And action 🎬! That seemed to be the motto of our official speech training session with Marco Behrmann, which took place last Saturday 15 January 2024. Marco Behrmann is a professional expert for personality, assessment, leadership, and team-making, from X-Rubicon with the focus of passing on speaking- and negotiationskills. After a brief introduction to principles of negotiations by Marco, it was the turn of our delegates to become active. The cameras were directed at them while presenting different speeches. This exercise came with two challenges: At first the delegates had ten minutes to prepare speeches about a random topic they were assigned, which didn’t necessarily correlate with the typical questions discussed by the United Nations. In a second round the speeches were then supposed to refer to the actual committee topics. However, it wasn’t just that easy. Our delegates were confronted with various specific scenarios which they might likely face in New York, for example giving a speech after a failed negotiation process.
After each speech everyone received an individual feedback. This was extremely helpful to become for example aware of certain unintentional habits while speaking but also served as a huge boost of confidence for many. It became clear that our delegation is quite well prepared and advanced at publicly speaking already. In addition, with the second tasks improvements to our first attempts quickly became apparent. It was also really interesting to realize that the context of giving a speech really matters a lot. The setting as well as the people you address are very important to keep in mind in order to set the right tone of a speech.
With these new insights, we were able to conclude the training with feelings of satisfaction and excitement for the upcoming opportunities where we can further demonstrate our skills: First TMUN on the 26 January and then finally at NMUN, taking place at the end of March.
