that world turns out to be one crazy rollercoaster that makes you puke, it is the experience that matters.
You take this rollercoaster and no matter whether you like it or not, you have gone on it and it is not something that you are going to forget anytime soon. Let’s say you do puke. Most people would see that as a failure, a sign of weakness, showing how you could not stomach it. But I see that as a sign of you having pushed your boundaries and finding out what you are capable of doing.
Taking chances also allows you to find out more about yourself. Most people see this in the opportunities that taking chances gives you, the endless possibilities that are out there. But I believe that taking chances and failing lets you learn just as much, if not more, about who you are than succeeding does.
Maya Angelou once said, “I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way they handle these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.” One rarely faces failure unless one steps out of their comfort zone and takes a chance.
Finally, the very act of taking a chance changes you as a person. Taking a chance is liberating. It requires you to take a step into a cupboard, follow a giant bearded man with a magical umbrella, and walk into a witch’s cottage. It is not where you eventually end up but the path that you have chosen. We feel that life lacks choices because we think that life has only one pathway. But we are really just walking through life with blinders on the sides of our faces. It is when you take a chance and rip those blinders off that you realise life is not limited by your lack of choices but your fear of the world around us. Taking chances liberates us from ourselves. We no longer have to care about our own fears, prejudices, mind-sets; it opens up worlds of possibilities, and endless directions we can run towards.
This is not to say that taking chances is easy, it is not. Taking a chance means you also have to deal with the consequences, the opinions of people around you.
When I made the decision to go to SOTA, pretty much everyone I talked to thought I was crazy. My mentality? I might be crazy but I am happy. So go out there, and take your chance.