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.
Tag Archives: toastmaster
library
The library at work was closed down and the librarian got fired last week while I was in Saskatoon. Not many people will miss the library, as they all think it is just a waste of resource to hire someone to order books and keep track of magazines. I’m among one of the few customers of library, who feel sad that it’s closed. I do agree the librarian is kinda redundant and useless, but the library is where I get my weekly magazines from. Now when the library closed, it fetters me from getting my Economist and Harvard Business Review. I hope the company will hire a junior librarian or even a co-op student soon, so that the library can go back to business.
I am the table topic master in today’s toast master meeting. The topic is “Beautiful BC”, which the chairman assumes BC always stands for Birthish Columbia. I put a twist on the topic and use BC as an acronyms. The speakers and club member had fun and lots of laugh, and I think I did not a bad job. My hand gesture and flow of words still need more improvement. Gota remind myself avoid clapping my hands in my speech. The word of the day is Effulgent, it an adjactive with the same meaning as bright. I tried to use Effulgent in my speech, but I don’t make it bend in with my speech very well. However, this excerise give me an idea. I just subscribed to the dictioary.com word of the day mailing list. I’ll see how can I use the daily word in my blog starting today.
speech preparation
Today is quite unproductive at work, not only I had 3 hours of meeting straight from 11:00a.m. to 2:30p.m., I did a brain dump to another colleague of what I had learnt in Saskatoon in the afternoon. The meeting in lunch time is not project related, it’s a mini seminar organized by the Toastmaster club on how to prepare a speech. The speaker is Marget Hope, a specialist on speech from SFU. I believe had I attended similiar seminar taught her before, but obviously I had forgot everything I learnt last time. Giving a speech is very different from writing an article. When writing an article, people usually use fancy words and complex sentence structures, but in a speech, simple sentence is usually the way to go. First she introduced the bubble diagram to brain storm ideas, then briefly on the technic of walk thru, talk thru, real rehersal and mental rehersal. After the seminar, I felt I am more prepared for the ice-breaker speech I have to do in Toastmaster, so I signed myself up do it the week after.
I think my chess skill really had improved, I slaughtered Gordon with a major advantage. Moreover, I tried the Sicilian defence dragon variable and really appreciate its beauty. I decided to focus on this as my main defense strategy in king pwan openings.
move on
Tonight I am having farewell party with a friend leaving Vancouver for good, then the big group went to watch Starwars together. The line up is pretty long, even though we went almost 1.5 hours early, the seats are just so-and-so. In the gathering, I had met some old friends who had left the company. They talked about their career plans and I found I couldn’t join the conversation. I simply have nothing to say about my career, I know the job at PMC leads no where, and I don’t feel like talking about the plan after I graduate, since I still haven’t got my degree yet. Talk about something that vague in the future even makes me think I am just BSing. I am glad that my friends are able to move on to their next stage of life, but what about myself? Anyways, enough whining for the day, now switch the topic to something more positive.
I read this anecdote from HBR, which is quite inspiring and I planned to use it in the Toastmaster meeting. In WWII, a statistician Abraham Wald was appointed by the US air force to improve the survivability of the warplanes. From the data the air force had gathered, they found that the some parts of the planes get hits much more often. So the military naturally concluded they should reinforce those parts. However Wald come up with an opposite conclusion from the data, he figured that the part that hit least should be reinforced. His reasoning is that the data is biased, only planes had survived are included in the statistic. If a critical part is hit, the plane is already crashed and it won’t show up in the data. Therefore reinforce those heavily damage parts won’t give any improvement in survivability, as the pilots can still make it back to the base. Selective bias when reading statistics can be very misleading and give us a false sense of security.
time keeper
My name Horace is originated from the God of time keeping in Greek (not Geek) mythology. I used this the opening line in my Toastmaster timer speech. Unfortunately, a good opening doesn’t lead to a smooth ending. I had too many um/ah and dead air during my speech. I also forgot to address the chairman and the fellow toastmasters in the beginner and lead the forum back to the chairman at the end. I hope I will do better next time.