Shades of Grey

It’s been an interesting 24 hours, I discovered that I can do a mean Martin Luther King, maybe I should rephrase that, I do not and have never considered Martin Luther King to be a mean man, in fact he did seem quite generous with his time and his passion, and when I say passion I don’t intend to imply that he was involved with any women but his wife, oh, yeah, maybe I should start again…

Last night, I, the pasty white Irishman, possibly the whitest man in the world, so white that when I show people my tan they think that I look normal colour – in fact they have even been known to mock my tan, that is until I roll up my sleeve and blind them with my glaring whiteness! But that doesn’t shut them up, they usually start screaming “My eyes, my eyes!”. The effect is usually temporary, after night in hospital and several days in a dark room they generally regain 95% of their sight…

Where was I going with this?

Ah yes, last night, I, in all my apparent whiteness gave my interpretation of what is considered one of the best American speeches ever given. It was interesting, not my typical speech. I normally give nice quiet speeches which are educational, possibly interesting or even mildy amusing, all given in soft playful tones which is why I thought it would be a bit of challenge doing a speech that was given to 250,000 civil rights marchers – it’s just not me!

The idea was that I would give an interpretive reading of a great speech, it meant that instead of spending time working on constructing a speech, all I had to do was work out the best way to deliver a pre-written speech…

Easy! Or so you would think…

There is some work involved, first you need to choose a speech and I had a few in mind, nice quiet speeches that were ideal for me but then last week I was browsing the internet and I came across “I have a dream” and I was instantly captivated by it. It is an exercise in speechcraft, without even hearing the speech (and for some reason I have never heard the speech), I could see the beauty and impressiveness of the speech, the use of repetition, the use of familiar phrases and quotes and the use of powerful emotional language makes it a fabulous work of art.

I threw away the other possibilities and decided that this was the one.

It was a crazy decision, how could I, a novice public speaker do justice to such a great man’s word? It was probably the most difficult speech that I’ve done, it took me so far out of my comfort zone that I’m not sure if I’ll find my way back!

When he or his team were writing the speech I’m convinced that if they noticed they were using a word shorter than three syllables then out came the thesaurus and they found a larger, harder to pronouce word to use instead, it was hell! My nemesis was the word “unalienable”, I just couldn’t say it, my tongue would swell up and be uncoordinated and it ended up being “unblehblahable”, I discovered that the only way I could say it was to say it really really slowly syllable by syllable and then of course afterwards people came up and told me how much they liked the way I said “unalienable”!

The other challenge was bringing the power and volume to my voice, that was difficult, I felt really self-conscious, roaring out his message, even at home – I was worried I would disturb the neighbours so instead I was delivering the speech slightly louder, it wasn’t too convincing but somehow I felt that I’d be able to be loud on the night and strangely I was, it was fascinating to hear myself do it, to see that I could do it, it was intense.

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Speaking Out

Friday rolls around and it’s time for the International Speech and Evaluation Contest.

Like the crazed lunatic that I am, I put myself down as a contestant for both contests. The speech that had been written on Wednesday never really got learnt, I was going to have to wing it…

We’d originally had 12 people signed up to compete in the speech contest but as it got closer to the contest these numbers began to dwindle, which was bad because it took away from the competition but good because we had serious time problems trying to fit them all into the evening and alsobecause it increased my chances of winning something. In the end we had six contestants, all giving strong speeches, it was very hard to judge how well or badly I’d done.

But there was little time to wonder about this as immediately after the speech contest, the evaluation contest began. For this, one person gets up and gives a speech. The contestants listen attentively and then afterwards  we’re given five minutes to write up our notes. This is quite tough, only five minutes to analyse the speech given, looking for things done well, things that need some improvement and giving suggestions for making the speech even better, all this and it has to be given in a structured sensitive way, all in five minutes. At the end of the five minutes your notes are confiscated and you don’t get them back until it’s your turn to go in and speak.

