Archive for the ‘Public Speaking’ Category

Last week, I presented a talk as part of Leeds Anxiety Clinic’s series of events on helping people manage their anxiety. It was entitled How to be incredibly productive, even when you have anxiety.

I thought it went well. Everyone turned up for a start. We weren’t expecting that. When Anxiety Leeds ran a trial, we invited 30 people and 4 turned up on the day. Everyone who had bought a ticket (it sold out a week in advance) turned up, so we were scrambling around for extra chairs just before the start.

Final course launch for April: overcoming the fear of public speaking. Here is the blurb:

Do you want to conquer your fear of public speaking, improve your confidence and build your communication skills?  Maybe you want to be an amazing speaker, or maybe you just want to feel less terrified every time you have to give a presentation at work or “say a few words”.

If so, this is the course for you.

We’ll start by learning 12 different strategies for managing public speaking anxiety. We’ll then move on to how to prepare, write and deliver amazing speeches. We’ll learn how to practise our skills in a safe space, with exercises workbooks and expert tips.

And here is the trailer:

Check it out on Udemy here.

This is my speech for the 2017 humorous speaking contest at Toastmasters.

This is a speech I have at Leeds City Toastmasters last month, advocating that we use our camera phones a little bit less and live a little bit more.

My speech for the 2017 international speech contest was entitled “The Worst-Case Scenario” and told the story of how things going wrong can so often produce our greatest achievements.

Club contest

I managed to see off some tough competition in the form of Simon and Paul at the club level. People say that the club level is often the most difficult to win. This is often attributed to questionable quality judging, but I think it has more to do with the amazing speakers we have at Leeds City.

Area contest

For the Area 15 final, I decided I had to sort my outfit out. If I was going to speak about running, I needed to be a runner.

As it turned out, the evaluation contest was taking place before the speech contest. So I quickly had to change back into my civvies and then get changed again.

Division contest

At the Division E final in Birmingham, the story ends. I didn’t even place. I’m a pretty bitter loser. It’s frustrating because the only feedback people ever offer is “I loved your speech”.

It robs Toastmasters of it’s most important ingredient: the feedback that allows you to grow. And it also makes you question whether there is much objectivity to what we are doing.

Or maybe it conforms to Robert Pirsig’s definition of quality and is simply incredible. We know a great speech when we see one but we can’t say why. The magic eludes me, but it doesn’t seem to based on sound fundamentals.

Still, that’s the talk of a loser. Onwards and upwards.

And, on the plus side, it did make a nice road trip for Venla.

Writing the perfect eulogy is a tough business, especially when you want to do justice to a loved one. These tips will help guide you in the delicate task.

Writing and delivering a eulogy is rarely a pleasant thing to do. However, when you are called upon to do it, chances are you will want to do the best job you can do in honouring the loved one you have lost. You rarely get extended notice, so it is best to be prepared. Here are some tips.

It’s not a biography

The structure of a eulogy will typically talk through a person’s life. This is a good guide for how to lay out your speech. However, it is important to remember that it is not a biography. Everyone at the funeral is likely to have known the person and their life story, so there is no benefit in parroting it back to them. Instead, you should concentrate on distilling the essence of their personality. Pick out a few bits to talk about that really show what kind of person they were.

Unless they were a complete bastard, in which case you should show a mix of their personality. There is no point denying their faults but focus on their good points also.

Use humour

At my public speaking club, I’m noted for adding humour to any situation. In fact, I used to joke that I thought it was always appropriate, though I hadn’t had a eulogy to try it out at yet. That was years ago, and now I have had a eulogy to try it out at, and still stick by my conviction.

Humour is a wonderful tool for keeping people engaged and breaking the tension. it can bring the mood of a room right up. You might think that a funeral is not the place for a eulogy, but I could not disagree more. You need to use humour to lighten the mood not just in spite of it being a funeral, but because of it. You want to leave attendees with a positive memory of the deceased, not a solemn downcast version.

Tell stories

This goes for any speech, ever. Stories have an emotional attachment. People will quickly forget what you said, but how you made them feel will stick around much longer. Humans love stories. So skip the boring details and lay out your speech out hopping from story to story.

If another member of the family has a lovely story about the deceased, invite them up to give it.

Two days after I delivered Speak from the Heart at Leeds City, I delivered a speech called “Warehouse of Gifts” at Asselby Speakers. It was another speech I had written to try and develop my personal stories and improve the emotion in my speeches.

I did not go there with high hopes. The speech was rough, the idea was clichéd, and I was doing the whole thing in a Finland hockey jersey. However, it actually went a lot better than the other one did. People liked it.

Asselby Speakers is a great place to take a speech. It is an advanced club, only open to Competent Communicators. The result is that you get unparalleled feedback. Speeches that regular clubs fail to give any suggestions, Asselby will give you an A4 page full, which is what you want at this level.

Recently, I’ve been working on including more personal stories and emotion in my speeches. Some have gone better than others. This speech, for example, was a failure. Sort of.

Feedback was very positive. One of our members stopped me in the bathroom to tell me that he had never written a feedback slip before, but had tonight, because my speech was “perfect”. In fact, all the feedback slips were positive, which is frustrating because you can’t improve when nobody call tell you what was wrong. This was extra frustrating, because I failed to win best speaker.

Looking back at the video though, I can see why it wasn’t a winner. It doesn’t have the emotion in that I wanted it to have. I just didn’t express it. In fact, I think my trademark humour, as everyone refers to it, probably detracted from the speech because it took the edge off the emotion, and maybe I shouldn’t have done that.

My recent speech “Morality Explained” was the final project I needed to complete in order to achieve my Advanced Communicator Silver award.

My Toastmasters speech for Speaking to Inform project #5 “The Abstract Concept”. In this talk I discuss how morality and altruism can work within the context of natural selection.