I am a little backed up on blogs. I spoke at the University of Miami on August 18th. Now you can see how backed up I am. They booked me to speak to all of their about 2,000 incoming freshman about alcohol and self-medicating for other issues! The name of that program is fittingly Mixed Drinks, Mixed Emotions.

Any time I have to speak to more than about 1,000 people I kind of get anxious. Not so much because of the amount of people, but because I am always concerned that audiences in the thousands may not want to hear this message or could easily find someone else to pretend they don’t care about it with. So when I got into Miami’s basketball arena and saw the seats lined up I reminded myself to stay focused on what got me to this point. And basically what got me here was a lot of trial and error in figuring out what people wanted to hear and how they wanted to hear it. I took a long time in the beginning of my speaking to figure out what worked and didn’t work and continue to adjust to make it work whether the audience is 12 or over 2,000.

The freshman at Miami were awesome and really receptive. From the beginning of my presentation until the end they were engaged and really interactive. I was really happy with the way it went. When I finished my presentation I would say about 25% of the audience stood up to give me a standing ovation. After that 25% stands up usually the 75% follows and that was the case here. So even though I was anxious at the size of the room I did get a standing ovation. I think this really shows how much people do want to care and do want to help their friends deal with these problems. A lot of times we hear the negative in this world and it’s easy to fall into thinking that may be the only option, but 2,000 students giving a presentation about changing self-medicating behaviors a standing ovation gives me hope. It really comes down to the fact that we often don’t know what to say or do and when someone is in front of you saying what needs to be said it’s inspiring to so many others. I don’t view this as a platform just for me or my speaking. It really is a platform for everyone who doesn’t have a voice. I was just really lucky enough to find one and even luckier to find a way to reach others.

So thanks Miami! Thanks to the students who let me film them and bought the books too!

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 14th, 2007 at 9:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.