I recently participated in the club level of the bi-annual Toastmasters International Speech and Evaluation Contest. In case you didn't know, Toastmasters is an international speaking club, and you can read more about it at my article, Introduction To Toastmasters. It's a way to practice your public speaking skills, no matter where you are in public speaking: a total newbie or a seasoned pro. The way the speech contests work is, first there are club-level contests. Here you're just competing against your fellow club members who you meet with regularly, at the regular location. If you win, then you go onto the area-level contest; a Toastmasters "Area" is just a geographically-based collection of clubs. Win the area contest and you'll advance to the "division" one, and from there to the "district" level, and then the "regional" level, and then the international finals. Similarly for the evaluation part; the only difference between the evaluation contest and the speech contest is that in the evaluation contest, your speech has to be the evaluation of a speaker. Each echelon in the contest is a wider area of people to compete against, until the international contest, which is over the entire world.
I won't be going on beyond the club level, mainly because I spent all of about an hour preparing for the speech, when I was supposed to spend weeks on it. I did a speech on "Creationism and Evolution", since one of the two speeches I still need for the "Competent Communicator" manual is the "Persuasive Speech". Now I only need to do one more speech, the evil and dreaded "Visual Aid Speech" (which is actually like 4th from the last speech in the manual, I just did the other "harder" speeches first because I dread using visual aids so much).
We had a pretty dismal turnout of speakers, even though there was pretty full attendance. Our club is usually pretty good, but for this speech contest, only 3 speakers and 3 evaluators ended up participating. There were originally 5 or 6 speakers scheduled, but everyone was canceling for various reasons.
The Sergeant At Arms opened the club meeting with the usual pledge of allegiance, and then introduced the Club President. The one repeat guest (he'd come to a previous meeting) was asked to introduce himself, and we all introduced ourselves in return. Actually, he was the one on-time guest. Several other guests would pop in late throughout the first half of the contest. The club president apologized for her "vertigo", a condition which makes it so she can't lean to the right or left without fainting... the last Toastmasters Liveblog I did, she was absent due to the vertigo. After apologizing for the vertigo, she proceeded to announce some corrections to the printed schedule-- quite a few actually, the meeting schedule was pretty badly off due to all the last-minute cancellations. No sooner did she finish announcing these corrections, when our first late guest arrived, prompting another round of introductions around the room.
Finally, the Toastmaster Of The Evening was introduced and called up to the podium. He started by explaining the details of the contest: first, the details of the voyage from club-level to international-level. He briefly gave some history of former winners from our club. No sooner did he finish this, when another guest walked in late. Without a hint of exasperation, the TM quickly got this latest latecomer up to speed with what was going on, and we did another quickened round of intros. Asked why he decided to come visit us, this guest said that he soon has to do a lecture and he's terrible at public speaking. No sooner was this guest's time in the spotlight over, as if by conspiracy, yet another guest strolled in. Slightly more exasperated, the TM suggested we postpone the customary introductions for later.
Once that guest business was settled, the Toastmaster announced the speaking order (which was selected by drawing numbers before the meeting started). I was to be the first speaker; good, it's better to get it over with sooner, especially when you know you haven't really prepared enough. The TM had to ask for the title of my speech, as well as that of the second speaker's. A minor slip-up, since he should've secured the speech titles before the meeting started. The contest was officially started and the Toastmaster called up the Chief Judge to explain some rules.
The rules of the contest are as follows. To speak, the speaker must be in good standing with the club. He or she must have given six speeches from their manual. Incumbent elected club officers are ineligible to participate (which probably goes some way to explain the shortage of contestants). Each speech must be 5-7 minutes, with a 30-second grace period either way. Timing begins with the first definite verbal or nonverbal communication from the speaker after being called to the podium. If a speaker is in multiple toastmaster clubs, she can participate in each club's contests, but can only go to one area-level contest. (Yeah, that sounds pretty silly, but actually there are people who are gung-ho enough about getting their speaking skills all maxed out, they enroll in multiple clubs at once)
The Toastmaster retook control of the podium. He announced that no photos would be allowed, and that the timer of the evening might use a yellow sheet of paper as a backup signal, since the yellow christmas light we normally use (along with a red light and green light) to indicate time to the speaker, was misbehaving. As the first speaker, I was called up: the TM misread my speech title as "Creation and Evolution" but I ignored the slipup and launched into my speech.
