The home of advanced speaking in China…
Just a reminder that
Some highlights:
- Marco Meng presenting “Find Your Voice and Inspire Others to Find Theirs”
- Syna Ruan presenting “A Group of 99″
- Dan Smith delivering the first half of The Moment of Truth
You’ll love it.
A bit after 7pm at Baileman (near Jing’an) – here is CAT’s agenda for 24 July. See you there.
Speaking to groups of people can be greatly challenging. Not only can the skills be technically and cognitively demanding, but adopting an appropriate style can be very difficult. American President Franklin Delanor Roosevelt achieved quite a remarkable feat in his Fireside Chat radio broadcasts – connecting with ordinary people over the radio in a way that we find hard to fathom these days. Yet his method was simple.
Speak to one person… well, speak as if you were speaking to just one person. Then use technology to leverage your communication so that you can speak to massive groups.
Connect and communicate with your audience… one at a time.
There’s more about this here.
First impressions last.
The first experiences we have with a person, idea or organisation have a disproportionately large impact upon our thinking. It’s one of the ways in which we are irrational. But it is predictable and real.
This week, to start the new Toastmasters year, we are going to be welcoming our newest member, Chris Haynes CC to deliver his first Advanced speech.
We will also be welcoming the high energy Spike Gu CC for a Dramatic Talk from The Entertaining Speaker Manual.
And we will be welcoming experienced Toastmaster, Daniel Smith DTM, for a training session that might be entitled “Impact: How to grab your audience by the throat!”
Amongst other things of course… looking forward to seeing you in room 712 of the Baileman this Thursday night!
Each of the speech projects in the Toastmasters education program is specifically crafted to help develop your speaking skills in a particular fashion. When I started speaking, I just wanted to talk and have people listen to me – I didn’t really pay careful attention to the specific learning points from each project. But that meant that I wasted a lot of the learnings that I could have received!
Many speeches very much miss the point. Sometimes its because the speaker didn’t understand the langauge used in the project. But mostly it’s more laziness. When you’re delivering a speech, care for your audience enough to read through the manual – make notes on that book so that your evaluator can see that you actively read the pages and have thought about how you can incorporate the lessons.
Maybe it’s a bit of a challenge, but it’s the best way to get the most from your Toastmasters experience – and not just waste your audiences’ and your own time.
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