Category Archives: Contests

International Speech Contest 2015

Last week, the International Speech Contest within the Toastmasters International Convention took place in Las Vegas. Although the full speeches that competed are not available yet, Toastmasters has released a short clip (3 minutes each) of the three first qualified speeches (remember these speeches normally last around 7 minutes). In spite of not having the full speeches to evaluate them properly, we can still learn a couple of things from these videos for our future speeches.

There is something all three speakers use in their speeches, and they are safe bets when preparing a speech: humor, personal stories and take-away messages. Humor is key to make people feel good while listening to your speech: if you make them laugh, they will like you. A lot has been written about storytelling (it is trendy nowadays), and when those stories are personal, the audience attention increases greatly. Take-away messages are key to reinforce the message you have been leading the audience to, and are a nice way to finish a speech.

The third place was for Manoj Vasudevan with a speech called “We Can Fix It“.

The title is extremely important here, as it is the motto of the speech, which seems to have been repeated many times during the speech. This makes the audience learn the key message and provides the speaker a tool to interact with them, even leaving the audience say the two last words in the speech. Another nice example is when he refers to Niha, a character of the second speaker, which shows empathy with both the previous speaker, and the audience, who is now friends with Niha.

The second place has been for Aditya Maheswaran, with his speech “Scratch“.

Aditya’s way to interact with the audience is the classical rhetorical question. He uses it at least twice during his speech. First time is when he starts his speech “Do you remember your first big gift to yourself?“, and in that moment the audience is remembering it and engaged with the speech. The second time he uses this resource is when he asks the audience “When did you scratch another person?“, which is probably a way to recover anyone who might not be with him at that point of the speech, while allowing him to insert a long pause, which also helps them breath before the end of the speech… and after the question, he connects again with the audience, by making a small joke to everyone in the room when talking about the Sergeant at Arms.

The winner is Mohammed Qahtani, with “The Power of Words“.

For me, his opening is just fantastic. He uses a simple prop (a cigarette) and does not say a word for too many seconds (considering he is in a public speaking contest). Instead, he communicates by staring the audience with his eyes extremely open. Then, starts providing a lot of facts about smoking, surprising everybody and confusing some others (I can imagine the doctors in the room shaking their heads), ending with a touch of humor “data which I just made up“. The rest of the (cut) speech does not inspire me a lot of comments, but I see he concludes the speech with the cigarette again. This is a very nice and simple way to provide structure to a speech: link the opening with the conclusion in such an evident way as possible.

What do you see in these speeches? Feel free to comment this post with your view.

PS: Remember that if you want to see other International Speech Contest Winners, you can check our section in this web.

Written by Nacho

Club Speech and Evaluation Contests

wpid-20150304_205405.jpg On March 4th we held our Club speech and evaluation contests. The meeting had been efficiently prepared by Raquel, who also acted as Contest Chairwoman. A number of club members volunteered in the supporting roles. The meeting run smoothly, in the same friendly atmosphere as always.

Both contests reflected the high level of the club members. At the speech contest, we enjoyed the pitches delivered by Eric, Jane and Teresa, who was brave enough to enter also the evaluation contest, this one together with Luciana and Jaime. Each of the speakers managed to enthrall the audience, each one with a very different topic and style. Not an easy job for the judges, who declared Eric the winner of the contest, followed by Jane. The variety of the chosen topics, the differences in the presentation techniques and the feelings that all speeches aroused on us reflect the high level of our club members.

Despite the careful organisation of the meeting, the planned test speaker for the evaluation contest did not show up and Nacho volunteered to replace him. His was a truly impromptu speech, focused on informing about the Division Conference to be held the last weekend in April, where Toastmasters from all clubs in Spain will meet in Madrid to compete in these same categories at national level. There will also be workshops to develop our leadership and public speaking skills, as well as networking activities.

Teresa, Luciana and Jaime showed their command of evaluations by giving very comprehensive, structured and productive syntheses of the test speech. They highlighted both the most remarkable aspects of the speech, and those few issues that could have been improved, indicating explicitly how that could have been done. Another tall order for the judges, who declared Jaime winner, with Luciana ranking in second place.

We all had great fun and learned a lot by listening to the contestants, both in the speech and in the evaluation contests. The next step for the winners (who are now part of the club’s Hall of Fame) will be the Area Contest on 11th April, where they will compete against the other Madrid clubs’ winners for a seat in the Division Contest.

Written by Alberto.

Spring Contests in Toastmasters Madrid

In less than one month, on 4th March, our club will celebrate a special meeting, the Spring Contest (although we are a bit ahead of time this year and the club contest will be celebrated still in Winter). Contests are a great opportunity to put in practice all your public speaking skills, in a special set up. We are still in the safe laboratory where you can explore your limits, but the adrenaline of competing plays a role that everyone should try, and we can assure you that if you try it once, you will repeat.

Area Contest - Jose winningContests are a way to explore your boundaries, and cross them, especially if you win and compete at Area Level (Madrid), Division Level (Spain) or District level (South Europe). It is also a great way to get stage time, which is a fantastic strategy to grow as a speaker, as we all know in Toastmasters. As everything in Toastmasters, contests are plenty of fun and emotions, both for the contestants and for the audience, that get moved by the speakers.

Spring Contest comprises two different contests: International Speech Contest, and Evaluation Contests. The first one consists of 7-minute speeches with all the ingredients to engage the audience into it. A target speaker delivers a speech that the Evaluation contest participants will then evaluate in a 3-4 minutes evaluation.

If you are thinking about taking part in this great event, contact our VP Education a.s.a.p. to secure your seat in the contests. If you still have doubts or need some inspiration, take a look to the following resources: