Video transcript
@The Arts Unit Art Bites – Impromptu-ing with the stars – secondary public speaking – 02. With Emily Kim

[chime]

TONY DAVEY: Hi, Emily. How are you doing?

EMILY KIM: Hi. I'm going pretty well. Thank you.

TONY DAVEY: Excellent. You probably recognise Emily from a couple of other videos. But just very quickly, remind us who you are.

EMILY KIM: Hello. I'm Emily. And I was the State and National Plain English Champion in 2017, so I haven't done this for a while. But I am back now to offer you what I can.

TONY DAVEY: That's right. Emily is going to shake off the rust and try to write and deliver an impromptu speech, even though it's been at least a couple of years. So, here's how this is going to work. I am going to give you a topic, and then I'm going to give you three minutes to write the speech.

I should say to everyone out there, we're not going to pause or edit. I promise, the next six minutes that you watch are going to be live and real. And then afterwards, we'll get Emily to record some commentary for her impromptu so that you can kind of see what she was thinking as she was writing it. So, if you're all ready to go, I'll give you the topic. So, the topic is off the scale.

EMILY KIM: off the scale, off the scale?

TONY DAVEY: off the scale, exactly right.

EMILY KIM: Just sorry, I know we weren't supposed to cut or interrupt. I'm also going to time myself on my phone, So, you don't have to clap me later if that's - I'll actually keep the time this time.

TONY DAVEY: Very sensible.

EMILY KIM: So, you don't have to do that.

TONY DAVEY: I like it. I'll keep time. I'll just call you after three minutes then. And then we'll get the speech going. Good luck, Emily. I'm going to mute here, so I don't annoy you.

EMILY KIM: Sure thanks.

TONY DAVEY: Starting now.

EMILY KIM: So, I don't speak with palm cards in my impromptu speeches. And that's not because I'm flexing. It's because I find that I stuff up if I have palm cards. It's just a personal preference. I get confused looking at my notes on the paper, particularly because I write very messily when I'm under stress.

So, I don't write anything down that I'm going to take into the room. So, my process might look a bit different from yours. But the first thing I do is probably the same, which is I take a couple of seconds to kind of try and understand what the topic is asking of me. Now, I was not born in Australia. And I only moved here when I was of primary school age. So, I don't know a lot of idioms, actually. So, luckily here, we had one that I knew.

But often the first few seconds will just be spent trying to exactly pin down what the meaning of the idiom is. And I actually think that's important for everyone, because sometimes people do slightly misinterpret it, even though they think they intuitively know what it means. So, I think about what it means. I repeat to myself my head, off the scale, off the scale. What does that mean? It's like things are shooting off, off the scale.

I was thinking it similar to off the charts. And I was thinking, what's off the charts? And I was like, this year, so I'll talk about this year, because that seems to be the clearest link. But I don't want to give a speech that everyone else will give. And everyone will say coronavirus has been off the charts. It's showing that we need to have better pandemic policy or whatever.

So, I don't want to overlap too much with what other people would think. So, I thought, how can I take this at an angle that's a bit different? And I was thinking, I did see that headline about the bushfires. And I remember thinking it was crazy that that had happened in January. And that just means this year has been even more off the charts than we feel like it is now. And I thought, that's perfect.

Things seem off the scale now, but if you think about the big picture of 2020, it's been even more off the scale. So, I was like, I'll talk about that. I need to have a message, though, so I thought my message will be that we can't lose sight of those things. Now, I was trying to think - I spent most of my time thinking, how can I say this in a way that isn't insensitive? Because I obviously didn't want to trivialise the pandemic.

So, I was just thinking about phrases I could use throughout the speech to make it clear that I wasn't suggesting we shouldn't care about the pandemic, just that we shouldn't get that kind of tunnel vision. So, that was the phrase that I was thinking of. And then in the last minute, I just start saying things so that I can start practicing phrases.

