Sep 19

A Winning Speech vs. An Excellent Speech

Fellow blogger and speaker Eric Feng made an interesting post over at The Public Speaking Blog back in August on whether an award-winning speech at Toastmasters can be considered an excellent speech. Here’s how the article opens:

“A couple of days ago, I raved about having a female winner for the International Speech Contest held by Toastmasters International. This competition is akin to the Olympics of public speaking. Anyhow, one of the readers (Simon from UK) commented that “a Toastmasters competition is not the best way to measure skills as a public speaker…” and he sees “competitions as a bit too artificial to give a decent idea”…” Continue reading

Sep 16

Sisterhood – the Brit-Kiwi Comedy

A couple of years back I was fortunate enough to appear in a film. Now, after a Hollywood film festival this past summer, it’s now got a limited cinema release next month at the Odeon in Panton Street, just off Leicester Square. I don’t have one of the starring roles, I do appear right at the end as a lawyer (yes, I DO have dialogue). So if you do get to see it I know it’ll be torture for you to wait for my big screen debut until the end, but I’m sure you’ll survive.

Here’s the word on the street re the film: Continue reading

Sep 09

Humorous Speech Workshop

I ran a humorous speech workshop at my Toastmasters club Grosvenor Square Speakers last night. It’s a little bit difficult in London at the moment because the majority of the workshops for this contest season happened on the same day. There were others I wanted to attend, but had my own to run… Continue reading

Sep 05

Winning Public Speaking Contests

The London Speaker blog has kindly re-published a post I made on this blog from earlier this year. That post, which you can read by clicking on the link, was about creating a winning mindset and finding ways to “tip the balance” in your favour when you enter into a contest. Continue reading

Sep 05

Public Speaking: Table Topics Tips

I’ve been thinking about one of my favourite forms of theatre – the Commedia dell’ Arte and I think there are some important lessons for us to take away for our table topics sessions at Toastmasters.

Brief bit of history; in Western theatre there have been two traditions, the scripted and memorised and the improvised. In the scripted and memorised tradition would fall playwrights such as Moliere, Shakespeare, Wilde and numerous more modern examples such as Patrick Marber, Frederico Garcia Lorca and Mark Ravenhill.
Continue reading