Elevator Speech

Before I even started to work on this speech, it took me a long time to figure out what I would like to talk about for such a short time. After many ideas, I did stay with the recommended one. I tried to talk about myself, and I tried to sell myself for a position.

First, I figured I try to see what comes out in one minute without preparing. It was a disaster. Nothing really came to my mind, and even what came sounded very confused. I was very surprised, because previously, I had to talk about myself during interviews, and I never really had such a hard time and did well. This time, it was not that easy.

So, I started making a list of things to talk about. I made three main groups of things to sell myself: education, experience and personality. I tried to list many things for each and write some partial sentences.

The next challenge was to actually speak it and keep it under or close to one minute. It tried it and repeated the exercise several times, but it was not great. I cut some of the things to keep it closer to a minute, but even then, it was a little longer.

When I was ready with the content, I asked my girlfriend to listen to me and then record it to me. I told her that I wanted to practice it first, and that I was very nervous and uncomfortable about it, which was very surprising again with my previous interview experiences. She kind of tricked me and recorded it during one of the practice runs, but I was glad. I guess I was still not as nervous as would have been live. I have to keep repeating that during a real interview and conversation I never feel this way… I guess this was just too artificial.

Anyway, it was recorded and was as good as it gets for now. I was still shaky in my voice and was not as confident and concise sounding as I expected it, but at least I learned something about myself and about recording my speech. It was kind of nice to gather some ideas for a short conversation about me and hearing my voice (and my accent) back, too. :-)

Elevator Speech