So I did it.<\/p>\n
I stood up on a platform in front of a room of native signers, and delivered a (pre-prepared) five minute presentation without making a sound. In front of cameras, with my ugly face beamed out to multiple large screens.<\/p>\n
That was stressful, though less so then many different public speaking engagements I’ve participated in. It was a different kind<\/em> of stress. I’m sure I made all kinds of mistakes of which I wasn’t even aware of. ASL books, videos, and web sites tend to focus on particular signs, and vocabulary is one important part of learning the language–but not the only part. A huge amount of the communication comes through facial expression, body shifting and language, and other “non-manual markers.” I’m learning, if slowly.<\/p>\n It’s also helping me in everyday situations, among hearing folks. I’m better able to express myself and I’ve picked up some new gestures (like non-dominant-hand indexing…more on that later), and I tend to, even if in the back of my mind, think about how you’d express such-and-such an idea in ASL, and having thought it through more, better express it in writing or speech.<\/p>\n It’s also helping to finally tame my inner-introvert. When a fundamental part of communication involves displaying play-by-play emotions on your face (and indeed, entire body) it changes you. Better than acting lessons.<\/p>\n What have you done lately to push yourself out of your comfort zone? -m<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So I did it. I stood up on a platform in front of a room of native signers, and delivered a (pre-prepared) five minute presentation without making a sound. In front of cameras, with my ugly face beamed out to multiple large screens. That was stressful, though less so then many different public speaking engagements…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1111],"tags":[1112,1117,1121,1122,1119,1120,1118],"class_list":["post-1011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asl","tag-asl-2","tag-comfortzone","tag-deaf","tag-hearing","tag-presentation","tag-public-speaking","tag-signing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8eo8l-gj","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1011"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1012,"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011\/revisions\/1012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}