Finally, I had completed my first toastmaster speech. I don’t think I’m doing very well. I can feel my legs was shaking for the whole time. It is different than doing a table topic, where is more careful and have no expectation. My time management is really bad, run out of time half way and my mind went blank because I don’t know what to say in order to cut my speech short. I can imagine my pronunciation and grammar has some problems, due to the lack of sleep makes my mind slow. Anyways, it’s done and I have to think about the second speech planned in next month.

Time is running out before my trip to Germany, and I have less than 2 months to reach the milestone I had set for my thesis. I found talking an extend period of time on phone with Pat every night become a big distraction to my study. Especially when I have to spend energy to ‘tum’ her all the time. My goal is to cut down the duration of phone call from over 45 minutes to 15 minutes a day. The extra 30 minutes may not seems a lot, but the time it takes for me to focus make the big difference. In addition, the timing of call make a big difference. Have an hour of solid work before the phone call helps productive, so I could use it call as a welcome break. Unlike the current habit, I got interrupt when I just about to begin my study. My mind on the work is lost after the phone call, and it usually take an hour to regroup.

One last thing, although I agree not to sleep again in church to avoid more nagging from Pat, sleeping in church itself is NOT an immature behavior. There are many valid reasons to fall asleep in church, and it doesn’t imply disrespect to the priest, fellow church goers or God. It may worth the time to write a serious article on the true nature of sleeping in the church, but that would take quite some time to a proper research. I’ll definitely put this topic down on my to do list after I had finished my thesis. For the time being, let’s use the reason that sleeping is a from of prayer, quoted from this article written by Maurice Bellet, a Catholic author.

I was preparing my ice breaker speech for the toastmaster meeting tomorrow. I found that it is quite hard to condense all the material into 5 minutes. There are so many things I want to talk about myself. I had picked school as the mean to describe my character. I always believe the importance of education in shaping the personality of a man. I had picked a few anecdotes from Lasalle days, Appleby and Waterloo days to illustrate the real me. At this moment, I’m still struggle to organize my speech. Maybe I’ll just give it one more practice and then go to bed. I had already spent 2 hours but still couldn’t speak fluently. To become a good public speaker really require lots of hard work and practice, unless you are born with this talent.