FIRST SPEECH: "CREATIONISM AND EVOLUTION"
I shook the Toastmaster's hand at the podium and turned to face my audience. The purpose of the speech were twofold. First: to briefly explain what evolution and creationism actually are, in a neutral way. Second: to persuade the audience that the two theories don't have to be mutually exclusive.
I was basically winging the entire thing. I had spent maybe an hour, tops, preparing for the speech, in which time I did nothing but lay the very general outline: introduction, define evolution and creationism, discuss the role evolution can play within creationism, discuss the role creationism can play in evolution (and science in general), and conclude with some remarks on the "evolution in the classroom" fight which fundamentalists are always pushing here in the U.S. The speech went better than I was expecting, given the minimal preparation. In a sentence, I'm great at BSing speeches.
I won't write the details of the speech itself here; I might later convert the speech into an article of its own, so stay tuned.
SECOND SPEECH: "THE BEST DEFENSE"
After I was applauded and returned to my seat, there was a short one-minute break for the judges to write notes, and then the TM announced the second speaker and called him up. His speech was somewhat cryptically titled, "The Best Defense". He shook the TM's hand and began.
Bear with me, the next paragraph is a little confusing.
It turned out "the best defense" is a reference to the phrase "the best defense is a good offense", and here it was being used in reference to the recent U.S. recession. That, during the recession, you should "defend" yourself by launching an "offense"; "and that offense is success" (speaker's words). "Success is two words: `Social Capital'" (speaker's words again). He then defined "social capital" as, "what you have when you leverage social intelligence to get others to do what you want them to do". The rest of the speech after that was all about this idea of social capital, examples of how to get it, and so on.
Basically, the name and introduction of the speech were misleading. He should've just named the speech "Social Capital", and skipped the confusing maze of tangents which led there from "The Best Defense". It felt like he was transparently trying to give an air of topicalness to a subject which is really quite timeless and general; the attempt to bundle it with the U.S. recession was downright cliche.
It was too bad, too, because the speaker had truly outstanding body language, voice projection, voice tonality, and eye contact. It's almost as if he answered my total lack of preparation with an overabundance of preparation, "thinking too much" about a basic general concept and trying to make it more catchy and glossy than it should've been. (And ending up sounding like something from a corporate mission statement) If the masterful expertise of his presentation was combined with the better-formed topic from my speech, that combination could've been a winner.
I dunno, maybe I'm jaded from being a part of the "self-improvement" blog movement. After reading enough of the blogs in that movement, you could just say "Social Capital" to me and I could type up a quick 2000 word essay on it like a zombie, and it'd have at least as much original content and ingenuity as the speech given at this contest. Indeed that's basically what some of my very early blog posts were (but with other broad, general topics like "The Joy of Change" or "Subjective Reality") before I realized just how dime-a-dozen that sort of thing is, and started really striving to provide unique and original value with my writing. I could just be being too harsh, coming from a place where a blog post titled "Social Capital" wouldn't even compel me to click on it to read it.
THIRD SPEECH: "MY ECONOMIC BAILOUT"
After the second speech, there was a short break for the judges to confer with each other. I went to get a drink, then chatted with a couple other club members. The conversation turned toward the economy, which was a good way of getting me into the mood to hear the next speech, titled "My Economic Bailout". We went back to our seats and the TM called up the third speaker.
"When the banks make bad loans, the government swoops in and bails them out. When big business makes bad business, the government swoops in and bails them out. So where's my stimulus package? When banks and businesses need money, the government delivers. What are they gonna give you? The bill." This is how the third speaker opened his speech.
He then went on to talk about his own experiences being downsized and what he learned from the process. "Last year I was downsized and I learned a lot about personal economics." He boiled down the lessons he'd learned into three concise (if rather obvious) principles.
First principle: reduce debt. Me, I've never been in debt as an adult. I was briefly in debt several hundred dollars to my parents, but I immediately got a job making sandwiches to pay that off. Soon as I was old enough, I joined the Air Force (read my article about Air Force boot camp), and saved up almost all my pay, enabling me to pay my own way through university without ever having to take out a single cent of debt. Most consumer debt is rather silly, if you think about it. You have to pay the money eventually, one way or the other, and with interest, you end up paying a lot more. The only reason it'd be wise to buy anything on credit or loans would be if you had carefully considered the interest in your calculations, e.g. starting a small business or buying a house. The kind of debt the third speaker had, though, was credit card debt, which was the main thing he was talking about here.
