CEC Debate Competition

On the 22nd of October, the Thursdays of all Thursdays, it was the big day. Okay, before I get into the bit where I stood in a tiny room in the CEC institute at the west side of Surabaya, I would like to share my story to how me and my debate team partake in the debate yesterday. 

So, around 1 month ago, I decided to 'drag' 2 friends of mine to join a debate competition. Well this isn't my first debate but it is for them. I'm completely okay with helping them progress with their speaking, critical thinking and argumentative skills. I was the most experienced there and I feel that I need to help them through the process that I went through around a year ago. Thinking back, I felt what they felt, they aren't really alone and people don't suddenly become used to talking in front of people who are judging you. As time went on, me and my team had to come up with arguments for the topics that has been announced by the CEC officials. There were 20 topics and 2 sides--government and opposition. For each side, there must be 5 arguments and including parameters and definitions. So there were around 20 x 2 x 5 which is around 200 arguments. Thinking of the arguments took us a very long while to come up. We probably used up around more than 12 hours in just thinking about it at Starbucks or at someone's home. The topics weren't just the normal 'cheap' topics, some of them even included politics and environmental health. These topics asks us to research about it, and criticize each side and defend the house's arguments. By researching a lot of these topics, we learnt some interesting facts about the world around us thats always in debate of things. Well thats just one of the challenges we faced, the second one was to train our speaking skills. Truth to be told, my skills have rusted through the year and I have a hard time dealing with sudden stops and 'point of informations' (which are basically statements or questions done by the opposing side). 

When it was our turn to finally shine, we were shaking, like litearally shaking.... It was intense and especially for the two new debaters in my team, it was a whole new level for them. I recalled to what the other team's words, 'confidence is appreciated by them' and so I constantly reminded myself, 'don't stutter' 'this is just like practice' 'do your best'. Those words echoed within my mind and reflected to what I did. I believed that I have done more than what I expected from myself and I am proud of my team. They progressed very well from our first to our second round and it was fun! Even though we did not made it to the next round, but I will never regret this experience. It's something new and fresh + obviously a unique feel rather than the one from last year. 

I wish that I can also improve more in my public speaking skills in the future.