Postcard from Korea

 

JR has sent greetings frum Jeju Island, South Korea. More stops on his trip (and more postcards, we hope) before he returns to the club in December.

2010 Contest Rules Received

Just received are the revised contest rules for 2010 and the new speech contest manual. If you’re thinking about competing in the International Speech Contest next time around (or if you’ll be organizing the contest), it’s well worth your time to get familiar with the rules and procedures early. Also received is the new Supply Catalog.

Gestures

From Andrew Dlugan, a thorough study of gesturing:

By now, you know that you should be complementing your speech with gestures.

But do you know how big these gestures should be?

In this article, you’ll learn to match the size of your gestures to your audience and venue.

At the end of his post, you’ll find links to other useful articles on gesturing.

When did “um” become a dirty word?

Denise Graveline has posted an interview with Michael Erard, author of Um…Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, And What They Mean. Dyed in the wool Toastmasters will probably feel uncomfortable with Erard’s comments about Ralph Smedley’s dogmatism, but I think it’s kind of refreshing to hear someone speak out for naturalness and genuineness in speech. Follow the link to read the whole interview.

Required reading: Int Speech Finalist helps you “Pump Up your Evaluations”

Evaluation is the core of the amazing fruit that the Toastmasters tree can produce. When the fruit is soft, you will often find a history of rotten evaluations at the core.

Rich Hopkins lists a handful of the things that can go wrong with evaluations and offers nine tips for doing them well. You owe to yourself and to your club to follow the link and read the whole post.

via Speak & Deliver.

Crafting a memorable key message in 10 minutes

It makes sense. Start from your key point. But sometimes you can spend more time than you want to working out what that key point is. Olivia Mitchell offers a three-step process for “crafting your key message.”

A key message is the number one thing you want your audience to remember or do as a result of your presentation. Some experts call it “the big idea”, the core of your presentation or the proposition.

Start planning your presentation by deciding on your key message. It will make the rest of your planning easy and straightforward. Steve Bent, one of my readers, said in a comment on a previous post:

“…[T]hat’s when I had the Eureka moment of the key message for that particular presentation. Then all previous thoughts, notes and parts of the presentation were easy to classify in terms of how relevant they were, and which step they fell into (if any).”

If you’re preparing a presentation on a topic you know well, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to decide on your key message quickly. I’ve trained hundreds of people and there’s not one that’s been unable to come up with a key message within 5-10 minutes!

But in Steve’s words you may have “message commitment issues”. You may be thinking that once you’ve got a key message, you can’t change it as you carry on with your planning. Rubbish! Think of it as an engagement, not a marriage. You can always change your message if you find that it’s not quite working for you.

Or maybe you’re expecting the perfect, clever and catchy key message to come to you fully-formed. If that does happen to you – you’re lucky. But more often a memorable key message is a result of crafting.

Why We Speak

 

Here’s a post that captures the feeling and the trials of preparation, the difficulty of speaking, and the joy of getting it right.

Here’s a taste:

I was checking the Twitterstream one day and saw an interesting tweet directing me to Ignite! I really liked the concept of having five minutes to discuss anything, so I thought about what I would say in five minutes. I thought long and hard…five minutes to make a difference, what could I possibly say that could bring something to someone?

I decided I had a great topic and would share my trials and tribulations of being fired four times (plus I was looking for speaking opportunities for practice and to put myself out there). So I submitted my proposal for my five minute inspirational presentation about being fired four times and how I was still standing on my own two feet.

It was accepted!

Then I realized the true challenge of having five minutes…there would also be a 20 slide presentation to accompany the slide. The 20 slides would automatically rotate every 15 seconds

Well worth checking out the whole post:

 

via The Eloquent Woman: A blog on women and public speaking: Jennifer Cohens very public first talk.

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.