I’m never that confident about my evaluations, I think it’s because I’m still learning, I’m always worried about hurting someone’s feelings by being too harsh (honest) so maybe in a way that helps me give a more sensitive evaluation.

After all the evaluations were given, it was time to wait and see what results the judges would have conjured up and they were as always surprising, people who should have been in the top three weren’t there and even more surprising, I got into the top three in both contests, and the same position too – 2nd. Not sure how I managed that!

The top two of each contest go on to represent the club at the Area contest, maybe this time I’ll be able to put in more preparation….

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Speech Construction

All through my travels through Singapore and Malaysia over Chinese New Year, there was a consistent thought at the back of my mind – Toastmasters. Not just because I have a little bit of a toastmaster addiction but also because between last Friday and this Friday I have to give two speeches and help organise a competition.

I spent my travels trying to think about topics for the speeches, I probably wrote and rejected several speeches, none of them ever good enough, my prospective listeners would have high expectations of my speeches but because of the type of speeches they were.

The first speech was my 10th official speech with Toastmasters, a very significant speech. It’s longer, 8 to 10 minutes, and for me the project was much more difficult “Inspire Your Audience”, I had plenty of ideas – the wonder of travel, eat your way around the world, the heroes of antarctic exploration, my father, ordinary inspirational people but none of them seemed to fit. Finally I decided on telling the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby and that worked, it had the right level of triumph over adversity that people find inspiring.

Last Friday I stood up and gave the speech. It wasn’t my best delivery, mainly because I’d had a fit of inspiration at lunchtime on Friday and decided to rewrite large parts of my speech. The problem with that is that it didn’t give me a whole lot of time to remember the new text! I got through it and met my objectives. I am now a CC, or Competant Communicator.

It feels a bit weird to have reached the goal that I’ve been aiming for ever since I joined Toastmasters, to have become one of the advanced speakers in the club while there are members who joined before me who haven’t achieved this distinction yet.

Now that I have the CC, is that it? No, not all all, I have 15 advanced manuals to choose from, they cover a wide range of topics so there’s plenty to keep me busy. I’m thinking of next working on the manuals for Storytelling and Interpretive Reading, they both suit me well and should be interesting to work on.

But first, I have a speech on Friday to prepare. I wrote this speech a couple of weeks ago but it’s wasn’t right. On Monday I began rewriting it. Yesterday I threw out the rewritten speech and changed the focus entirely, it’s a lot stronger but it does give me only 24 hours to learn it! And in those 24 hours I also have to work, sleep and finish off the last minute organsation for the speech competition, it’s going to be hectic 24 hours!

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Baby Food

I seem to always find myself in the position in Toastmasters where I either have a long quiet period where I don’t speak or else I have a whole bunch of speeches all at once. This is one of the latter…

Between now and the 20th Feb I have to write and deliver three speeches.

Well, I don’t HAVE to but I want to!

I have one written but the other two are still very vague…

One is for the project called “Inspire your Audience”, this is a tough one, I have no idea how to inspire anyone, least of all myself so I’m looking at loads of ideas but so far none have grabbed me, I keep thinking of speeches given by generals just before their troups go in battle and get themselves killed, something along the lines of Braveheart “You can take our lives but you can’t take our freedom!”, or else I’m wondering if I can base a whole speech around Oscar Wilde’s quote “We are all lying in the gutter but some of us are staring at the stars”, not sure yet.

The other is for the club speech contest, and has to be a solid, possibly serious topic, I’m thinking of talking about hunger and poverty and outlining the solution as Swifts “A modest proposal” where he suggests that the poor sell their excess babies as a new culinary delicacy for the rich, population control and eliminating hunger all in one fell swoop! With such a black and satirical speech there’s no possible way I could win, I just want to do it to see the reactions on people’s faces!

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Gathering wood

Last Friday evening was a different type of Toastmasters, different because I was the toastmaster of the evening, I was in charge.

