TM: Pause for dramatic effect or just Stop all together

I committed myself to attempt my 3rd Assignment Speech for today's Toastmasters Meeting. Like always I will prepare a draft of the full speech, then make second draft with only the important points of the speech, then the night before I will practice a few times and timed myself. But unlike any of the previous two speeches I gave earlier, this week (an in fact from the past 4 weeks) I've been very occupied with a big engineering issue that's still unsolved and it's eating me.

I thought I have prepared very well the night before. I honestly thought I did. Little did I know that I'm using my short term memory for this preparation.

This afternoon, whatever that might go wrong, eventually did went wrong. I forgot the Title of my speech. How bizzare! My brain blacked out in the middle of the speech and there was a long moment of silence. Gasp! My mind was blank without any recovery words. I can't even focus on the notes with bullet points even when I wrote it down with a marker pen. I forgot some parts that makes the speech flow smoothly and relevant.

Suffice to say, I flopped today. So much for being the 'Best Speaker' last time :P
Everybody have their bad days I guess. Anyways, I'm looking forward for my 4th Assignment Speech.

Looking back, I think I knew why this happened, one of the reason is I was so concerned with making eye contact with my audience and trying control hand gestures. At one point, I realised I was talking too fast forgotten to pause for "dramatic" effect. But the 'pause' went too long and I went blank. Hah.

Here's my perfect speech that I've written down, fortunately I decided not to record a video of myself then there'll be a big discrepancy between the two. lol!.Clearly I was really distracted.

MANAGING DISTRACTIONS

Have you ever started your day filled with enthusiasm and motivation to complete a list of tasks you’ve planned to do ONLY to be sidelined by distractions?

It happens to the best of us. I myself falls victim to my own weakness. As I was trying to prepare this speech, I had to play this new downloaded game on my mobile phone, go through a dozen of blogs, read the news, watch a couple of videos on Youtube and check on FB once in every 5 minutes! And by the time I know it, 2 hours has already gone!

Distractions are like huge drains that take our focus away from what we should be doing. Personally, distractions are very indulging and I could easily find myself lose hours just like that. This makes me feel generally drained and disappointed for the lost of opportunity and productive time that I could have spent working on something useful.

Fellow Toastmasters, today I am going to share with you techniques on how to manage distractions in four simple steps.

1 – Unplug: As I mentioned earlier, the biggest distractions often comes from connectivity. Emails, IM, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, phones. These are the things that pulls your attention away from what you should be doing. Unplug these connections while you are working on your single task.

2 – Stop Multi-tasking: Although ability to multitask has been seen as an asset in this era, researchers have shown that multitaskers are easily susceptible to distractions and performs more slowly than non-multitaskers. Therefore less is more. Close all those browsing tabs, unrelated documents, turn off the TV. Focus on one task at a time.

3 – Timeboxing: Don’t think in terms of having to tackle an entire work day, or an entire list of stuff to do. That’s overwhelming. Fix a time to work on a task and doing your best within that time frame. So instead of working on something until it is done in one sitting, we only work for 30 mins (for example). This way, you keep your work fresh and engaging throughout the entire day.

4 - Reward yourself: This is a good motivational boost. Give yourself something to look forward to at the end of your timebox or task. Like a carrot at the end of a stick. Once you’ve achieved your goal, undistracted & working without interruptions, give yourself a reward. Tea break, get back online and connect back with the virtual world.

Whenever you have a task at hand that needs to be done and you’re trying to avoid from distractions, remember these four things, Unplug, Stop multitasking, Timeboxing and Reward yourself.

The Cup of Life

Last Thursday, I've attempted my TM Speech Assignment #2 - Organise Your Speech.

It was four months since my first Toastmasters' speech. It's been ages! Procrastination is not your friend. I've had enough and decided to move forward and signed up myself for my next speech, whether I'm ready or not. 3 days before the speech day, I still haven't decided what to talk about. At first I wanted to talk about my house break-in incident, but I felt that it was too depressing and it's like asking pity from others. Panic strikes in 2 days before speech day, but fortunately an idea crept into my mind while watching a World Cup match and decidedly, I chose to speak about The Cup of Life.

Here's my whole speech that I've prepared:

The Cup of Life

It comes every four years and when it does, it drives people to a frenzy. Yes, I am talking about the World Cup, which is currently on-going at this moment of time.

