Being a University Student, the only public speaking I’ve ever done has been in front of my classmates and even then, I knew who most of them were. When the opportunity came about to speak at one of the West Midlands CARE Team lectures, I was nervous, but I know I just have to keep raising awareness of Brugada Syndrome and CRY in every way possible. The CARE Team is ‘A charity providing advanced medical care throughout the West Midlands’ and they are an amazing group of people who volunteer their time to help others and if you would like to read more about them then please visit www.wmcareteam.com! The aim of me speaking was to raise awareness for CRY and to give an insight to what it is like living with a heart condition like Brugada Syndrome. I was so nervous about speaking to a crowd especially because we never had a definitive number of people confirmed to be attending, we could only guess!
Preparing for this I made a PowerPoint presentation to go along with my speech, which included many family photos for people to look/laugh at. But that was the easy part, the hard part was standing there in front of about 40 people trying not to look down at my paper and mumble through every word. My advice would be to definitely rehearse time and time again and also just to take a deep breath if you feel like you’re mumbling or talking too fast! Also have some water with you, dry mouth almost got the better of me at some points during the lecture. We were also kindly gifted a giant Thornton’s chocolate hamper to sell as part of a raffle after the lecture, as you can imagine the raffle tickets sold very quickly! Overall that evening we earned just over £60 and I gained some experience I will definitely use again in the future.
Big thank you to the West Midlands CARE Team for having me!
If you’d like to learn more about why I fundraise for CRY then feel free to visit my blog on brugadasyndromediaries.wordpress.com!
Liz Bowers-Keable
