Posts Tagged ‘speech contest’

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.

This is my speech from the recent Toastmasters 2015 humorous speech contest. I recorded it both at club level and area level, both of which I ended up winning.

If you want to watch one, I recommend the bottom one as the Area one is probably a little more polished. For the Toastmasters geek among you, I will go into detail about both.

Above is the club contest. My first contest in two years having taken a year out to be Area Governor. I was a bit nervous beforehand but felt fine once I got up there.

I did not mean to actually cause so a racquet when I kicked the shoes off, but I when it got such big laughs I would I would roll with it. Then on to the area contest…

Here I had taken out a lot of the history of the heel. This was originally the point of the speech, but it was a bit try for a humorous contest, so I replace it with some material about the number of pairs of shoes we often end up with.

I also kept the accidental ending in (though this time on purpose). At Division level I toned this down as I almost hit an audience member at Area! So I carefully removed the shoes and then pretended to slam them to the ground.

I did not record Divsion, but it was essentially the same as Area. a made a few subtle changes. For example I took out “as all women know, the first step is to buy loads of shoes” because I felt this was a bit sexist. I replaced it with “I studied my wife carefully and worked out the first step was to buy loads of shoes” as this makes the same identifiable joke without offending anyone (except perhaps Elina, who I cleared it with in advance!).

You might notice I am wearing the same outfit in both videos. That is not a coincidence. One of the feedback points I got from my advanced club was that I needed to show off my legs – so a well-fitted t-shirt and skinny jeans it was! They’re horrible, I don’t know how the young people put up with them.

Speaking of advanced clubs, taking the speech to Asselby Speakers was the best preparation I did. None of this being nice nonsense you get at regular clubs, they just gave me proper feedback. I came away with a one and half sides of A4 and it turned an okay speech into a multi-contest winning speech.

The Spring 2015 Toastmasters District 71 (UK & Ireland) conference took place in Nottingham.

Nottingham is quite a happening city. There was plenty of people out in the evenings and a good range of restaurants. We also did a walking tour lead by Robin Hood. He told us that the city was originally called “Snotingaham” which it turns out is true.

Workshops

The workshops were a mixed back. You get a lot of professional speakers and motivational coaches running workshops, and they send to speak a lot of shit. Erick Rainey for example started his speech with a slow motion run down the aisle. I thought to myself “brilliant, this is going to be a sarcastic post-modern take on how stupid a lot of the motivational crap is”. But then he did it all seriously. He’s a great communicator, and has loads of good stuff to say, but then he mixes it with nonsense like NLP.

Rav Chambers presented a good workshop on video. It did not teach me anything I did not know already, but it was valuable to have a reminder of all the things I know I should be doing when shooting film.

Vinay Parmar’s workshop on personal branding was interesting. However, for someone who focuses on how you present yourself, he really needs to spell-check his slides as there were several errors in them.

International Speech Contest

The district final of the International Speech Contest took place on the Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t the best venue for it as it was in a lecture theatre. The speeches were good, but I am looking forward to getting back to competing. Two years ago, in Torquay, I felt out-classed (to be clear, I wasn’t competing). Here, I sat there thinking there are a bunch of us in Area 15 that could compete at this level.

Opening ceremony

The Friday evening is a buffet and fancy dress party. Of course the theme was Robin Hood!

Gala dinner

The Saturday night was the Gala dinner. We had the Sheriff of Nottingham as a guest and for one of the raffle prizes, she let someone wear her robes and hat! Best of all, Gillian took the prize.

Last Sunday I chaired the Area 15 Autumn 2014 contest. It was a tough one. I was in the Scottish Highlands the week before so I was trying to organise it from an area of the country almost devoid of phone signal.

There were only twelve people there on the day. However, thanks to the professionalism and enthusiasm of the members we were able to cover everything and run the contest. Even Elina was drafted in to count the ballots!

The Regent Hotel in Doncaster were an excellent host as always. I would like to say a big thank you to everyone who attended the contest and helped out, and well done to everyone who competed! Good luck to Andrew and Anthony who will be representing us at Division level.

At the end of April I acted as Chief Judge for the Toastmasters Division E International Speech & Evaluation contest. I did not go perfectly, but the general feedback seemed to be that nobody realised, so I am taking that as a win.

Congratulations to Gayna and Owen who won the contests. Most of all, congratulations to Doncaster Speakers and in particular Shelagh, our Contest Chair, for a fantastically well organised day.

Last week I had the pleasure of going to Sheffield for the Toastmasters Area 15 International Speech & Evaluation contest. At said meeting I was elected as next years Area Governor. It remains to be seen whether that counts as winning or not ;). Congratulations to Billal, Jane, Gail and Pauline who proceed on to Division.

Earlier this month Leeds City Toastmasters held its 2014 International Speech & Evaluation Contest. We had four competitors for each contest and the standard was excellent. Congratulations to everyone who took part! The winners, myself and Anthony, now move onto the Area Contest in Sheffield.

In November, I travelled down to Colchester to compete in the District 71 humorous speaking contest finals. I lost in the semi-finals which was pretty disappointing. I was happy with the structure and quality of my speech, but I didn’t get the laughs the other contestants did, so more humour is probably needed. Our short stay at the conference was enjoyable though – unlike the Riviera Renaissance conference everything was in the same hotel which made it a lot nicer.

This is me receiving my certificate of participation.

The purpose of these is to fill time while the votes are being counted.

Having somehow won the area contest at the end of September, I headed over to Warrington for the Division E final of the 2013 humorous speech contest. It was held at a Masonic hall.

It was a flying visit as we were out at Wendy House the night before and had to be back in Leeds that evening to host Simon Singh. I had no idea of the result until 8pm when Chanaka texted me – to find out that somehow I had won this one too!

Most of the contest was a bit of a blur, to be honest. Part of my speech requires me to pick up a chair, and during this, I managed to hit myself on the head. I somehow finished my speech but the next thing I really remembered was being sat back down wondering when I joined the Freemasons.

On the last Sunday of September, we held the Area 15 contest for humorous speaking and table topics. The competition was tough and all competitors did a great job – congratulations to all that took part!

Despite having lost at the club contest, only to win through at White Rose, I somehow came out on top in humorous speaking. Two contestants go through to Division so Jamie will be joining me with a speech entitled “The TM 2 1 3 1” as well.

Chanaka once again stormed through the Table Topics and will be going to the division contest alongside Michael who also gave an excellent speech. I’m also pleased to say Michael took home the Toastmaster of the Year award for his ever-present hard work for the area.