The whole toastmaster experience is very interesting. Last night I gave my second speech. Ever since my first one a month ago I’ve been itching to get out and talk again, I’d already prepared two more speeches, all I needed was the chance to speak.
Even though I had written the speech, I spent the week tweaking it, adding a bit here and chopping off a bit there. My initial worry was that it was going to be too short. I was talking about how to win by playing Blackjack and my speech had 6 sections, the beginning, what is blackjack, how to play blackjack well, card counting, cheating at blackjack and of course, the end. I found during practice that explaining the game was taking more and more time, it was important that it was done well so that people would understand the more complicated later sections. It was taking so long that I had to cut out the cheating section entirely which was a shame since that where I got the idea for the speech in the first place. I could never get a good ending either, it never sounded right, I had to make it up last night as I was speaking, never a good way if you want to impress people.
Each speech has a set of objectives to be achieved, this idea behind this speech was organisation, to have a clear structure to your speech, a beginning, a middle and an end with smooth transition between these sections and I felt that this was clear from my speech, there were natural sections that flowed into each other. My only concern was the ending.
All yesterday I was thinking about the complexity and details of the speech, always remembering something else that I might need to add, it got longer and longer, so long that by the time I got to speak it got out of control, the speech was too long, I had to rush the final couple of sections and somehow make up an ending - it seemed to be received well.
The evaluation was the interesting part. I am beginning to see that there is a formula that needs to be followed, and it needs to be obvious that you’re following that formula, deviating from an explicitly stated formula may lead to confusion…
The title of my speech was “Hit me baby one more time”, a nice ambiguous title reminiscent of a Britney Spears song, the “Hit Me” refers to how you can ask for another card in Blackjack but I only made reference to this in the middle of the speech. It made sense to do it that way. It was suggested that I should have made it more punchy by using the speech title in both the beginning and the ending. I’ve noticed this done quite a bit, subtlety is not exactly encouraged!
What else did I do wrong? Well my smooth transitions between sections may have been too smooth as my beginning and end may not have been as obvious as people might have liked. Volume is always my big problems I need to speak up. This time I was using a flip chart and with that I committed a big crime, while flipping the pages, I may have turned my back to the audience, this is good to know.
I like to think of these rules more as guidelines but I must know these rules before I start to break them!
One of my fears when talking at Toastmasters is the Grammarian, is that while I am a fluent English speaker, I’m always worried that my Irishisms would be highlighted but fortunately not this time, instead I kept the Ah Counter busy. I use “so” a lot when I’m writing and speaking and this is one of those banned words that shouldn’t be overused and I certainly did that last night, about half-way through I caught myself “so”ing and stopped it but the damage was already done!
