I once heard a quote that made a lot of sense to me: “It’s not who you are that holds you back, it’s who you think you’re not.”

I came across this quote soon after participating in my first national speech competition four years ago, where I learned a valuable lesson about confidence and how negative thinking can affect you.

My speech team arrived at Western Kentucky University, which was hosting the National Forensic League Competition that year. The National Forensic League is an organization of high school speech teams from schools all over the country.

Speech can mean both debating and acting, but my partner Danyel and I were competing only in the acting part, in which participants memorized and acted out part of a play or novel. This was our first year in speech, and our first national tournament too, so we wanted to show the world how great we could be as actors. We had worked hard to get to this point.

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