Photos of Yesterday’s Meeting

Rick Eshbach has posted a gallery of photos from yesterday’s meeting. There’s some awfully photogenic Toastmasters in our club.

Show What You Mean?

Here’s Denise Graveline’s eighth coaching session with Stephanie Benoit. The subject is Connect with Your Audience and it’s full of good advice. But don’t miss another important connection. Denise has taken her video out of the office and to the FDR memorial to illustrate her points. I think she’s done a masterful job of using her prop, the memorial, to cement her point in a listener’s mind. We don’t always have the luxury of choosing the sites for our speeches, but this really expands my idea of how you can set a presentation up well.

Be a Starfish Speaker

It’s not quite an argument for mindmapping, but it’s awfully close. Read the whole post at Green Room Speakers for the explanation.

One day this summer, while walking with my family on the Santa Barbara pier, my son excitedly pointed out to me a large starfish floating in the water.We talked that day about the starfish’s amazing powers of regeneration. We couldnt help but wonder, wouldnt it be great if people also could grow back lost limbs?

But then it occured to me that in a metaphorical sense, we can!

Many of my clients express anxiety that they will forget part of their speech and that this will get them off track and ultimately ruin the whole speech.To address this anxiety, perhaps we can learn a thing or two from the starfish.

Speaking with Notes

Every speaker speaks with notes – even the ones that insist notes shouldn’t be used at all!

When speaking ‘without notes’, our brains are still referring back to what we have written in preparation for the speech, or referencing touchpoints in the room that represent tentpoles in their presentation. Even if you are speaking off the cuff, you are pulling information out of your head as fast as possible, essentially looking for notes in the broad files of your brain.

Without getting mired too far into the neuroscience of note usage, let’s look at ways you can use notes effectively in your presentations.

One of the bugaboos of Toastmasters seems to be that you can’t speak with notes. Here’s a blog post by Rich Hopkins, a finalist in Toastmasters’ International Speech Contest, that says otherwise and provides seven ways for doing it well.

9 ways to do connect with your audience

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” ~ Howards EndI love this statement: Only connect. It is the crux of human relationships, of course. And it is the crux of the speaker/audience relationship. You can have good material, perfect organization and skilled delivery, but if you dont connect with the audience, something critical is missing.

Lisa Brathwaite suggests nine ways to connect with an audience. Besides the text of her message, Lisa provides a downloadable audio message at her site.

Impromptu Speaking Script

Area Governor Chuck Palmer had a surprise for our club today, the script and accompanying materials for the Impromptu Speaking module from The Better Speaker Series. It was presented by the District because we added at least three members to our roster between last November and last January. I’ll try to remember to bring the script to our next meeting, and it will remain available with our club materials for anyone who wants to present this module.

Area Contest Results

JR couldn’t make it to the contest today, so Adam represented us in Table Topics and David did a reprise of his speech about baseball cards. The trophies went to Ope Oribokun in Table Topics and Hasnat Ahmad in Humorous Speech. Our club was also represented by Contestmaster Jim Wilson, Chief Judge Mike Schultz, Sergeant at Arms Ralph Sierra, Timer Karen Huang, Linda Schultz, and new member Aaron Luoma.

JR Advances to Area Contest

Brinker Toastmasters had an exciting and well attended contest this morning. Adam, David, Ralph, and JR all had inventive answers to Margaret’s Table Topic–if you could do one thing to solve all the world’s problems, what would it be–and it was JR’s answer that got the nod from the judges. It was JR’s speech What’s in the Bag? that carried the day over David’s story of sports card collecting.

Photos of Area I2 Humorous Speech and Table Topics Contest

You might want to take a peek at these photos to see what Rick Eshbach is up to in a part of his Toastmasters life away from our club–photos from Rick’s area contest.

Perspective: Shakespeare’s Take on Persuasion

Over at Memo to C-Level Speakers, Pete Ryckman takes us back to the fifteenth century to deliver a convincing lesson about leadership and persuasion.