Posts Tagged ‘speech’

This is Nigel Farage giving his victory speech at the European Parliament. I noticed that he had a flag on his desk. Nobody else has a flag. The European Parliament do not provide flags. Farage just brought his own flag in from home and put it on his desk.

His speech was silly and offensive. However, I laughed more than anything because it was so similar to another speech I had seen. This is Nigel Farage giving his victory speech at the European Parliament:

And here is Father Ted accepting a Golden Cleric award:

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.

Someone to watch while you’re sat on your own, in a lonely apartment, because you abandoned your friends for a bit more cash at work… ;).

Cabinet reshuffle:

Howling Laud Hope’s speech:

Dancing during the pub crawl:

The preliminaries of the 2014 Public Speaking World Championships are now underway. This seems an appropriate time to post a video from last year’s final. The winner, Presiyan Vasilev, won with a speech entitled “Changed by a Tyre”.

This is my tenth speech from the Toastmasters Competent Communicator manual, “Inspire Your Audience”. The speech doesn’t start until a minute in to the video.

At the end of April, I travelled to York to compete in the Division E International Speech Contest final. You can see a video of speech in a previous post, albeit it at a different competition to this one. I only managed third place, but live and learn – only four months until the next one!

For my fifth project in the Toastmaster’s Competent Communicator series, I presented a talk entitled “A Humanist Soup Kitchen?”

This referenced my open letter to David Cameron, inviting him to come and see the Humanist Action Group doing its thing, after he had suggested that no such humanist enterprises existed.

Despite the talk creeping up on me somewhat (mainly due to being ill all the previous weekend), I managed to get everything in shape and took home another Best Speaker ribbon. Good times.

Last week I delivered a talk to the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire on the same subject I spoke at the Enquiry Conference on – my experiences with the Christian Union.

The talk itself went well enough and it was great to see that even after the summer break the group was still well attended and indeed had many new, and more importantly younger faces. If the group can sustain more of a mixed demographic, I think it will prove to be of real benefit.

I also got the chance to meet Joel, the new interfaith secretary at the Christian Union, who suggested I check out Hope City Church in Leeds – it’s much better than all the others apparently.