Extemp Estuary: Life Management

“Ich Bin Ein Extemper!” One of the things extempers always seem to ask me is how to sustain oneself during the season — or even over the course of a high school career. An underexplored topic, no doubt — but certainly quite relevant. I myself — a second place finisher and national champion at two successive NFL tournaments — remember how burned out I felt after completing my senior year. I was in no shape to continue the event — and I didn’t in college, for this and other reasons. I do not, however, think this is the healthiest way to do anything, let alone an event that is as exciting (and do-able in college) as extemporaneous speaking. So, from my experience, here are my recommendations for how to avoid my tired-out, worn down encounter with extemp…an event I do, however, love dearly to this day.

First, and most simply, allocate time for yourself to do other things than extemp. This can be hard — if you care a lot about something, if it gives meaning, if it creates an important and exhilarating experience for you…well, you just want to do it all the time. But don’t. At least not all the time. Force yourself to take a little holiday from prepping and wheedling away at your filebox. Go out with friends. Watch some movie you’ve been meaning to see. Get your umbrella and go for a walk. Write some poetry. Kiss your girlfriend for once. Give your boyfriend a hug sometime — you know, live a life outside extemp.

Second, make sure the routine you have for practicing does not become work. If you start to feel like it is a chore, become aware of what part of the event you would rather be practicing or working on. Say, for example, you’ve gotten really, really tired of writing practice outlines. Well, change it up: start looking around for intro material — if that feels more like play, do that. Nothing makes practice more enjoyable than when it feels like play. Sure, there will be times (lots of them) when you’ve got to grin and bear it and knuckle down. But if it is always that way it is time to take a holiday and change up the routine a bit. You’ll get more out of practice in the long-term.

And this leads to the third suggestion: don’t judge your practice time by how much time you put in. This often leads into a drudgerous hopelessness in which you make yourself dependent on how many hours you’ve put in, as opposed to the quality of the work. If you shoot a hundred poor free throws, you’ve shot lots of free-throws but shooting twenty ones with perfect form would be preferable. The same goes for working on forensics. Give it a good forty-five minutes a day and you will see more results than if you spend three arduous, disjointed, annoying hours barely accomplishing much. Time is not more important than quality — and pouring endless, useless hour-age into the event only makes it more likely to burn you out.

Hopefully, these suggestions help a bit. The main thing to remember is that you may achieve more success by working as hard as you can — certainly, it is possible that success will find you sooner — but you ought to remember that burning yourself out is a good way to destroy all success. And at the very least, success is not the main reason to do this event. I wish I would have remembered that.

I would encourage you all to work on these things and then look to the April issue for more soon. Send me any questions you have…until next month!

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After placing second at Nationals in 2000, Jesse Nathan was the 2001 National Champion.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 20th, 2006 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Extemp Estuary, Extemporaneous Speaking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.