It’s a different experience organising an entire meeting instead of merely being a particpant. I had to get people to speak, people to evaluate and others to fill the various other support roles. I had to come up with a theme for the evening, write introductions for all the speakers and participants, and even buy awards to give to the best participants.

Being a manager seems to be a lot more creative in Toastmasters.

I started planning this evening two months ago which apparently is shockingly far in advance for our toastmasters group. The reason I started so early is that I wanted the speakers to have enough time to write a speech that would fit in with my theme for the evening. Naturally most of them only wrote their speech a week or two before the meeting but it’s good to give them notice.

The theme was “Campfire Tales”, a perfect opportunity to sit around and tell stories, a whole evening of storytelling, what could be better?

There were looks of bemusement as I took away the tables and chairs, after all you can’t have a campfire with people sitting at tables, it has to be on the ground in a circle and that’s how I had them, on the ground, just like we did in primary school.

They seemed to take it in good spirits and I think the evening went fairly well…

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Talk talk talk

Sometimes I feel that I go on a bit too much about Toastmasters, like one of these born-again Christians who are always telling you how much better their life is since they met Jesus and all I can do is stop myself from rolling my eyes to heaven at such remarks yet here I am preaching the words of the Master of Toast (mmmmm, toast….)

On Friday I gave my eighth speech.

I’m beginning to get a bit self-concious about the number of speeches I’ve completed so far, I’ve done eight speeches in 5 months, that’s a lot, some people only do four or five in one year. It sounds really stupid but sometimes I worry that people will think I’m a bit of a swot for completing so many speeches!

The main reaction is “wow, you’ve done that many speeches”, maybe I should slow down a little but it’s so much fun and I’m keen to start on the projects in the advanced manuals, there one manual that is about reading out loud where you read poems, stories, a famous speech and even act out a play, it’s sounds like great fun, I can’t wait to start on that!

Friday evening was really good, it was at the Amsterdam Toastmasters at the Hilton, the place where I gave my first ever speech, so in a way it was a kind of a homecoming and I was curious to see how much I have progressed since then.

I gave a speech called “Taking Better Photos”, the project was designed to help me learn about working with visual aids and props, so naturally photography and showing off my photos seemed like a good idea.

As I’ve become happier with the progress I’ve made with my photos and their increasing quality, a seed of an idea has been slowing germinating, that maybe sometime in the future I could become a photography teacher. This was the first step.

There was no point talking about aperture and shutter speed, I needed to pick three quick tips that people without fancy cameras like mine could use. I settled on three simple ideas:

1. Stop and think about the picture you want before even taking out your camera.

2. Control your background, try to eliminating any distracting elements and if possible use a plain mono-colour background to highlight your subject.

3. The rule of thirds – composition, putting your photo together to give it strength and balance.

It went really well and I was very surprised by the reaction I got from my listeners, some of them used the words “inspirational” which was very interesting since I hadn’t intended it to be that way at all. One people even said I was overacting a little, which was great since I’ve never ever in my whole life been accused of that!

It was so good that I’ve been on a high ever since…

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More Talk Talk

It’s toastmaster’s time again and this evening instead of being an evaluator ( which went okay last time, my evaluatee wasn’t devastated by my comments, always a plus!) I get an easy job – speaker!

This time I have stayed away from my comfortable speeches where I teach a concept or tell a story because this project is called “Research Your Topic” and so I had to learn about something I didn’t know, I chose Economic Sanctions (something light and easy to digest).

This is what I plan to say:

————————————————————————————

Do Sanctions Work?

Sanctions. In the news we hear a lot about imposing sanctions on countries like Iraq, Burma or Zimbabwe but we never hear what happens next. What effect does imposing sanctions have on a country or government?

In short, do sanctions work?

————–

What are economic sanctions?

