Motivated to Learn and Grow: A Self-Evaluation

The original self-evaluation I wrote was especially hard on myself. 

So I scrapped it. I was hard on myself because the video failed to live up to my imaginings in my mind. In part because I was overly ambitious with the content, and in part because the imagery wasn’t what I had initially hoped it would be. However, I realize now that there are several things I did of which I am proud.

The first is that I didn’t write a script. It was important to me not to sound scripted. Yes, that meant I occasionally used filler words, or misspoke (several of the misspeaking clips were re-recorded), but it meant I was able to (I think) sound more enthusiastic and natural in my delivery while working from a set of notes to keep me on track.

The second is that my presentation doesn’t include a lot of text. Especially if I’m in a classroom, I hate slides that have too much text on them because it’s not a good presentation tool; I spend more time reading what’s on the slides or writing everything before the next one comes up to listen. Although these make for good study tools later, they’re ineffective to me as a classroom tool. That aside, I also feel really clever for how I organized the images and linked them to create the M in my final image. It’s cheesy, but I’m proud of it.

The third thing is I covered what I wanted to cover. I feel I gave a pretty comprehensive overview of motivation and how different people might apply varying techniques to motivate a class. It is not as deep as I wanted, and there aren’t as many anecdotes (I love my anecdotes) and self-reflective questions as I had originally planned, but I at least touched on everything. Hopefully, the brief introduction and the links inspired someone to go learn a little more and go digging.

Now, the things of which I’m less proud.

First (if you couldn’t tell from the blog post), going over time. I really had intended to stick to the 6 minutes. Looking at it now, I could have cut sections from the beginning and ended up with a decent video. At the same time, seeing that many of my classmates also went over makes me feel a little better in that I’m not alone in being overly ambitious.

Second, agonizing over the length in both the video and blog post. I’m hard on myself. Sometimes I forget not to be so vocal about that. I know apologizing doesn’t help, that it can damage how people perceive you and your work, but I can’t seem to stop. It is something my fiancé is working with me on because it annoys him to no end. (Believe it or not, I am better than I used to be about it.)

Third, I didn’t really summarize the presentation at the end. Yes, I returned to the learning objectives and talked through what I hope had been gleaned, but that isn’t really a summary.

The last thing isn’t really here or there, and I’ll explain. I feel I may have spoken a bit too quickly in the video. Ever since 10^th grade when I had my first speech class, the unanimous criticism was I speak too quickly. I was even told senior year that I recited Hamlet’s third soliloquy astonishingly fast. The more excited I get, the faster I talk. I have greatly improved in this, though. In large part from talking with people and doing presentations all the time for two years, followed by an MBA program and case competitions. I still speak faster than many people. I accept this about myself and have come to accept that there is a level of slow that I cannot do without losing my train of thought. And that is one thing for which I’m done apologizing.

Overall, it isn’t what I had imagined it would be, but I wouldn’t say it’s bad, either. You live and you learn and hopefully improve along the way. I look forward to learning from the feedback you all provide.