For my “lone wolf speech,” I am going to talk about how to be a better version of one’s professional self. Connecting with the audience will probably be my biggest challenge, as I am soft-spoken and I get anxious in most situations. To combat this I will need to work on projecting my voice so that I am speaking evenly and with volume. On top of that, I will have to work on eliciting emotions with my tone, facial expressions, and hand gestures. This includes making eye contact with the audience and maintaining a casual, yet in-control demeanor. Another important aspect of connecting with my audience is my language. I have to remember that I am speaking to (mostly) college students who would rather be anywhere else. Keeping a casual level of diction and possibly including a few jokes may help in this situation. Overall I will have to make sure that what I say makes sense, gets to the point, and is captivating, or else I’ll lose my audience. I selected “how to be a better version of one’s professional self” because of some struggles I’ve experienced in my professional life. I tend to be a very open person, wearing my emotions on my sleeve. However in a work setting, I can’t be crying, yelling, or (overly) laughing, so it can be hard for me to maintain a “professional demeanor.” I think it is important for me and others to learn how to regulate and rephrase so that emotion can be managed within a business environment. That is not to say I want to give a speech on how to be a robot, more so, I want to give a speech on how to communicate frustrations, excitement, and a range of other emotions so that the audience can understand how to express themselves in every step of life. I plan to begin my speech with a short explanation of why it is important to maintain oneself in the workplace. I would like to follow this with examples (capturing the audience with some humor here) of right and wrong ways to conduct oneself. One example I hope to use would be phrased along the lines of “There was a time in my life when I had to deal with one coworker I particularly disliked. I was in charge at the time, and he openly did something against company policy, something I had asked him seconds before not to do. Honestly, I wanted to report him and give him a piece of my mind. As satisfying as it would have been to let him know how I really felt, I had to keep my composure. At that moment in time, he was the one at fault, but if I were to begin yelling and screaming, then my job would be at risk as well.” I would then follow the story with examples of ways to communicate in that situation and why it is so important to not lose your temper. The rest of the speech would cover other emotions with the same template (story, why you shouldn’t, what to do instead).