 Good morning, my beautiful internet friends. I have been bum all morning deciding if I was going to go to the thing I committed to go do, which I'll tell you about in just a second, we're not. I pretty much made a decision to be a bum and stay home, avoid it a little bit longer. But there are days where you just gotta rip the bandaid off and I decided I'm gonna do that. So I'm part of a Toastmasters group, which is about like public speaking leadership, mostly public speaking. And I am actually the president of my local chapter and I have not been attending for the past seven months, been hard to get there. But now I'm at the place where I can go. I've kind of been scared to, again, it's just like kind of weird to go back to places for the first time and see people and like have those conversations post-surgery when I haven't seen anyone since I had a leg, but I need to do this. And so I signed up yesterday to give a speech, I've never given the speech on such short notice, less than 24 hours, but hey, I'm first time for everything. So I wanna rehearse my idea a little bit longer and then actually take a shower and fix this situation and head out. A lot of people have asked me kind of like what my process is, getting ready to speak. So I'm gonna take you through with me on my day. It starts with getting ready, so I'm freshly showered. Get clean first, that's usually where I start. As we wait for our hair to dry, we're gonna go ahead and practice through that speech of ours, you know, maybe two, three, four times. But the vital part of preparing for a speech day of is to make sure that around, you know, your second rehearse time, you just really start feeling a little sick and maybe you should just cancel. Maybe you should probably just cancel because you don't wanna get anyone sick and what if you were contagious and you know, you really, you really shouldn't give this speech anyways. So once you've convinced yourself not to go, convince yourself to go and go ahead and rehearse that speech a couple more times and power through. I don't know, at least that's what I do. I guarantee you every time I'm about to give a speech, I generally come up with a reason that's fairly legitimate not to go and then I always end up going. Also, make sure you pace back and forth all over your house while you're rehearsing like a weirdo. And in the time that I have been gone, this sucks, this sucks, restart. If you start and you suck, then just start again. Instead of having a leg and a half, I had two, this sucks too, this sucks, this sucks too, start again. That I am failing to fulfill my obligations that came along with that role. And so as I was making that decision, I started journaling. 10 people grew to 20, grew to 2,000. My speech is supposed to be five, seven minutes or at seven minutes, 35 seconds. I think that's pretty good. I always wanted to be like longer in rehearsal because I end up talking faster and leaving things out in the actual speech. Just and I think we are ready to head out. So when I get to where I'm going to give speech, I try to get there like 10 to 15 minutes early depending on how long my speech is and sit in the car, hopefully in a place where no one can see and try to like park in the back parking lot and rehearse my speech one more time. I envision the whole thing, but I don't have that much time because I don't right now. I'll just rehearse the very beginning, like the first few lines, the last few lines, try to breathe deep and head on in a few minutes early so I'm not rushed. This is the first time I'm gonna be speaking in front of people without a leg. I surprisingly feel less nervous about the speaking part than the walking into the room part. Probably a little bit backward. We'll see how it goes. The topic I'm speaking on is actually very applicable to everyone watching and I'm interested to hear what you guys think of it. When I left you seven months ago, I looked a little bit different. I had two semi-working legs. I miss some of the equipment for that presently. I did not realize that I was actually accepting a brand new role in life. I'd apparently audition four and one and that was of your friendly neighborhood inspirational amputee. It's recently come to my attention though that I have been failing to fulfill my obligations. Now if you don't know, when I was 13, I fell off a horse and as I made this nearly impossible decision, I started journaling. But instead of putting pen to paper, I'm a toast master. I like hearing myself speak. I turn on a camera and I started talking to myself. As I continued to do that, an audience started building. As that happened, I noticed that there was one word that people kept repeating even when I came out of surgery and my husband was reading me Facebook messages that people had sent to me. Inspirational. I was so inspiring. I don't say that with sarcasm. I say that seriously and really gratefully. And as I read through hundreds and thousands of comments from people as they watch my videos, they continued to tell me how inspirational I was to know. And when a million, two million people tell you that you're inspiring and amazing, there's a lot of pressure that ends up coming with that that I never really expected. So I better do something inspirational with my life and with my story. But as time continued on, this journey did not go according to plan. I had to have surgery and now we're here seven months after initial imputation. I have no answers, still in pain. Doctors don't know what's going on. But it's been a challenge to say the least. I've continued to make videos about it. I've been honest about the process. The highest in the law was some of the first things that I've done. I traveled overseas for the first time ever a couple months ago and that was a blast. I did it without a leg. And going into surgery, this last surgery a couple months ago, I struggled to feel any kind of hope. But we got through it and then I learned that it didn't work. And so I talked to people about all of this and now I have an audience that's listening. It turns out that when you talk about unhappy things, when you talk about dealing with depression or hopelessness or insecurity, sometimes people don't like it. This isn't inspiring enough for me. It's essentially the answer, the messages that I'm getting and it's fascinating to me. And it's led me to question, what responsibility do I have to an audience? An audience that I didn't expect that I'm incredibly grateful for. I'm in some ways a role model to a lot of people. So do I owe them constant shining, Skittles, Starbursts, Jolly Ranchers, positivity all