Personally, I think my skills have improved. The speeches I have made have been fairly relaxed, but I still feel as if I presented myself confidently and with decent skill to begin with. I think this how-to speech was definitely a good one, and I was able to minimize the amount of hand waving by channeling that energy into making the fortune-teller, rather than just waving them in the air. That helped me realize that having somewhere to direct my hands is a great asset for me, and helps keep the audience from being distracted while I speak. Most of the critique I received was that I had some fairly large pauses while I made the fortune-teller, and this pushed me just over the 5 minute time limit. By having the paper pre-creased and just showing where to fold, I was able to actually have less pauses because I didn’t have to think about the steps quite as much. This made my final version of the speech 4 1/2 minutes long, which is within the time constraints. Ultimately, I think this speech was a success.