Ongoing story of my Toastmasters experiences

I recently joined Toastmasters and am blogging about my Toastmasters experiences occasionally as they relate to storytelling. Read my previous entry.

I really started writing my first Toastmasters speech in my head after the first meeting I attended once I learned that the first speech (or “Project,” in Toastmasters parlance) is intended to be an “Icebreaker” in which the speaker tells the audience about himself or herself.

My concerns for this first speech were:

• Ensuring that I included stories, or at least anecdotes;
• Knowing the material well without its sounding memorized;
• Timing the speech (it was prescribed to be 4-6 minutes);
• Communicating what I wanted the members to know about me.

I scheduled the speech for my fifth week in the organization. I had gone through a few weeks of angst and disgruntlement because joining the organization had proved more difficult than I anticipated. The relatively new local club did not yet have a bank account. The club’s secretary had suggested that I wouldn’t get “credit” (toward the Competent Communicator certificate the organization awards after 10 speeches) for any speeches I gave or leadership roles I took on before I became a member. So I had to cool my jets until the membership kinks were worked out, leading to an awkward moment when I passed on doing one of the impromptu talks (“Table Topics”) that are part of every meeting. I passed because I didn’t want to do something I wouldn’t get credit for, but also because I’m not good at thinking on my feet, a requirement for these impromptu talks. Interestingly, the Toastmasters literature suggests that Table Topics are good practice for speeches, but I find the impromptu aspect much more daunting than the planned aspect of the project speeches.

I’m sure I benefited from listening to the speeches of other members while waiting for my chance to present my first talk.

I committed my speech to writing about five days before I delivered it. The next day, I broke it down into an outline of keywords, cut the outline apart, and taped into onto 5 x 8 index cards. I started practicing the speech by reading/speaking the full text, as well as by using the keywords on the index cards so I could speak the talk without reading.

The Toastmaster’s literature suggests memorizing the beginning and end of the Icebreaker but ad libbing the body of the speech since you are presumably comfortable talking about yourself. The right kind of preparation and delivery — reading vs. memorizing vs. speaking off the cuff from bare-bones notes — has been an ongoing dilemma for me as I’ve considered the best ways people should tell stories and give presentations in various contexts, and I’ve written previously about some of my musings (a post that includes the additional complexity of whether one should read, memorize, or go off the cuff when in a situation when one can’t be seen, such as in a podcast or on the radio).

One Toastmasters member had given a well-received speech one week that was indeed very good — but to me, it sounded very memorized, as opposed to delivered in a natural way. Others had been overly dependent on their notes. Still others barely used notes and sounded completely natural; that’s, of course, what I was striving for.

In the five-day run-up to delivering the speech, I established a routine of spending an hour or so, reading over the text but then putting it aside. After the first couple of times, I also put aside the notecards with the keywords. In each run-through, I would mess something up or forget something. With three days to go, I recorded myself reading the text, using a very cool iPad app called SoundNote, and I incorporated listening to the recording into my routine; I even listened to it in the bathtub.

During the first few run-throughs, I timed the speech, and it came up at just about 4 minutes. Since I had up to 6 minutes available, I decided to add a bit more to the speech. In fact, I added a couple of anecdotes. After that, the recording on my iPad came out to be about 5 minutes. I thought my timing would turn out to be accurate, especially after I read this observation by Roger C. Schank, president and CEO of Socratic Arts, a company whose goal is to design and implement low-cost story-based learning by doing curricula in schools, universities, and corporations:

I performed an experiment recently. I wrote down 100 of my favorite stories that I tell about lessons I have learned through experience, limiting myself to two typewritten pages for each story. Then I tried reading them to people to see what they thought. I found that it took three times longer to read what I had written than it would have taken me to tell the same story the way I would have done in a typical conversation. Writing rules and professional styles make written stories less memorable, less interesting, and too long.

The content of the speech was in three acts, which I connected rather artfully, if I do say so myself. I could have come up with content that would lend itself better to stories, but I had strong feelings on what I wanted to convey. Act I was my shyness and introversion (including my phone phobia), Act II was my life as a writer (the perfect profession for a quirky, shy introvert), and Act III was our cross-country move from Florida to Washington (because I’m a writer with an Internet-based business, I can live anywhere). The speech was not as story-rich as one would expect from someone passionate about story-telling, but it had proto-storytelling and anecdotes.

On the day of the speech, I had two long run-through sessions. I never did a truly smooth rehearsal performance. My dread started to mount as the day went on. I am not nearly as freaked out by public speaking as some people are, but the first time in a new venue or to a new audience is always unnerving. As I drove to the Toastmasters meeting, I had a vague hope that something would happen to prevent me from having to go through with it. I also had a strong desire to be holding my notecards during the speech instead of laying them on the lectern, as the Toastmasters manual strongly encourages. I didn’t think I’d look at them, but the idea of holding them seemed like a security blanket.

My moment arrived. I didn’t hold the cards. I laid them on the lectern. Then I walked well away from the lectern, and a magical thing happened. Adrenaline kicked in. I delivered the speech so much better than I had in any of the run-throughs. Not just better, but stunningly, astonishingly better. I walked back to the lectern to check my notes just once. I tripped on my words a couple of times. I uttered seven pause words (according to the meeting’s “Ah-Counter’). But I felt it was a pretty darned good speech.

The member assigned to evaluate my speech had lots of great things to say about it. She especially praised my independence from the lectern and my notes, as well as my hand-gestures. She was the same woman I’d admired for her story-rich speech about biting dogs on her meter-reader route, so her praise meant a lot. A couple of other people came up to me and said nice things.

Toastmasters members vote on Best Speech at each meeting, and I didn’t win. The most likely reason is that the other speech was better than mine (how can I be objective?). Other factors may have included the notion that it would be unseemly for a first-timer to win Best Speech — there’d be little room for growth. And then there was the length factor. Despite my timing the run-throughs and Roger Schank’s observation, the speech exceeded the limit by more than a minute. Shouldn’t have added the extra padding.

I’m elated that it’s over. But I’m already planning my next speech, which I’m hoping to deliver in early November. Stay tuned.