Second principle: Save Money. This goes hand-in-hand with reducing debt. The magic guaranteed way to avoid debt is to just buy things with cash (or check or debit card or whatever but not on credit), saving up so you have the money when you make the purchase.
Third principle: Spend Wisely. Here some examples include cooking and shopping for yourself instead of eating out all the time; doing preventive maintenance for cheap to avoid bigger costs when things break down; and so on.
If you'll forgive me for diverging from what the third speaker said for a moment... if you happen to be where I was when I was an undergraduate, that is, if your house or apartment is just a place to sleep and maybe eat, and you're not responsible for a family or anything. Then you should consider just sleeping in your office or in an undergrad lounge or something. When your apartment is just a bed and four walls to you, simply cutting "rent: $500+/month" out of the equation can make all the other nickel-and-dime considerations of personal economics trivial. I mean, if you didn't have to pay rent, who cares if eating out costs $8 instead of $3? If it sounds like you might fit that lifestyle (or if you just want a good read), check out my article, Homeless By Choice.
The third speech was followed by a couple minutes of silence for the judges to confer. The chief judge wanted to immediately count the judges' ballots for the speech part of the contest, but the president veto'd that, saying the two contests (speech and evaluation) should be counted together at the end of the meeting.
That was the end of the speech part of the contest. The next part would be the evaluation contest. In Toastmasters, besides speakers who give prepared speeches, there are evaluators who give feedback to the speakers, and the feedback is itself in the form of a speech. That's part of what makes the club great. Besides the speech component, the international contest also has an evaluation component, which is what the second half of the meeting would be about.
READ PART TWO: THE EVALUATION CONTEST
FURTHER READING
For a summary of a regular, non-contest club meeting, check out my article: Toastmasters Liveblog: Worthington Toastmasters, 13 Jan 09. The regular meeting has a lot of things the contest lacks, like the word-of-the-day, the inspiration/jester, and so on.
I wrote up one of my TM speeches as an article of its own. You can read it at: Unconditional Thanksgiving. This was, of course, to fulfill the "inspiring speech" project in the Competent Communicator manual.
A couple of the speeches in this contest centered on the economy, and more specifically, the recession. Read some of my own thoughts in the article, The Solution To The Money Game.
I won't be going on beyond the club level, mainly because I spent all of about an hour preparing for the speech, when I was supposed to spend weeks on it. I did a speech on "Creationism and Evolution", since one of the two speeches I still need for the "Competent Communicator" manual is the "Persuasive Speech". Now I only need to do one more speech, the evil and dreaded "Visual Aid Speech" (which is actually like 4th from the last speech in the manual, I just did the other "harder" speeches first because I dread using visual aids so much).
We had a pretty dismal turnout of speakers, even though there was pretty full attendance. Our club is usually pretty good, but for this speech contest, only 3 speakers and 3 evaluators ended up participating. There were originally 5 or 6 speakers scheduled, but everyone was canceling for various reasons.
The Sergeant At Arms opened the club meeting with the usual pledge of allegiance, and then introduced the Club President. The one repeat guest (he'd come to a previous meeting) was asked to introduce himself, and we all introduced ourselves in return. Actually, he was the one on-time guest. Several other guests would pop in late throughout the first half of the contest. The club president apologized for her "vertigo", a condition which makes it so she can't lean to the right or left without fainting... the last Toastmasters Liveblog I did, she was absent due to the vertigo. After apologizing for the vertigo, she proceeded to announce some corrections to the printed schedule-- quite a few actually, the meeting schedule was pretty badly off due to all the last-minute cancellations. No sooner did she finish announcing these corrections, when our first late guest arrived, prompting another round of introductions around the room.
