Reflections

Another year has come and gone and soon we will be bidding adieu to the year 2008.

It has been an eventful year for me and it is timely to reflect on how the year has developed in terms of my key interests in toastmasters, kidsREAD and personal goals.

Toastmasters
It has been a good year for toastmastering. I have accelerated my growth and personal development in this area by completing my Competent Leader as well as Advanced Communicator Bronze awards this year. I have visited many clubs and made some new friends along the way. It has been tiring at times when one has to go to a club after a day at work and to take up appointments as project evaluator or language evaluator. I continue to learn about event management, planning, scheduling, getting people to say "Yes" to my request for them to come to my club and act as project evaluators and appointment holders. Winning friends and influencing people are a hallmark of Toastmasters skills that one develops (in addition to a thick skin) to get people to help you with meetings. *haha*

kidsREAD
My first full-year of kidsREAD saw me taking care of my 9 cute but at times active class of mosly 7 year-olds. I am blessed to teach this class as the children are mostly well behaved (especially the girls) while the boys were manageable. I believe my vocal variety and ability to be more animated in reading stories has improved as my audience lets me know it whenever the novelty or excitement of the story wears off. Children are very frank in letting you know if you are boring with a capital "B". :-)

Blogging
As the year nears to the end, the creative juices are flowing with sometimes multiple blog entries in one day. It is getting more therapeutic and carthartic to pour out some (not all) of my thoughts electronically for the world to see. Of course, in reality if more than 3 persons read my blog, that is already a good audience. *smile*... It used to be difficult in the beginning to think of what to blog and I felt self-conscious in thinking that my articles would not be worth the bandwidth it took to upload and download. I have managed to overcome this inhibition and now am able to blog relatively freely about recurrent themes and thoughts that permeate (a word I practiced during the previous December club meeting) my mind.

It is amazing sometimes when we document our thoughts we realise there is actually quite a lot going on in the little grey cells up there. Blogging helps us to structure some of the meandering streams of consciousness into a coherent flow which can be navigated by you dear reader. :-) It allows me to explore more of both hemispheres of my brain as I use both words and also pictures or graphics in my blogs to help maximise the creative energies within my mind.

Others
It has not been smooth sailing this entire year. There were periods of depressive tendencies and times when I felt lost as well despite my busy schedule. The busyness at times masks the thin line that separates us from being "OK" to not being "OK" in transactional analysis terms. While most of the time I am "OK", I am also susceptible to bouts of hopelessness and despair as well when the darker side of my mind takes over with the poisoness pessimism that can strike any of us when we least expect it. That is why I have tried to, in my connections with people, be a positive element rather than a toxic, negative element which neutralises good vibes and makes eveyone feel sucky.

Conclusion
It has been an interesting year as there were hits and misses. Overall, I felt that the hits outweighed the misses and begin to realise that when we grow older, we really do trade our youthful idealism and enthusiasm for a more mellowed outlook that is realistically positive. The realistic positive way of looking at things accepts situations more "AS IS" but with a hopeful view. It knows that all that separates us from living and dying is at times just the most minute of circumstances and occurrences. We live in God's hands. He may decide that one day, that is our day to go be with Him.

I wish all my reader(s) a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

May your dreams drive your reality in 2009!

Keeping Audience on Edge of their Seat

One of the most valuable parts of the recentDistrict 80 Toastmasters Annual Convention held in Hong Kong from 18 to 20 May 2007 was Craig Valentine's Keynote address plus his seminar on "How to Keep your Audiences on the Edge of Their Seats".

Despite being the 1999 World Champion of Public Speaking, Craig sought out Patricia Fripp, one of the top speaking coaches in the USA, and got coaching from her on his presentation skills even after he was crowned World Champion.

Simply amazing.

There I was, sitting amid 500 participants made up of toastmasters from Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, Thailand and from neighbouring Asean countries. In the comfortable grey seats of the Hong Kong Convention Centre, listening attentively to Craig Valentine, arguably one of the best speakers I have ever heard in my life.

