What Do You Think?

• Your ideas matter! Which educational presentations will help you to achieve your goals? Several members of our club will be doing educational presentations over the next few months to meet the requirements of the Competent Leader and Advanced Toastmaster/Communicator-Silver awards. Let us know what you think. Please use the comments feature of this blog to tell us which topics are most interesting to you.
• Impromptu Speaking
• Selecting Your Topic
• How to be a Successful Mentor
• Introducing a Speaker with Style
• Preparation and Practice
• Parliamentary Procedure
• Leadership Excellence (one of the series)
• Other (you tell us)
• Effective Evaluations ... (Presented by Marc on March 9)

Circle of Gold

Our Circle of Gold is a small group of CTI members who have committed to taking their speaking to the next level by workshopping 5-7 minute speech projects over a two month period. Last year's Circle of Gold members experienced exhilaration when they presented their project speeches and felt they had delivered their personal best.
At the end of January 2006, we started our 2-month journey by brainstorming our speech topic ideas and key messages. Each of the members said afterwards that this was extremely valuable as it helped to ensure that we were very clear about what we wanted to say and what we wanted the audience to take home (the gift).
In the weeks to come, we will workshop our work-in-progress speeches to bring out the best in our speech writing (content, humour, relevance, language) and delivery (use of voice, gestures and staging). We have committed to presenting our speeches at CTI sometime in late March or early April.
If you would like to find out more about CTI's Circle of Gold, please contact Darlene at info@techtalkers.org.

Tips for Table Topics

You know the situation. You are up at the front of the room trembling in front of the audience and you have 1-2 minutes to answer the Toastmaster's question coherently. Here are four tips to increase your success in table topics (impromptu speaking). 1) Take a few seconds before you start speaking to focus and decide what message you plan to share with the audience. 2) Open with a statement that succinctly describes your topic and where you plan to go. 3) In the body of the speech, make 2-3 clear points and support them with stories, examples or facts. 4) Wrap up the package by pulling all the pieces together with a clear concluding statement. Bonus tip: Have fun! Your fellow Toastmasters are cheering for you.