MPW held a fascinating and informative day for student ambassadors on Wednesday 29th January, with the aim of teaching them the useful life skills of public speaking and how to handle a variety of interview scenarios.

Phoebe Fildes, Creative Director and Founder of Activate Workshops, designed the day to cover impact, influence and effective communication through games, energisers, focus exercises and enriching team building activities.

We started the day by dealing with our physical presence, looking at breathing and releasing body tension to find the perfect, confident standing position and learnt to control ourselves and our emotions, decreasing the chances of emotional leakage, i.e. not appearing nervous or agitated. These activities encouraged us to appear at our best, confident, determined self, conveying a sense of integrity and identity.

Another one of the exercises, was to deliver a perfect pitch in an interview, using our tone of voice to present ourselves as mature, driven and motivated. We were guided to convey a sense of status by using mature body language and our voice and appearance, in a way that highlights our uniqueness in order to hopefully impress the interviewer.

While learning important, intuitive life skills, we also played various team building activities using our voices. We were given the task of creating a product to advertise in a presentation developing our skills, giving a ‘Dragons Den Pitch’ incorporating three objectives and using the four techniques of breath, body, voice and language in front of an audience.

Overall, in my opinion, this student ambassador day encouraged us to develop our interviewer skills and encouraged us to be more confident in public speaking and conveying to others, our best self.