The speech is going to be said, not read. So, you need to make sure that things sound right. And if you do nothing else in that time, you should try say your intro, for instance. So, that's what I was doing.

It's important not to lose sight of the big picture is what I'm going to say, because we get so bogged down in little parts of it that we forget that it's still all in the context of the world, where other issues have not stopped. And I'll talk about climate change. So, I'm going to talk about the pandemic, but not about the pandemic, if that makes sense. Cool.

TONY DAVEY: That's the three. That does make sense. So, now you're walking back to the school hall, or the stage, or whatever it is. And if you're ready to go, I'm going to call on you. Please welcome, with her impromptu speech, Emily Kim. Yay.

EMILY KIM: Cool. I'll start the timer. If I asked you to try and remember exactly how long Australia's bushfire crisis happened ago, you probably wouldn't think that it's been less than half a year since those have happened. And the reason for that is totally fair. It's because I'm guessing the rest of us have had something a little different to be thinking about since those bushfires happened.

But, they feel so long ago that even I'd almost completely forgotten that they'd happened until a random news article about it just happened to pop up in my news cycle. And I remember thinking, Oh my gosh, I have not seen news about nearly anything else in the time that my feed has been saturated with pandemic news.

And obviously, that is understandable. That is fair. People are scared. Things are going awry. When it comes to the scale of worldwide current affairs, I think it's safe to say that 2020 has been off the scale. Never in my 21 years of life have I experienced a year in which this much has happened continuously.

But, I think what I've realised is that in a time like this, while it's important to address the issues that are emerging and that matter most right now, it's also really important not to lose sight of the bigger picture and not to lose sight of the fact that this pandemic is still happening in the context of a world in which other issues haven't paused. And they haven't stopped for us while we're freaking out about the pandemic.

I read just a little while ago, actually, the Australian bushfires headline that I mentioned, that climate change and the pandemic are kind of best friends, in a way, that they feed one another, that climate change made a pandemic like this statistically likelier to happen and be worse, and that while we're totally, our attention is turned on the pandemic, that climate change continues to worsen totally unobserved.

And I think that's so true. And I'm guilty of having totally neglected thinking about any other issue as well. And while this is not me trying to at all push attention off the pandemic, and I think we should focus our resources and attention on it now, I guess what I'm trying to express here is that when things are off the scale in this way, it's really easy to get tunnel vision and focus only on one part of the things that are shooting off the scale.

But we have to remember that when we come out on the other end of this pandemic, which hopefully will be very, very soon, that other issues won't have stopped, that we're going to have to address them, and then it's important not to completely ignore or neglect the fact that there are going to be things that are calling for our attention, and that that means that we shouldn't let ourselves be totally saturated thinking about what scares us in the immediacy, because if we allow ourselves to be trapped in that kind of a mindset, then at the very end of this, we'll have far, far more to be scared about.

And things, for me personally, are off the scale enough as it is. I would really like to not see them get any further off the scale. And I would really like to, hopefully, enter into a world on the other end of this in which we're ready and willing to address the other things that always have mattered, continue to matter now, and will matter even more in the future, in the aftermath of something truly big that is happening to all of us.

TONY DAVEY: Yeah, well played. You are the god of public speaking. Congratulations, that's pretty great stuff.

EMILY KIM: Thank you.

TONY DAVEY: No, please, that was amazing. So, thank you for going through that with us. I'm sure it was, at worst, a little bit nerve racking, I would have thought.

EMILY KIM: I'm having heart palpitations, everyone. So, please don't get the wrong idea and think that this is easy for me.

TONY DAVEY: That's good to hear. I'm sorry. It's good to know that everybody still gets a little bit nervous doing impromptus.

EMILY KIM: Oh, yeah.

TONY DAVEY: Thanks for doing that with us, Em. That was fantastic. And stay safe out there. We'll see you at the other end of the pandemic.

EMILY KIM: See you soon. Bye, everyone.