This Medal Changed My Life (Even Though I Didn’t Deserve It)
A story about fear, failure, and finding confidence in the middle of disaster.
This medal changed my life.
Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?
I won it in seventh grade, and it changed everything.
Back then, I was a good student — straight A’s — and a good athlete, especially in soccer. But I had zero confidence. None. Maybe I let the teasing and middle-school politics get to me. Maybe, like a lot of kids that age, I cared far too much about being liked.
That year, one of my teachers nominated me for an area speech meet sponsored by Optimist International. I agreed to participate mostly to please her. Only later did I realize what I’d signed up for — standing behind a microphone in front of a few hundred people.
I was horrified. But I didn’t dare back out.
The Fear
I spent weeks writing and practicing my five-minute speech. Over and over, I rehearsed it — in my room, in front of the mirror, to the family dog.
Still, the dread grew.
By the time the event rolled around, I had convinced myself that this would be the most humiliating night of my life.
When I arrived at the banquet hall that Friday evening, I expected maybe a few dozen people. I was wrong.
There were more than a hundred — parents, teachers, judges, strangers — all seated at round tables with polite smiles and folded programs.
When my name was called, my heart raced so fast I could hear it in my ears. My skin felt like it was on fire. My mouth was dry. I wanted to turn around and walk straight out the back door.
But I didn’t.
The Freeze
I stepped up to the podium, took a shaky breath, and began my speech in a trembling voice.
And then — maybe a minute in — I froze.
Not a dramatic pause. A full, paralyzing, eternal silence.
For what felt like forever, I stood there motionless.
I could feel every eye in the room on me. My mind went completely blank. I remember thinking, This is it. This is the moment I’ll never live down.
No one rushed in to help. No one whispered a line. I was on my own.
Then, for reasons I can’t explain, I started speaking again — the words suddenly returning, my voice still shaking but steady enough to finish.
When I stepped down from the podium, the sense of relief was overwhelming. I wanted to disappear. I wanted to go home and never think about this again.
The Medal
At the end of the program, the emcee began announcing awards.
Third place… applause.
Then: “Second place — Will Hinton.”
I was stunned. Had they not seen what just happened? I had frozen, completely failed!
But people began to congratulate me.
“I don’t know how you did that, but it was impressive you kept going.”
“That was really brave.”
I didn’t feel brave. I felt exposed.
And yet — something inside me shifted that night.
The Revelation
Somewhere between shock and relief, I realized that my worst fear had come true. I’d failed, publicly. And I’d survived.
That realization was liberating.
All the power that fear had over me was gone.
I didn’t need everyone’s approval to know who I was.
I didn’t need to be the best student, the best athlete, or the most confident person in the room.
I just needed to keep standing when I wanted to run.
Maybe that medal didn’t mean I’d given the best speech. Maybe it meant that sometimes the point isn’t perfection — it’s endurance.
The Aftermath
I’ve never lacked confidence since that night — not the loud kind that needs an audience, but a quiet steadiness that comes from surviving embarrassment.
Real confidence isn’t arrogance. It’s gratitude.
It’s knowing that your worth doesn’t depend on whether your voice shakes.
That seventh-grade speech meet taught me something that still guides me today:
Failure doesn’t define you. What you do next does.
I still keep the medal on my desk.
Not as proof of achievement — but as a reminder of that moment.
The night I froze.
The night I failed.
And the night I finally learned to stand.
Join the conversation: Where are you waiting to feel confident before you start? What would it look like to start first?
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For me, a parallel experience: I was a lot older when this happened, coming up on my 28th birthday. I had been given a summer job helping teach in the management development program of an anonymous (very) major corporation. We had this particular week an unusually aggressive group of middle-level managers as our audience. I watched, during the early days of the week, as they routinely gave a really tough time, challenging the various PhD instructors we brought in from prestigious universities in NYC. I was scheduled for Thursday afternoon, to lead my session on "Bridging the Generation Gap" -- this was the late 60's, with all the anti-war, anti-everything demonstrations--and as I watched I got more and more nervous.
Then at lunch on Wednesday, sitting with three of these middle-level managers, one of them said, "You know, I'd hate to get up in front of us." Another responded, "So would I." And I realized...I don't need to worry, they're afraid of themselves.
In a practical way, I realized I could take tough, challenging questions and do various things to defuse the "challenge to authority" dimension. For example, "That's a good question, George. How would you respond, Frank, to George's question?" Or, "Tell me, George, what's behind that question? What experiences have you had that make you ask that?" And so forth.
I learned to engage the group members in dealing with their own challenges, their questions; not feel that I always had to have the quick "authoritative" response. In fact, a big part of bridging gaps--whether generational or racial or gender-based--is learning to engage the other, to listen.
A longer term learning, over what became a career in leading management development programs, was that when you're working with adults in particular, there is always somebody in the group who knows more about any given subject than I do. My job is to learn to take advantage of the collective knowledge and experience of the group, rather than to try to be the one with the most knowledge and experience.