An economic sanction is any restriction imposed by one or more countries on trade with another country in order to persuade the target country’s government to change a policy.

i.e. Limiting trade or investment into or out of the country
(we won’t buy your products and you can’t have ours)

But wait, if we don’t buy their products, what does that mean for their economy?
————–

This is the weapon.

By restricting trade, we’re effectively putting the country under siege. Companies in the target country will lose money or go out of business, reducing tax income, increasing unemployment and creating an unhappy population. The theory is that these pressures will force the government to change their policies.

How well does this work in practice?

Let’s look at some examples:

————–

Cuba:

The US has imposed sanctions on Cuba for over 40 years.

The purpose was to oust Castro.

He’s still there.

Kofi Annan has described sanctions as a blunt and even counter-productive weapon.

Cuba is a prime example of this. Imposing sanctions on Cuba gave Castro the ultimate weapon, he could blame all the countries problems on the US.

They made him stronger, they strengthened him by providing an external enemy to unite against.

————–

Burma

15 years of sanctions imposed by Western nations.

The aim, the freeing of political prisoners and democratic elections.

The result – no elections, no releases.

Here the effect of the sanctions was limited, Burma’s main trading partners were India, China and Thailand, so lack of trade with the West hardly affected it!

————–

Iraq

13 years of UN sanctions.

The result – nothing.

Well, when I say nothing, I mean the sanctions didn’t hurt those in power.

Instead they had an effect on everyone else – the poor and disadvantaged.

They suffered.

The estimates vary and it’s hard to get exact figures but it’s estimated that at least 100,000 children died from the poverty, malnutrition and disease caused by the imposition of the sanctions.

We, the international community, killed 100,000 Iraqi children.

Here again the sanctions were counter-productive, imposing sanctions hurt the very people we were trying to help.

————–

But sanctions can work too.

They worked in South Africa.
As a result of sanctions Apartheid was abolished.

They worked because they hurt the influential white middle class and they pressurised the government to change.

But it took 12 years for the sanctions to work. Economic sanctions are not a quick fix, I compared them to a siege and that’s the perfect analogy, you surround your enemy and wait for them to starve and surrender.

————–

I can quote examples of the successes and failures of sanctions all night but what are the hard facts?

The most common number thrown around is 33.

That is, when sanctions have been imposed, they were successful 33% of the time and even then they were mainly only partially successful.

That 33% covers the period from 1914-1990, if we look at the period from 1973 onwards the success rate drops to 24%

One more positive figure concerns the effect of threatening sanctions.
In the period 1975-1994 sanctions were threatened by the US 84 times, here the threats had a 56% success rate.
As you can see the threat of sanctions is still a very effective weapon

But if the threat is ignored then imposing the sanctions will probably be a waste of time….

————–

The idea for this speech came from a trip to Burma two years ago where I saw first-hand the effects sanctions were having on the country.

I wanted to see how successful sanctions really were.

I wanted to know – do sanctions work?

Not really, they can work in some cases but in general they cause nothing but hardship and suffering and in answering this question it prompts another question:

Should we impose economic sanctions?

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The Evaluator

I’ve mentioned many roles that a non-speaking toastmaster can take up during a Toastmasters meeting but the one role that fills me with dread is that of the Evaluator and tonight, that’s me, The Evaluator.

You see, you don’t just get up, give your speech and it’s all over. Every speaker is assigned an evaluator, the evaluator listens to your speech and then later on in the meeting they get up and they tell you what they think.

Scary, isn’t it?

But fear not, the Toastmasters is an “American” concept so evaluations are not quite as scary as they might have been. Evaluators must harness the power of positive feedback and only say nice things, no bad things at all, not even a little one which perhaps takes the fun out of it when you’re an evaluator. They favour the sandwich method, two nice things and in-between a slightly less nice comment, we in the business like to term it as a “point for improvement”.

