Tuesday, March 13, 2007

My Icebreaker Speech experience!

I had my Icebreaker (first speech) at Toastmasters on last Sunday. It was a great learning experience not in the routine way. Icebreaker speech is the first speech to introduce the speaker to the group and identify scope for improvement. The objectives for preparing the speech are clearly defined in the manual and that helps you structure your speech.

I was assigned a mentor and the mentor called me up a few days before the week, gave an outline of how I should proceed, the speech structure, opening & closing and took me through a site http://www.ted.com which had great audio/video files of some great speeches . He taught me how to measure the time by just writing the speech in Arial font 10 size in an MS Word document. I was quite surprised that my mentor took so much time out of his schedule to explain me these things and later even review my speech through a couple of iterations. Not just this, he was even excited to go for a dry run and wanted me to get prepared well.

I decided on giving Icebreaker on Tuesday night and got it confirmed on Wednesday. I took some time and tried to write something about myself. I was very busy through out the week and could not spend much time in fine tuning it. The speech was in some presentable form on Friday and realized on Saturday that I was only 50% ready when I first try to give a mock. After giving a couple of mocks, I timed the speech to be about 9 minutes when the alloted time is between 4-6 minutes. It was a tough task to cut down the speech from 9 minutes to 6 minutes maintaining the flow and covering all aspects of my life.

When I reached the Toastmasters venue, I was even more surprised as another member enquired about my speech and volunteered to listen to it when I told him that I couldnt give a dry run to my mentor. He heard my speech and gave a very positive feedback which helped ease my nervousness. With so many inputs and so much of help, there was no way that I could not do the speech well. I did it well and even won the Best Speech award. Not bad, I can speak too!

Wait, the good things arent finished yet. My mentor even sent me an extensive mail after my speech giving the feedback how my speech went on. This was the best & most valuable feedback somebody ever gave me.

Wowww! Isnt it amazing? I cant just wait for my next speech :)

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

And you forgot to mention the certificate you got presented for the speech of the day. Pretty kool!

***Dig Alert***
I always knew you could speak, figuring how to stop you from speaking has been a bigger problem. :)

Well done! Nice to read detailed updates from you on Toastmasters. Rithesh too had interesting post on the Toastmasters recently.

Kudos!
Anshuman

Anonymous said...

Public Speaking is one such activity where any person has to improve. Most of us might be able to talk well with a group of people around us. Talking in front of a huge crowd and conveying the points in a right and presentable manner is very important.
And i think, Toastmasters aim at helping people improve their skills by giving them various assigments and projects and helping them to improve in every possible way.
Hope that u wud go a gr8 way ahead, and the way u started off is mindblowing. Keep the good job goin!! All the Best. Hope to c more reviews about ur toasmoasters and many more about your achievements.

Anonymous said...

Pavan,

A great, inspiring speech! Am your fan ;)

-RP

Krishnan said...

It was a really nice experience for me to hear your ice-breaker. I am really looking forward to your next speech. Mentorship is one really positive thing that I observed in HTM. I guess it comes naturally when everybody looks at Toastmaster's as a forum where they can learn something, everytime they meet.

PS: Its a great feeling to know that you liked my speech at Deloitte. :-)

Pavan Pochu said...

Thanks Krishnan! I am giving my second speech in the coming meetup.

Krishnan said...

oohhh bad yaar...I will not be able to attend the next meetup :-(

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