Craig's 3 step method how to keep our audiences on the edge of their seats comprises of the following:

1. Breathe Life into your Speech
2. Bring your Audience to You
3. Build a Message that Sticks

It sounds easy but that's what the professionals do well, simple things but he does it inordinately well!

1) Breathe Life into your Speech
The steps here are nothing magical but it works. First, tell a story and make a point. It's as simple as that but yet it's not that simple?

Sounds paradoxical?

When we tell the story we also need to paint the scene in the mind's eye of the audience. People remember what they saw in their mind. It's not what they see visually through their eyes but what is described to them in vivid detail in their mind's eye. For example, the scene, the sounds, the taste, the texture and feelings all come into play. Make it come alive for the audience.

2) Bring your Audience to You
Many speeches fail to connect with the audiences because the speech is about I, me, myself, the speaker. The audience is selfish, they want to know, "What's in it for me?" To answer that, Craig shared how we can:

• tap and transport
• search for similarities
• show our failures and flaws

3) Build a Message that Sticks
The way we can do this is to be as specific as we can in painting the scene in our audience's mind. The use of foundational phrases also help because it summarises in a apt phrase the point the speaker wants to make. E.g. What got you here can't get you there was used by Craig to illustrate how we all can improve beyond our current level. Our past achievements have gotten us so far, but to move even further up we need to have more commitment, more drive and more willpower to do it.

It's not the same for you to read what I told you compared to the actual experience listening to Craig Valentine up-close and personal. He is a very tall gentlemen as you can see from this picture and has a great sense of humour. He uses his body language very effectively because no gesture is wasted, and it is all scripted yet it flow so naturally during his speech. Indeed, when you see a World Champion in action, the quality and ability shines through.

This was my first toastmasters annual convention but it won't be my last. I want to attend more conventions in the future, because if I want to be the best, I have to learn from the best!

Moral of the story

I delivered my third Advanced Project in the Story Telling manual and crashed and burned to some degree! :-P

The title of my speech was "Big Peter, Little Peter" and it was based on a Norway folktale. I was initially attracted to this story because it was rather macarbe. It was a story of 2 brothers Big Peter and Little Peter and how the younger brother was able to use his cunning and wit to outsmart and in fact kill his older brother. On hindsight, a better story could have been found.

My evaluator L gave me a very fair and educational evaluation. Essentially here were the areas for improvement:

• Inappropriate story selection: Less is more! - I had too many details - I overran the time 4-6mins by 100% ending up at 12mins!
• Incongruence of facial expression and tone - It was a macarbe story but I had a smile on my face the entire time....Hmm.. maybe I have the makings of a serial killer (just kidding!)
• To select a shorter story with simpler moral and to embellish it to make it fit the timing would have been a better strategy
• Flow of the story was jerky and abrupt and hard for the audience to follow as there were too many details that did not help to advance the plot

She was kind enough to also feedback that she felt I had the confidence and ability to carry the story through and should capitalise on that to pause often and let the audience follow my pace instead of trying to deliver too many details to the audience.

For my own benefit, I will try to schedule a time to redo this project as I feel that it is an important one given the short duration of 4 to 6 minutes. This is critical to my development as a kidsREAD volunteer if I want to be serious about delivering my speech.

V the President of the Club has done the story telling manual too and he started the meeting by telling us about the story of the donkey who was being buried alive by the farmer when it fell into a pit. But instead of being buried alive as dirt was poured into the pit and onto its head, the donkey shook it off and took one step up and was finally able to escape from the pit.

We are put in the position of the donkey at times, life pours dirt on our heads but we need to shake it off in order to take a step forward.

Onwards with my story telling manual journey!

First Fear

Public speaking comes easy to some but not so for others.

I realised that I had some ability in public speaking only after making mistakes such as having up to 40+ pause fillers in my speech and also forgetting bits of my speech even as it was being coughed out in front of a live audience. My ability came after doing 10+5+5 speeches along with at least 30-40 table-topics over an interrupted span of 5 years in toastmastering.