Finally, the Toastmaster Of The Evening was introduced and called up to the podium. He started by explaining the details of the contest: first, the details of the voyage from club-level to international-level. He briefly gave some history of former winners from our club. No sooner did he finish this, when another guest walked in late. Without a hint of exasperation, the TM quickly got this latest latecomer up to speed with what was going on, and we did another quickened round of intros. Asked why he decided to come visit us, this guest said that he soon has to do a lecture and he's terrible at public speaking. No sooner was this guest's time in the spotlight over, as if by conspiracy, yet another guest strolled in. Slightly more exasperated, the TM suggested we postpone the customary introductions for later.
Once that guest business was settled, the Toastmaster announced the speaking order (which was selected by drawing numbers before the meeting started). I was to be the first speaker; good, it's better to get it over with sooner, especially when you know you haven't really prepared enough. The TM had to ask for the title of my speech, as well as that of the second speaker's. A minor slip-up, since he should've secured the speech titles before the meeting started. The contest was officially started and the Toastmaster called up the Chief Judge to explain some rules.
The rules of the contest are as follows. To speak, the speaker must be in good standing with the club. He or she must have given six speeches from their manual. Incumbent elected club officers are ineligible to participate (which probably goes some way to explain the shortage of contestants). Each speech must be 5-7 minutes, with a 30-second grace period either way. Timing begins with the first definite verbal or nonverbal communication from the speaker after being called to the podium. If a speaker is in multiple toastmaster clubs, she can participate in each club's contests, but can only go to one area-level contest. (Yeah, that sounds pretty silly, but actually there are people who are gung-ho enough about getting their speaking skills all maxed out, they enroll in multiple clubs at once)
The Toastmaster retook control of the podium. He announced that no photos would be allowed, and that the timer of the evening might use a yellow sheet of paper as a backup signal, since the yellow christmas light we normally use (along with a red light and green light) to indicate time to the speaker, was misbehaving. As the first speaker, I was called up: the TM misread my speech title as "Creation and Evolution" but I ignored the slipup and launched into my speech.
FIRST SPEECH: "CREATIONISM AND EVOLUTION"
I shook the Toastmaster's hand at the podium and turned to face my audience. The purpose of the speech were twofold. First: to briefly explain what evolution and creationism actually are, in a neutral way. Second: to persuade the audience that the two theories don't have to be mutually exclusive.
I was basically winging the entire thing. I had spent maybe an hour, tops, preparing for the speech, in which time I did nothing but lay the very general outline: introduction, define evolution and creationism, discuss the role evolution can play within creationism, discuss the role creationism can play in evolution (and science in general), and conclude with some remarks on the "evolution in the classroom" fight which fundamentalists are always pushing here in the U.S. The speech went better than I was expecting, given the minimal preparation. In a sentence, I'm great at BSing speeches.
I won't write the details of the speech itself here; I might later convert the speech into an article of its own, so stay tuned.
SECOND SPEECH: "THE BEST DEFENSE"
After I was applauded and returned to my seat, there was a short one-minute break for the judges to write notes, and then the TM announced the second speaker and called him up. His speech was somewhat cryptically titled, "The Best Defense". He shook the TM's hand and began.
Bear with me, the next paragraph is a little confusing.
It turned out "the best defense" is a reference to the phrase "the best defense is a good offense", and here it was being used in reference to the recent U.S. recession. That, during the recession, you should "defend" yourself by launching an "offense"; "and that offense is success" (speaker's words). "Success is two words: `Social Capital'" (speaker's words again). He then defined "social capital" as, "what you have when you leverage social intelligence to get others to do what you want them to do". The rest of the speech after that was all about this idea of social capital, examples of how to get it, and so on.
Basically, the name and introduction of the speech were misleading. He should've just named the speech "Social Capital", and skipped the confusing maze of tangents which led there from "The Best Defense". It felt like he was transparently trying to give an air of topicalness to a subject which is really quite timeless and general; the attempt to bundle it with the U.S. recession was downright cliche.
It was too bad, too, because the speaker had truly outstanding body language, voice projection, voice tonality, and eye contact. It's almost as if he answered my total lack of preparation with an overabundance of preparation, "thinking too much" about a basic general concept and trying to make it more catchy and glossy than it should've been. (And ending up sounding like something from a corporate mission statement) If the masterful expertise of his presentation was combined with the better-formed topic from my speech, that combination could've been a winner.