Indeed, a point for improvement is a sneaky way of saying something bad but you can get away with it if you put a positive spin on it at the end, comments like “the speech was horrendous but perhaps next time you could give it at home”? (the inflection of a question also takes the edge off)

Tonight I get to evaluate not just any speech, to have the opportunity to send someone accidentally home in tears, no, tonight I get to evaluate an ice-breaker, someone’s first ever speech with toastmasters where a bad evaluation could result in them never ever speaking in public again!

So no pressure then!

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Scrambled Speaking

It was an interesting experience last night, as it got closer to my time to speak I got more and more nervous. This was a bit of a surprise.

I’ve been getting a bit cocky lately, thinking that as long as I was well prepared there was nothing to stop me from giving an amazing speech. Instead it was merely the comfort of speaking in front of people I’m comfortable with.

Last night was a welcome dose of reality, though nerves don’t always help when giving a speech, they make you forget things, make you more aware of how good or bad the speech is going and this awareness only provokes you to make mistakes and forget more…

This speech’s project was all about expanding my vocal variety, not speaking at the same pace in the same tone but slowing down and speeding up, changing pitch and tone, using pauses effectively. It was really difficult for me as this has been highlighted as a problem when I speak and I’m never sure how to remedy it.

This was my challenge, I chose a story, not because story-telling is fun and easy for me but simply because I felt it suited the project guidelines. I told a story that I’ve already told in the blog about a white-water rafting trip, it allowed for a lot of variety – slow to build up the tension then very fast when battling the rapids, the opportunity to do the different voices of the people in our group (always a bad idea since my accents are awful, good for a word or two and then change, badly!) but I wasn’t entirely happy with it, it could have been better and the nerves certainly had an effect.

Was I my harshed critic? Probably.

Was the speech enjoyed and appreciated by the audience? Definitely.

Sometimes I notice that subtley doesn’t go down well in Toastmasters, there are rules, and doing something a little different (not that my way was really that different) doesn’t always sit well with some of the listeners. My evaluator firstly misheard me when I said “rapids”, instead she heard “rabbits”, confusing her greatly, god only knows what was going through her head when I talked about doing battle with white-water rabbits!

She seemed to have missed a lot of the vocal variety that I had in, really obvious vocal variety and afterwards she told me that my speech was only about one thing, rafting – rafting, rafting, rafting, (it was a story about me having a near-death experience rafting so I wasn’t sure how I could have reduced the rafting aspects of the tale). She wanted more lead up, more “la, la, la, while travelling through Ecuador, I took a white-water rafting trip, it was dangerous, ooooooo, scary” etc, she felt I should have talked about signing an accident disclaimer. I couldn’t help but think how dull and boring my speech would have been with all this unnecessary detail, I had dived in at the pertinent point, told the story and got out again, there was no flab but Toastmasters like to have a lead in and lead out, it makes them happy!

Another aspect that toastmasters seem to want is people to totally ham it up when talking, subtley never seems to be encouraged – you can’t be subtle, there may be less gifted members of the audience who would miss it and we want our clubs to be inclusionist and not exclusionist!

Last night I gave a speech that had the audience at the end of their seats, not really knowing if I would be alive or dead by the end of end of the story yet being aware that a perfectly healthy version of me was telling the story, in a way I guess you could consider it a success.

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Telling Tales

It’s almost become an addiction.

And the worst part of this addiction is that I’ve changed, no longer can I convince people that I’m really shy and quiet, people see me up there on the stage giving a speech and they see this other person, another me.

And the scary bit is that maybe I am becoming that other me, I love the whole process of speaking, the creativity of writing and preparing a speech, the crafting of words, tones and body language and the fun of performing a speech in front of an audience (and performing it is, a little bit of acting is essential).

Now I’ve stepped up the stakes, in the next 6 weeks I will deliver four different speeches in front of three different toastmasters clubs, yes the addiction has moved up a level, now I’m out preaching my words to not just my own group but to anyone I can get to listen…

It begins tonight in Amsterdam with a tale of scrambled gringos…

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