During this time of of the season, generally, there will be two groups of people. First, the ones who are football fan-atics, and the second group consists of everybody else who doesn’t have a clue what’s the fuss is all about?! I , unfortunately, belong to that second group.

I try to make sense out of this madness. Why the World Cup is so great? There must be a method in all that madness. After a lot of contemplation, it all makes sense now. Football is an imitation of life.

In football, the objective of the game is to score a goal, but there are obstacles in the form of opposing team. You will need to learn new skills and a lot of practice to continually improve your skills. Similar to our lives, we have our own goals to achieve and obstacles come in many shapes, forms and sizes. You need to continuously learn new skills and practice it in order to be better and achieve your goals.

To put the ball into the goal requires teamwork. A football by any other is just a ball. But when you give a skilled man ball, it becomes a show. But when 22 skillful men trying to put on a show, it becomes an entertainment. However, not all the 22 men will score a goal for themselves. They need a cohesive teamwork and coordination in a strategical way, then it becomes an exciting game. And it’s the same in real life, everyone has their own goals, but we always have to depend and work together with others to reach it. That is teamwork. The same can be said when working on a project, we need to utilize each skillful team member together towards a common goal, success can be achieved.

Not everyone will have a chance to play, but everyone can be part of the team by rooting for their team,;by being the supporters. Giving unconditional support and believe in the capability of your team member can provide a good morale boost and confidence for the team. As a parent, sibling or friend, we have to provide strong support towards our child, family member or friends who are struggling putting their best effort to achieve success.

Lastly, when the game has come to an end, we celebrate and be a good sport. If our team wins, celebration is necessary to signify and to acknowledge success, by all means bask in the merriment (high five for using Word of the Day!) of winning, but don’t be too proud and belittle others. But if we lose, be a good sport and admit defeat gracefully. There’s always room for improvements. You can wallow in sadness but don’t be too attached to the past, close that book and look forward to do better next time.

To understand football, we will need to see beyond the football field and past the 22 well built and good looking men to find the delicate meaning behind of these 22 men chasing after a single ball. Football is a reflection and imitation of life itself. Like Ricky Martin have said before, it’s the Cup of Life. Before I end my speech, I'd like to wish everyone a very good World Cup season.

Well, it was suppose to go perfectly like that, but during delivery I've hacked and chopped and mashed and jumbled and added and severed everything all together because of my nervousness. That's why my evaluator informed me during feedback that my speech lacks transition between points. Quite a valid feedback. I need to control my nerves better next time.

Finally, a very good suggestion which was to rename my speech title to - The World Cup of Life. Wickedly brilliant idea.

Although I think my speech had went awry, but maybe I was over scrutinizing myself. Don't we always do that? Thinking that we did worse, when in actual fact, it wasn't all that bad, even maybe it was the best! I'm saying this because I was very surprised that at the end of the meeting, I was presented the Blue Ribbon - Best Speaker! Woo hoo!

Some of the motivational things on my wall :)

PS: I will be blogging (I hope will have the time for it) from a different location for the next couple of week. Actually I'm on the flight right now (the magic of Blogger). Stay tuned to find out where I am.

TM: The Ice Breaker

Joining Toastmasters (TM) is one of my first few steps trying things that is out of my comfort zone. Despite my fluency in written English (eh? perasan!), I have to admit that I have problems when speaking in front of the public. I will get really nervous and shaky, my mind goes blank and I talk rubbish. In general, I'm a boring conversationalist and sometimes (up to a point) a social retard (gosh, that's a strong word to use).

In all accounts I have met at least 3 people in the past who had suggested that I join TM. I'm glad I took the advise and now I am a member at my M0t0 office.

So what is it really? (TM official website)
It's like an English club that your school had last time. I like to put is this way, a place to have a good, clean and organised fun. The main aim is to provide a place for you to practice an impromptu or prepared speech in front of others and given feedback on how to improve yourself. Yeah, the way I said it, it might sound like a 'poyo' or a 'skema' club for people who has nothing better to do. But it's actually not. It's fun, interesting and other fellow TM are very supportive and friendly. Plus, there's two good looking guys in da club (ok, poor joke).

The activity is pretty organised, but hey, it doesn't mean that it's not fun, it just means that we are on a tight schedule (1.5 hours) and we'd like to make full use of it for the benefit of everybody (here I go again, making TM sounds 'nerdy'. That's just me, really).

