Last night was the big night, last night was my Toastmasters’ Icebreaker.
I spent the day terrified and in a muted panic. I’d written several versions of the speech over the last few weeks and when I saw it written down it was good, great even, but as I tried to learn it I discovered that writing beautiful prose does not always make the best speech nor does it make it easy to remember.
Toastmasters have a mentoring programme and I took full advantage of it. I arranged to give my mentor a “advance screening” of the speech. It was only okay and as a proud perfectionist that wasn’t good enough for me. I wasn’t happy with the flow of the speech, I felt the first section was weak and I couldn’t really remember much of what I had tried to learn.
That was Wednesday night. Thursday I spent trying to tweak it, stuff the speech into my head, walk around my apartment talking to myself, each time giving a slightly different speech, trying to cut sections out, it was too long but it was all good and all bad, I didn’t know which to leave in or take out…
Yesterday I was like a caged tiger all day, I could sense disaster looming, it was getting harder and harder to learn the speech, harder to believe that it was all going to go well. I knew that while the speech was me in words, it didn’t sound like me when I spoke. After days of overanalysing, my speech was in shreds and I really didn’t know what was going to happen.
It was in the middle of a long canal walk that I had an idea. Instead of giving the speech, I would give a speech about the speech and the more I thought about it, the more I felt that it fit my style, I could drop in pieces of my prepared speech and pepper it with ad-libs, it was almost a plan.
Another thing that made this Icebreaker different was that I wasn’t giving it to the Utrecht Toastmasters but instead to a mixed group of Amsterdam and Utrecht toastmasters and not in our usual pub but in the Hilton Hotel, Amsterdam! As if the nerves weren’t bad enough!
As it was the Hilton and because I needed some additional psychological armour, I wore my suit. Naturally this caused some bemusement from the Utrecht contingent…
There’s something about the formality of a Toastmasters meeting that helps, you don’t launch into your speech immediately, instead you greet the people there and while you’re greeting them it gives you a little bit of time to get your head together.
It went well, not exactly the best I could do but this was my first speech, I have to leave some room for improvement…
Then later came the evaluation, or rather the evaluations. First there’s the formal official evaluation and I didn’t enjoy that at all, not because there were problems but because he really didn’t have any problems and was praising my speech. I’m not too good at handling compliments especially when I’m in a room full of people and their attention is all directed at me…
The other form of evaluation is where the rest of the audience writes little notes (anonymous or otherwise) with their thoughts or tips on improving. I liked these more, I could read them on the train home with no-one watching me, much better.
They all liked my speech and no-one picked up on my nervousness at all, I guess I’m a better actor than I think I am! They came up with some useful pointers too, such as:
1. Maybe a little padded - I found this one interesting as I was constantly throwing away material as I made my way through the speech but maybe some of my adlibbing laboured a point or two.
2. Pacing - not the speed of my speech but rather me walking around, up and down, round and round, perhaps this is a carry-over from my teaching days but maybe it was the nerves as well.
3. Volume - this has always been a problem when I speak to groups, I was a mumbler for a many a year and it’s still hard to speak louder and project. That said, one comment felt that my soft voice drew him into the story, so maybe I just need to project the soft voice better…
4. Eye-contact - The room was huge, really wide, it was hard to sweep my gaze from one side to the other, this is something I need to work on.
All in all, a terrifying but satisfying experience and I’m already preparing my next speech…