The Public Speaking Blog

Last night, there were 3 Icebreakers, 3 brilliant first speeches - No notes. I was evaluating Manuela’s icebreaker speech. It was informative, witty, well-structured and extremely entertaining. It was amazing for an icebreaker, and it won the evening’s “best speech” award.

Manuela also used visual aids. Her speech revolved around her travels. Starting in Germany, she went to Ireland where she picked up an ex-husband (well, he became an ‘ex’ later) and headed back to Germany again. Then finally, she changed jobs, and ended up going to the UK. For each country move, she put up a flag of the country. It broke the speech up nicely. It was bright. It was really colourful. It stuck in your mind after the speech was over.

After the icebreakers, Noni gave her third speech, entitled “Move Your Body” - a call to action, to get us all a bit more active. I’ve been putting off joining my local gym for weeks now - so this was poignant for me. One of the aims of the speech was not to use notes, and instead Noni used bright, colourful visual aids - mini mind maps to keep her on track. Beside each point on the display, she’d written little notes to herself in pencil. She could see them up at the front, but the audience were unaware.

Finally, to close, David gave an amazing speech - with only 15 minutes’ preparation, one of our other members having dropped out at the last minute. His was the last speech of the ten that make up the first Toastmasters programme. It was to be an inspirational speech, and the fact he spoke up with so little warning was in itself inspirational. (David has adopted the ‘hour preparation for every speech’ approach for a while now - I call it the Lazy Man’s Way.)

David structured his speech around a few stories. The most memorable was about a friend of his, who’d been asked to give a short speech while he was visiting the United States. He’d expected to be asked to stand up and just stay a few words, but then the host announced the topic and that he’d be speaking for 2 hours!