Advanced.

 

So after a year or so, I have completed my Competent Communicator (CC) manual at Toastmasters and I am recently beginning to work on my first advanced manual – the Entertaining Speaker. In fact I have already done one speech on that, covering on a topic that I am so familiar with – army. I enjoyed giving my first entertaining speech titled “Fatboy in the Army II” and I was fortunate to win the Best Speaker award that day. Today I gave my second speech in the manual, and to be honest, it wasn’t a comfortable experience.

To start with, I was cracking my heads to try to come up with a topic. The project objective was to make an entertaining speech using resources other than personal experience while trying to bring a message across. Many topics were turning in my head for the past two days (I only knew I was due up on Sunday) and when I finally found the topic, I was having some trouble to make it entertaining. The speech was about examinations and why we should do away with that. There were some spots which I thought were going to be funny, but that’s the problem – my audience didn’t seem to get those humourous spots. I hoped that someone would laugh, but it turned out that many actually didn’t even understand what I was trying to say. One example – in my speech I had a line that went:

“If knowledge is power, exam is the wattmeter.”

I thought it would be an interesting point because we use a wattmeter to measure power (unless I got it wrong in the first place). But it seemed to me that the audience didn’t see the linkage. Perhaps the audience didn’t know what is a wattmeter. Or perhaps they didn’t know the proverb “Knowledge is power”. To put it simply, I thought many of my intended humourous points got lost along the speech and I saw some puzzled faces in the audience. So maybe the next time I might need to find some other things for people to laugh about. In fact, I think my speech was a bit hard to understand, as I thought that even though I had a proper structure, I have some members of the audience telling me that they couldn’t catch my ending. I thought I had one, but perhaps it wasn’t obvious enough. I originally wanted to end the speech with a question to give the audience something to think about, but I added just one or two sentences after that to make it end with an action. I thought having a question to end a speech seemed a bit too abrupt. But it turned out that my conclusion to the speech still didn’t seem obvious enough. That’s probably something to work on too.

One issue that I also seem to struggle with is my voice. As a lot of people know, I have a loud voice. But somehow I just don’t seem to be able to adjust my volume according to the parts of the speech. Most of the time my voice is loud at the start of the speech, and it just stays loud. I thought I was playing with a bit of vocal variety today, but again, it wasn’t obvious. Anyone with any tips for me to control my volume?

And of course, the deadliest thing one can ever do is not having enough preparations. The past couple of days have been really busy for me as I was looking after many things – work, home, Toastmasters, etc. I just didn’t have time to write the speech properly, let alone prepare for it. And so it showed. After I gave my pretty dramatic opening to the speech (which I thought was the only part of the speech that I actually did well), I forgot an entire paragraph of the speech. I wasn’t nervous, it was just one of those shocking moments when I just couldn’t remember anything. Fortunately enough, I managed to keep going and ultimately dropping that entire paragraph didn’t seem to affect the speech that much. But I was still a bit upset with myself.

All in all, I thought this was probably one of the worst speeches that I have ever done and I’m still a bit mad at myself for not doing better. The last time I did a speech that I wasn’t happy with myself was about half a year ago, and I guess I would need to work harder!