Is Lots of Stage Time Really the Key to Being a Great Speaker?

I recently had a brief email exchange with Darren LaCroix, 2001 World Speaking Champion. He said that I should be speaking once a week at a minimum, even if it’s at Toastmasters. So I’ve decided to take him up on his challenge.

From tomorrow I’m going to visit as many of the London Toastmasters clubs as I can. I was originally a member of two, but had to leave one when I moved to a different part of London, otherwise I would’ve probably been traveling for more than an hour just to get there. So I need to find a secondary club. I know there are two near me as I currently reside in the East End. So I’ll probably pop along to those.

I’d also like to join Excalibur Speakers because they are predominantly a club for Advanced Speakers. But the only thing is they are only a monthly club (most clubs here in London meet twice a month), so that greatly reduces the frequency of stage time. But it would improve my game.

After all, that’s what it’s all ab out – the stage time. The more frequently I get up to speak in front of an audience in no matter what scenario the more my confidence will grow. I’m a pretty confident speaker anyway, my background as a professional actor and a comedian has provided me with the ability to be able to get up in front of a crowd.

But in order for anyone to grow as a speaker that must speak. Kind of makes sense really. If you’re only outlet is Toastmasters use it as the tool that it is. Whether you’re scheduled to do a manual speech, a leadership role, a table topics or you just get to stand up as a guest at the end of the evening and say how much you enjoyed being at the club that evening, stage time is stage time.

When Darren LaCroix was preparing for the World Championship not only did you frequent many different clubs honing his championship speech, but he also took it into comedy clubs too. That way he’d really get to see what bits were working and which bit weren’t.

For those of you who don’t know, LaCroix’s a humorous speaker with a background as a stand-up. So it made complete sense for him to get comedy club gigs and really hone his speech down. So not only did he work out the timing of the laughs, but he also got tonnes and tonnes of stage time.

You’ll find that there are similarities amongst the top speakers in the world. apart from earning large some of money and helping out business or educational establishments. One, is that they write on a daily basis, as Eric Feng pointed out recently over on The Public Speaking Blog. The other is that they speak – frequently. You can’t hope to develop as a stand-up or as a speaker with getting up on to a stage or platform and do the thing that you say you do.

I myself speak fairly frequently. But I think it’ll be nice for me to try and crank things up a notch or two. I’m going to try and track my progress here. But obviously, I might have to take the odd day off from my mission to see my friends and family. With any luck i’ll be able to meet some of the other London speakers that I’ve recently been in touch with via this blog.