It all began at the Orators gavel club. The learning, the growth, that's where it started. All my life, I have struggled with a deep feeling of inadequacy, a feeling of inferiority, never enough, not important, always playing the second fiddle. Even though as a child, I was quite intelligent but the standard expected of me from my guardians was so high and oftentimes, I never made the mark, so further into the abyss of low self-esteem I sank. Getting into Unilag at the age of 15 didn't help matters, in the fast-paced world of higher learning, I never caught on, my intelligence was only enough to prevent me from failing outrightly.
It continued this way until my 400L in the College of Medicine, University of Lagos. By this time, I had gotten into trouble with everybody; Lecturers, clinical instructors, classmates alike because I just didn't care anymore, class attendance was an absolute disaster, I had become a veteran in stabbing posting. I knew my life was going down the drain, and I didn't care. Let it all burn, to hell with everything.
But towards the end of my 400L, a series of events started to change my outlook on life, I suddenly realized that I could get more out of existence, but I just couldn’t do anything about this change because of the devil that has beguiled me from childhood; low self-esteem. It was around that time I discovered that Orators gavel club.
I had seen Orators gavel club's poster on a friend's WhatsApp status and it caught my attention although I wasn’t sure of what they did in the club, there is nothing bad in giving it a try I thought to myself so I asked around when their next meeting was going to be but unfortunately for me, that was in December of 2018 and they were closed for the year. So I had to wait until 2019 before I got a chance to attend a meeting and in January 2019, I walked into my first Orators meeting, little did I know that I was walking into my redemption.
In the course of that meeting, I was asked to do a table topic(an impromptu speech), I was shocked, I was a first-timer, why should I be called upon to give a speech, but stood up, walked up to the stage to give my speech. My up-stage act was so horrendous that as I went back to my seat, I was swearing within myself never to return to that place again and put myself through such ridicule of having to speak before an audience but when the time of evaluation came, the assessor of my speech, started pointing out the areas of my speech he loved. That was the second shocker for me that day because I knew the speech I had delivered wasn’t in any way good as supposed to what the accessor was implying, and when he moved to the part of my speech that wasn't quite good, that he wanted me to improve on, I was like “Yeah…, that's more like it, that the Marvellous we all know, the one that never made it up to the standard” but those good words about my speech spoken earlier never left my brain, I was like Woah, so I could do something that a stranger really liked. That felt really good.
Wanting to get more of this feeling, I decided to join the Orator gavel club fully, and take a shot at the speech project they had set up for members. So I decided to start my own speech project and I also started getting ready to give my first prepared speech at the next meeting. In your first prepared speech at the Orators club, you are meant to deliver a speech that introduces you to the members of the club, so they get to know you. I tried my best in preparing, and when the day of the meeting arrived, I was ready to give my speech or so I thought.
As I walked up to the stage that fateful day, speech in hand, I saw the faces of the fellow club members, all waiting to hear what I wanted to say, then, the old enemy; low self-esteem began to rear its ugly head, by the time I was midway into my speech, I was overwhelmed by it and I started to stutter/ramble, this continued to the end of my speech. Right there on the stage, just like I had done in the previous meeting, I told myself I was never coming back, It was as though the ground should open up and swallow me because of the awful display I had just put up, and If the person that assessed my speech that day had come up and judged me based on what I thought I had done, I was damned sure this time that I was never returning to the Orators club again but just like the previous time, it was so surprising to me to see the assessor of my speech come up and start saying very good things about what I thought was an absolute failure of a speech. I was stunned! these guys definitely saw something I didn't see in myself. Mann, to say the truth, my confidence surged to an all-time high right there at that meeting.
Riding on the wave of my newly found confidence, I decided to do my second speech project at the next meeting, which coincidentally happened to be my birthday, and it turned out that a high confidence level plus a birthday can be the perfect magic to conjure up a great speech, my second speech was an absolute success and after this, nothing was stopping me. I left the orator meeting that day, brewing with so much confidence, that I jumped at an opportunity to represent the club in a debate competition against a fully-fledged toastmasters club(toastmasters are the masters of public speaking) at Eko hotel, although my old foe was still lurking in during the preparation for the debate but with my newly found confidence and with the help of friends we went for the debates and won, after that win, the rest they say was history.
I went on to deliver about eight speeches in my journey through the club, one of which longlisted for the Nigeria Prize for satire. Also, that year, I will go ahead to lead two student organizations, one at the school level, the other at my departmental level, I was chosen as project lead at an NGO I volunteered for, and the icing on the cake for me was the appointment as a campus director by a United Nations organized program.
Since then, I have embarked on several projects, some personal, some for different organizations all to varying degrees of success. Now, I am growing and learning, riding high in confidence and self-esteem, all of these will have been impossible if I hadn't walked in into that meeting that day in January 2019.
Sometimes there and then, when I share my story on that big stage, the orators club will be part of it, because when I did not believe in myself, they did, and that changed everything.
🔥
Agba marvy. Keep shining bro. The sky is your Startiing point