Jaison Wilson, VPPR
Past President, Mindful Communicators
Win by Losing
This year I was very fortunate to compete at the District Level of the International Speech Competition. I did not place but walked away with the most important thing that a person can win after losing. Knowledge of what to improve on the next time. It is easy to wonder what went wrong but I have to look at what I did right first by looking at the list of goals I made before I started on this journey.
This list was based on analyzing what I felt were the best traits to emulate from successful speeches. The reason why I made the list was that I noticed that from the times I had completed before, all my speeches sounded the same but with a different message. I wanted to force myself to break my habits. Here were my list of goals.
- Make sure you are not the hero in the speech. (That was harder to do than I thought)
- Use a prop and create a simple metaphor.
- With the characters, I create, make them distinct from each other through voice, body posture, and gesture.
- Maximize the virtual stage. Side to side and forward and backward.
- Work on the person growth portion more clearly as well as take-a-way message.
- Have the story be about the relationship of two people to make it easier to establish a timeline.
- Try not to have the speech come off as a performance. Make characters feel relatable.
Amazingly enough, I accomplished all my goals in greater ways than I could have ever imagined. Then what went wrong? At the ninth club, I practiced my speech, during the zoom meeting we had round-robin feedback. I started talking to the club members in a relaxed fashion about how much I had grown during the competition from the great feedback I was given. One of the members of the club said I like how you sound right now more than how you were during your speech. You should try to sound more like that. Many of the other experienced Toastmasters agree with the person’s comment. In my desire to improve as a speaker using all of these techniques, somewhere along the way I lost my authenticity. I knew my journey with the competition was going to end soon because authenticity will always win out over well-crafted techniques. Combine that with good writing and you have a story that moves people.
So what does that mean for my goals this year? Work on my weakness. If you look back at my list from this past year you don’t see: Creating a story that connects with the audience. That is because I was trying to use these techniques to accomplish it. My weakness is the story. I can tell because of how much I admire it when I see others do it so well. Goals for this year:
- Become what I admire.
- Be authentic through storytelling.
My list is short because within this simple goal there are a lot of complex details that I need to pay attention to.
Let’s all of us this year work on our weaknesses. If we are going to put that much time into our speeches might as well work on what we don’t know how to do rather than repeating what we know. I hope everyone goes further in their journey in the speech contest. Improving our ability to give speeches is why we entered Toastmasters. There is no loser when a person chooses to improve themselves.
Jaison