Some evaluators have been gentle with me. Some have been harsh but fair, others have been harsh and unfair [but these were the minority].

What I learnt from my toastmastering experience was the fear of speaking is very real. There is something about fearing ridicule, laughter or embarrassment that triggers the flight or fight instinct in us. That is why I try my best to smile at first time public speakers doing their first few speeches from the Basic Leadership and Communication Manual because it can be so hard for them to overcome their inate fear of embarrassment or "malu-ing" [embarassing in malay] themselves in front of an audience. By smiling, I show support and I also empathise with how difficult it is when one gets a negative reaction from a frowing listener.

Looking back at my toastmastering, I realise that the benefits come now as I am more confident in dealing with interviews and speaking situations at the workplace compared to what I was 5 years ago.

If you are a new toastmaster and continue to struggle with the fear. Brother or sister in public speaking, I share your fear. The fear IS REAL. The fear CAN be PALPABLE. But the good news is that the fear can be overcome with practice, practice and practice as well as mentorship and genuine coaching. I saw the benefits of my toastmastering experience and my ability in speaking off-the-cuff after training my mind to be able to handle table-topics. This ability is one of the greatest tangible benefits I have received from my investments in my time with toastmasters.

If you are discouraged over your toastmasters performance, my suggestion is to HANG IN THERE. It will get better but in the short-term it may get worse before it gets better. In each of us, there will be this "ah-ha" or eureka moment where it finally clicks for you how all the components of a excellent speech come into play. The combination of content, genuine conviction in what you have to say and being able to use voice, gestures, tone, pace and all the toastmasters skills to deliver an effective speech will materalise.

And when it does, you will be so glad that you stuck with it and managed to reap the rewards for doing so.

Public speaking can be hard for some. But it can be so rewarding when you are able to do it.

What I Learned in Toastmasters

If you want to be an effective public speaker, you must also learn to be an effective public listener!

What is a public listener?

Officially, this term "public listener" doesn't exist. It's something I coined to be the opposite of public speaker. Too often in your quest towards public speaking, you forget that part of effective communication is to listen using your ears and you eyes for feedback from your audience.

In a one-to-one conversation, it is relatively easy to maintain eye contact with audience of one. You can see her body language, facial expression and listen to her tone, pitch and volume.

However when you are a public speaker delivering a speech, you are having a one-to-many dialogue where one party speaks i.e. YOU, while the other party i.e. THE AUDIENCE, listens. The trick of powerful speech making is to make the speech a dialogue where you are not TALKING to but are INTERACTING with your audience.

How can you do this?

Firstly, make eye contact with selected members of the audience from different parts of the room to establish rapport and don't forget to smile. Look out for their facial expressions to see if they are happy, interested or bored with your speech.

Establish a connection with the audience by using YOU and US to be inclusive. Rapport with your audience can also be established if you understand the composition of your audience. Are they linked by geographical location, i.e. Singaporeans or Singapore residents. Are they affiliated through the toastmasters movement? Are they young, old or middle-aged? Are they members of the same company, club or charity?

React to the audience! If they laugh, pause to let the laughter permeate and then subside. If they are looking look puzzled or confused, you may want to slow down and articulate your next point carefully and take your time to speaker clearly. If they are frowning, then you may have to make some changes or lose your audience.

Listening to the mood of the audience

Your audience is a group of individuals who have different motivations, moods and mannerisms. However, when they are in the room to listen to you speak, there must be a purpose that draws them together with you in that room, hall or auditorium. Find out how they are feeling by mingling with some of the audience and picking up on the vibes by speaking with a few persons there. You'd be surprised how you can release some of the tension within yourself as you've made one or two acquaintances or even friends before you address the audience.

To really improve in your public speaking, follow-up by speaking with one or two members of the audience to get some feedback on your speech. They make give you the audience's perspective on how your speech went.

Speak well, listen well and live well.