I dunno, maybe I'm jaded from being a part of the "self-improvement" blog movement. After reading enough of the blogs in that movement, you could just say "Social Capital" to me and I could type up a quick 2000 word essay on it like a zombie, and it'd have at least as much original content and ingenuity as the speech given at this contest. Indeed that's basically what some of my very early blog posts were (but with other broad, general topics like "The Joy of Change" or "Subjective Reality") before I realized just how dime-a-dozen that sort of thing is, and started really striving to provide unique and original value with my writing. I could just be being too harsh, coming from a place where a blog post titled "Social Capital" wouldn't even compel me to click on it to read it.
THIRD SPEECH: "MY ECONOMIC BAILOUT"
After the second speech, there was a short break for the judges to confer with each other. I went to get a drink, then chatted with a couple other club members. The conversation turned toward the economy, which was a good way of getting me into the mood to hear the next speech, titled "My Economic Bailout". We went back to our seats and the TM called up the third speaker.
"When the banks make bad loans, the government swoops in and bails them out. When big business makes bad business, the government swoops in and bails them out. So where's my stimulus package? When banks and businesses need money, the government delivers. What are they gonna give you? The bill." This is how the third speaker opened his speech.
He then went on to talk about his own experiences being downsized and what he learned from the process. "Last year I was downsized and I learned a lot about personal economics." He boiled down the lessons he'd learned into three concise (if rather obvious) principles.
First principle: reduce debt. Me, I've never been in debt as an adult. I was briefly in debt several hundred dollars to my parents, but I immediately got a job making sandwiches to pay that off. Soon as I was old enough, I joined the Air Force (read my article about Air Force boot camp), and saved up almost all my pay, enabling me to pay my own way through university without ever having to take out a single cent of debt. Most consumer debt is rather silly, if you think about it. You have to pay the money eventually, one way or the other, and with interest, you end up paying a lot more. The only reason it'd be wise to buy anything on credit or loans would be if you had carefully considered the interest in your calculations, e.g. starting a small business or buying a house. The kind of debt the third speaker had, though, was credit card debt, which was the main thing he was talking about here.
Second principle: Save Money. This goes hand-in-hand with reducing debt. The magic guaranteed way to avoid debt is to just buy things with cash (or check or debit card or whatever but not on credit), saving up so you have the money when you make the purchase.
Third principle: Spend Wisely. Here some examples include cooking and shopping for yourself instead of eating out all the time; doing preventive maintenance for cheap to avoid bigger costs when things break down; and so on.
If you'll forgive me for diverging from what the third speaker said for a moment... if you happen to be where I was when I was an undergraduate, that is, if your house or apartment is just a place to sleep and maybe eat, and you're not responsible for a family or anything. Then you should consider just sleeping in your office or in an undergrad lounge or something. When your apartment is just a bed and four walls to you, simply cutting "rent: $500+/month" out of the equation can make all the other nickel-and-dime considerations of personal economics trivial. I mean, if you didn't have to pay rent, who cares if eating out costs $8 instead of $3? If it sounds like you might fit that lifestyle (or if you just want a good read), check out my article, Homeless By Choice.
The third speech was followed by a couple minutes of silence for the judges to confer. The chief judge wanted to immediately count the judges' ballots for the speech part of the contest, but the president veto'd that, saying the two contests (speech and evaluation) should be counted together at the end of the meeting.
That was the end of the speech part of the contest. The next part would be the evaluation contest. In Toastmasters, besides speakers who give prepared speeches, there are evaluators who give feedback to the speakers, and the feedback is itself in the form of a speech. That's part of what makes the club great. Besides the speech component, the international contest also has an evaluation component, which is what the second half of the meeting would be about.
READ PART TWO: THE EVALUATION CONTEST
FURTHER READING
For a summary of a regular, non-contest club meeting, check out my article: Toastmasters Liveblog: Worthington Toastmasters, 13 Jan 09. The regular meeting has a lot of things the contest lacks, like the word-of-the-day, the inspiration/jester, and so on.
I wrote up one of my TM speeches as an article of its own. You can read it at: Unconditional Thanksgiving. This was, of course, to fulfill the "inspiring speech" project in the Competent Communicator manual.
A couple of the speeches in this contest centered on the economy, and more specifically, the recession. Read some of my own thoughts in the article, The Solution To The Money Game.
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