Conference | Toastmasters Madrid – Public Speaking and Leadership Club

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

Toastmasters is a Communication and Leadership Club, but also the best Teamwork Club, where their members deliver fascinating speeches to their targeted audience. Raquel, our Toastmaster of the Day, put speakers together last Wednesday to accomplish these magic goals, that is, members and evaluators outperform communication and leadership by teamwork.

Javier, our first speaker, delighted us talking about “things are not just black or white”, where he could explain many things of his life. However, he preferred to talk us about his personal story when he was in a leadership training in the UK. He explained us that he was encouraged to choose among “doer, thinker, talker or guardian” to define himself. So, the Ice Breaker goals were successfully achieved, as Pilar assessed in an evaluation as great as the speech! The second speaker, Masha was also amazing and it was absolutely validated by Jim, her evaluator. The “Fight or Flight” speech was a demonstration of courage towards facing public speaking. Masha delighted us with the best methods to reach a great speech in public, but she concluded that the most important key is “practice, practice and practice”. Nacho was the third speaker with an Educational Session part of his High Performance Leadership manual, and was evaluated by Luciana. He talked us about the wonderful word of this blog, that is “Teamwork”. The topic of this speech was the Division Conference, the great meeting in Spain where the best speakers enchanted the audience by their abilities and great skills. He explained us that the aim of a successful teamwork: the motivation of the great team, and the participation of each member in all details of the conference, where everybody wants to aid to reach the proposed goals. The result of the teamwork was an amazing event.

The Table Topic Master, Jose, was an excellent moment of teamwork as well. Aware of the importance of working with others, Jose increased the participation component with a topic related to the Master of Ceremonies in a Conference, where the one of the main workshop leaders failed. The impromptu speakers had to to find why another different topic would still fit in the conference. We enjoyed a lot with speeches, such as, the Art of Walking, the Lady Gaga fame or the history of Harry Potter. We enjoyed a lot, where the evaluation of the motivated participants and Table Topic Master were fine, so I would like to say congratulations to all!!

To summarize the meeting, our Toastmaster of the day, our Grammarian, our Timekeeper and our General Evaluator, demonstrate us that the prime advantage to working as a team is the ability to combine skills and talents. That is, we benefit from a wide array of skills and talents that no single member could possess alone. Thus, our outstanding meeting was an exemplary teamwork.