1. Every meeting will have a theme, for example our last theme was 'Puppy Love'. So we could expect a lot of stories revolving around this theme; young love and such. The Thought of The Day also would be about the theme.
   
   
2. Then there's the Word of The Day (WOTD) , and the challenge for this is you have to try to use WOTD in your speech. It's interesting when others cleverly sew WOTD into a nice string of sentence.
   
   
3. The Humour section probably is the most awaited slot amongst all. It's always a pressure for the humourist to come up with a good funny story/speech, but we'll have a laugh anyways (out of politeness).
   
   
4. My favourite is the Table Topics (TT), mainly because it's interesting to hear speeches when being put on the spot. It's an impromptu session. The TT master will prepare some material and call 4 or 5 volunteers (normally the new comers and guests will get bullied during this time :P) to talk about a randomly chosen topic. You'll hear a lot of funny stuff as well as valuable inspiring stories that people share from their experiences.
   
   
5. Prepared speech. Now this is the serious stuff, though the speech doesn't have to be serious at all. It's a series of 12 speeches that the members have to prepare and present in order to attain the Competent Communicator title. Each of the 12 speech will train you on different aspects such as voice control, body language, control content, etc. I have just recently attempted my 1st speech and will tell you about it later.
   
   
6. Evaluations and Feedback. Every speech (items 1 to 5), will be evaluated. Apart from giving speeches, you're also trained to listen and encouraged to give constructive feedback. This is quite a challenge as well because everyone can criticise, but not everyone knows how to give constructive feedback because this is a skill. Like others, you'd want to hear what are your shortcomings and where are the angles that you need to improve on, but like all human beings we have feelings; if you criticise too much, you'd kill that person's spirit and motivation. On the other hand, if you shower too much praise that person will learn nothing. So, the evaluator needs to know the right amount of praise and criticism to be mixed together for a good delivery. I'm also learning these skills.
   

First Steps
(That's the title of my first speech)

It took me about half a dozen of meetings and a few times tackling Table Topics before I felt comfortable and brave enough to attempt my first TM assignment. I was approached twice by my VP, but I politely gave a million of excuses to postpone it. The third time is always a charm (I guess looking at my trend of taking actions).

I started to write the first draft earlier in the week and ended up with 3 different version of speeches. One was 2 pages long that felt like a script for a stand up comedy performance, the other was written in a sort of a musical-esque kind of way, and the third one was only written when I decided the first two was too much, too long and way too ridiculous.

I started off with an old Malay proverb as an Introduction - you will not be able to love something if you don't know it. Then I blabbed about my birth place, family and hometown. I continued with a joke about Taiping - during rainy season it rains the whole day, during a normal season it rains at least twice a day and during a dry season it only rains once a day. (please, please tell me that's funny, if not I have made a fool out of myself and got sympathetic laughs from the audience). I followed through the theme (Puppy Love) by sharing my first ever crush when I was a little girl, which is B.C. , guess, guess. (interesting enough my evaluator shares the same first name with him, Bernard. lol.). Then I shared my first driving experience and first vehicular accident (or rather a scratch only). And finally I ended with a proverb, 'The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step' and this is my first step into becoming a Competent Communicator.

That was my speech, all in 5 mins 33 seconds, 27 seconds shy from the time limit (6 mins). It was fairly alright given that I started of a bit shaky trying to control my nerves, I stumbled over a few words, my mind goes blank a few times but was saved by my little note and maybe was trying too hard to maintain eye contact with everyone in the room. I was also said to be quite monotonous, which I think is true. Well, I still have a long way to go, 11 more speeches to be in fact.

A toast youngling

It came in the mail today, as I anticipated. The contents read, "Welcome to Toastmasters! Your decision to join a Toasmasters club is a wise one."

I'm getting wiser by the day, and I surprised myself. (To think of the things that you need to do when you know there's not much time left and a lot of opportunities that has not yet been grabbed -kiasu oso lah).

Seems like it's so sudden, but honestly in fact, I've been putting this off for more than 7 years (Procrastination a bad habit that's hard to get rid off).

Hi Teacher (of 7 years ago) and Mr Burns II. FYI, I'm now a young Toast-padawan in training. Please be patient.