Gillian Miao

Noelle Nagales

English 2100

14 November 2022

Hopeless, Passionless, and Clueless. Among those three words, one word remains hidden but holds so much meaning: less. Like many young teens, I went into high school worrying about college, my future, and my grades but my most significant worry was that I had no idea what career path I wanted to pursue. I slacked off all throughout middle school as well as freshman year and I knew I had to do something about it, however, I had no idea where to start. My idleness had started to impact my grades and my social life to the point where I felt lesser than my peers. There was one class in particular that enabled me to be more confident in speaking to larger crowds which I’m thankful for whenever I have to speak in front of my peers. That class would be public speaking. 

Public Speaking has not only benefited me in presentations but has helped significantly with my role in DECA. Prior to taking public speaking, I was an anxious and quiet kid. I had trouble speaking in front of crowds as I was always afraid that I would say something that would embarrass me or that I would forget what I wanted to say once I stood in front of the class. However, through public speaking, I became more confident and less embarrassed to speak in front of crowds which significantly heightened my ability to excel in DECA. DECA is essentially a business club that you can join in high school and you compete with other high schools throughout the nation. You first compete in Regionals with schools around your region and if you make it past regionals then you advance to States where you compete with schools within your state. If you make it past states then you advance to Nationals where you compete with schools around the Nation. I had initially joined this club as it would look good on my college applications as well as my resume, however, I had no passion for business at the time. I participated in an individual roleplay my sophomore year in which you are provided with a situation regarding your category and you have 10 minutes to read about the situation, come up with a practical solution and present your ideas to the judges. The judges will score you based on your ability to speak, the practicality of your idea, whether you hit the key points as well as how well you answer their questions. 

As regionals approached, I got more and more anxious about the competition. I felt unprepared and it felt like my peers were excelling around me. On the day of the regionals, I tried to put on a nonchalant facade to calm my nerves and convince myself that I was confident in my abilities. However, my sweaty hands and racing heartbeat proved otherwise. It felt like my body was working against me and praying for my downfall. It didn’t help that my peers seemed confident in themselves as it just made me more worried. I figured that putting on a calm demeanor would make my brain believe that I was in fact calm and it would calm my nerves down as well, however, as more time passed, I couldn’t stop thinking about how unprepared I was for this. After what felt like hours, it was finally my turn. As I was given the paper with the situation on it, I prayed that my brain wouldn’t let me down and that I would be able to easily come up with solutions to the situation they provided me with. The timer started and my heart was racing. Shaking my leg and biting my lip, I was fighting to calm my nerves and be confident in my own abilities but there was so much pressure to perform well that my brain had stopped functioning for a few seconds. I was the last one from my school to do the roleplays and it made me even more anxious to know that everyone was waiting on me to leave so they could go home. I quickly finished my roleplay and put on a confident face as I walked back to my class. I didn’t have any faith that I would advance as I stuttered a lot and I knew there were people that performed better than I had, but I didn’t want to seem insecure to my peers and teachers so I put on a nonchalant face as if I had confidence that I had advanced. These roleplays destroyed my confidence as I had seen my peers do well and accelerate in their category while I stayed back and couldn’t move on. It made me feel lesser than my peers and I was slowly starting to lose hope in my future. If I couldn’t even accomplish a simple task like this successfully, how was I supposed to pursue a career path in business?

Nonetheless, I continued to do DECA my junior year as well. The only difference was this time around, I participated in group manuals rather than individual roleplays. Manuals are different from roleplays as it is a written piece that you work on within a given period of time. It requires more effort and commitment as you are expected to research and edit your manual to reach expectations. Additionally, you start off competing your manuals in States compared to roleplays where you start off in regionals. This attribute alone made me feel more relieved and more confident in my abilities. As opposed to roleplays where I was put on the spot and had to come up with ideas from the top of my head, manuals allowed me to be able to go back and edit my mistakes to improve my work further. As I worked on my manual with my teammates, I slowly developed a passion for marketing, specifically digital marketing, as I enjoyed creating and designing digital channels that would help to promote the company we were working on. Working on this project made me realize that there were so many different types of marketing and not everything business related has to be like a roleplay. A sense of relief washed over me and it felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. It made me think that I had finally found my passion and that my future wasn’t hopeless after all. Furthermore, we predominantly worked on our manuals in our marketing class where our teacher would give us feedback regarding our work which helped us greatly in the creation of our manual. My group specifically did not have many expectations for our manual as we were not particularly passionate about advancing to Nationals. We had all agreed from the beginning of the year that it would just be a fun project required for our class as a part of our grade. This agreement stuck throughout the process of our manual as we did not put much effort into it compared to our peers. We just tried to have fun working on it as a group rather than making it our main stressor. I believe this is what possibly helped us advance to states as it had made our manual seem more interesting and casual than compared to others who made their work more serious and proficient. Our group was one of the first groups to finalize their manual and submit it and we had all thought that we wouldn’t advance. It seemed more like we rushed through it and didn’t put much effort into it as we were one of the first to submit our manual so we didn’t have too high hopes of advancing. However, we were proven wrong. The award ceremony was being held online that year as COVID protocols were still set in place. We had the option of attending it through the DECA website, however, no one in my group attended it as we genuinely had no expectations that we would advance. I was sitting in my room doing my homework when I suddenly got a call from one of my friends asking if I was watching the award ceremony or not. When I told her I wasn’t, she said to me “Gillian. You guys placed 2nd overall in your category. You made it to Nationals!”. I was in complete shock at this news as I had not expected that at all. I didn’t believe it until she sent me a picture proving her statement to be true. This completely changed my perspective on pursuing a business career path and made me think back on my efforts. If I had advanced to the next round with minimal effort, how much better could I perform if I had put in the full effort? This enabled me to gain more confidence in my abilities and I continued to do DECA my senior year where I attempted an individual roleplay once more. This time, I had developed a passion for business and had more confidence in my abilities. I put full effort into my role plays this time around which allowed me to advance to States which I wasn’t able to do during my sophomore year of high school. I realized that it’s really all about your mindset. If you go into something with zero confidence in yourself, expecting to lose, then you will lose because you’re expecting to. If you have full confidence in yourself and your abilities, you’ll be able to advance far in life and it’s something that you should keep in mind when you’re going through life’s obstacles.