the time? Do I owe them inspiration at that? My job, because I've been put in a public light. Or do I owe them honesty? Do I owe them a little bit of vulnerability? Do I owe them the truth about my story that sometimes this is hard as hell and I don't know what I'm doing and I don't know what to expect? The thing is I continue down this. I owe something to myself and my husband and my family and the people who love me to walk through this or hover through it in the best way that I can to attempt to be a healthy person emotionally and physically and to me. That means not shoving my emotions down. And for me, making videos was always a way of expressing myself, of connecting with people and being honest doesn't connect with some people that I am just not inspiring enough for their day and I'll be honest, I think that's okay. It's taken a little while to make peace with that but I would rather let someone know that they're not alone if they feel hopeless. It's okay not to be radiating positivity out of every pore, every second, every day. I did it guys. I got it done. I'm actually really excited. I always feel very calm in the aftermath of a speech, like calm and accomplished. It's like a temporary high that lasts the solid 30 minutes. Probably one of the reasons I like speaking. If you wanna see the full unedited speech, hop over to my Patreon. It's available to anyone who is a patron and sign up as an announcement to patrons. That is gonna be a perk going forward. Any public speeches that I give will be posted in their full unedited ums and aas included versions there. You know, you guys only ever see me when I edit out all the words that I mess up for the most part, except when I leave them in. And when I edit out the ums and the bits and pieces where I mess up. So you see me public speaking. You see me in my full raw exposed form. So going forward, you will be able to see all my speeches there and I'll definitely post clips here. But what I was talking about today was essentially the pressure to be inspirational, to do inspiring things, to project this positive image that I can't do. A lot of people have expressed to me that I should be something different than what I am. Especially when I put out more vulnerable videos about being hopeless or dealing with anger, having a harder time that, you know, this isn't why they're there. That they're there for inspirational stuff or, you know, whatever it is. And sometimes that's hard to deal with. Sometimes that's hard to hear, to be totally honest with you. So this speech was kind of the culmination of spending a few weeks really thinking through that, really thinking through what is my responsibility, having an audience, having a platform. Should I be more like positive thinking in the cliche term of it or should I be honest? And the conclusion that I come to and that I come to over and over again is that I started this to help myself deal with this process. And I started this to let other people know that they're not alone if they were struggling. And that's what this will continue to be even though I struggle with that pressure to be inspiring, whatever that means. So I think I'm gonna award myself with a cup of coffee and go home and relax. I actually got nauseous today before today's speech. That doesn't usually happen. So before I go, a lot of people have asked me for public speaking advice when I've talked about the fact that I do give public speeches. Number one, I would totally recommend joining a local Toastmasters Club. They have chapters and clubs literally all over the world. They're usually small, like 10 to 30 people. You get opportunities to speak. You get immediate feedback and help and support. And my experience has been incredible here. It's a great place to totally screw up a speech and no one's gonna hate you for it. No one's gonna give you a hard time. So if you like public speaking or if you're in school and you have to give speeches and they need to be good, join Toastmasters Club. I would super recommend. And secondly, this is maybe a little bit counterintuitive but don't over rehearse it. Don't practice it too much. I've watched a lot of speeches where you can tell someone like basically memorized all 20 minutes of their speech and those don't usually resonate with me too well. If you can know your material as in, you really know the beginning, you really know the end and generally know what you're talking about in the middle and I practice that maybe a grand total if I have enough time, 10 times total max over the course of like a week or two leading up to it. Today was a little bit different because I learned I was gonna give a speech yesterday but don't over rehearse it so that it sounds like you're just speaking memorized words that would be one tip that I would give. And another thing that really helped me when I was in college and still super, super scared of public speaking was to make peace with the worst case scenario, like this might not help everybody, but it did help me imagine the worst thing that could happen. And for me, one day when I was like, this is gonna go horribly, I'm gonna suck, everyone's gonna hate me, they're gonna see me fail. I thought about the fact that I was gonna get up there, I didn't know my material, I was going to freeze, I might literally throw up in front of everybody and fail that assignment. And then I thought about that and realized I could survive it, realized like worst case scenario, I would still be alive, I would still be a valuable human being and it was gonna be okay. And so making peace with the worst case scenario and being like, yeah, that could totally happen and I would still be okay, helped me to go in there and do a really good job because I wasn't so worried about that worst case scenario happening because I knew I was gonna be okay, even if it did. So those are a few little pieces of advice. All right, off to reward myself with some coffee. Thank you guys so much for listening. I'm excited to have given my first speech without a leg. I almost fell over there, I don't know if you caught that. I did almost tip over at the beginning of the speech when I was talking about falling off a horse. Thank God that didn't happen. As always, but never for granted, a huge shout out goes to all of my patrons over on Patreon, I truly appreciate you. I love that we have that community there and I'll be posting the full speech up there shortly. I love all of you guys watching this. I'm so thankful for your eyes and your ears and for spending a few minutes with me here. I'm thinking about you guys, I'll see you in the next video. Take care.