Impromptu speaking help

Hands up if you recognize any of these -

You stood up to speak and ...

• pulling a few words together became as difficult as herding cats
• your heart rate shot through the roof
• your mind chose that moment to empty itself completely. Totally blank. There was nothing there. Nada. Zip. You experienced an instant case of lights on but no one home.

It's for you we've pulled together the thoughts and suggestions of three very experienced impromptu speakers. These are folk who have survived and gone on to thrive in the fine art of impromptu speaking, winning table topic contests at Area and Division level.

Image credit: Jonny Goldstein Flickr

In the next few posts you'll hear from Dr Stuart Marshall, Head of the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Victoria University, Gael Price, our current Division E Director and Senior Economic Analyst at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, and Rob Julian, DTM.

They were each asked to give their 3 top tips.

Stuart Marshall  says ...

I was associated with Harbourside Toastmasters, but I’m no longer a Toastmaster at the moment due to competing work and community commitments. I’ll be back with the organisation one day!

I won the Division Contest in 2013, and sometime around 2006.  (I've forgotten exactly when, sorry.)

My top 3 table topic tips

If I analyse how I did table topics, it generally involved:

1. Committing to a topic

Sometimes it’s not that people don’t have any ideas on how to respond to a topic, but the problem is that they have too many ideas/options, and become paralyzed. 

My strategy was always to go with the first approach that came to mind, and commit to that approach. 

Quite a few times, I’d realize thirty seconds in that what I was saying was not going to result in some sane and serious conclusion. Rather than back-tracking though, I would just commit to the absurdity, and follow that absurdity to its logical conclusion. Surprisingly, that resulted in some of my most successful speeches.  You can find some strange insights in the absurd. 

Two minutes is such a short time, that you simply can’t afford to pull back or back track.

2. Depth rather than breadth

A two minute table topic can’t be filled with seven different sub-topics and neither can you expect yourself to be able to deftly tie them all together in a way that the audience will understand, at least not often. 

The key is to fill out the two minutes, but do it with adding depth to two key points, rather than trying to rattle off a sequence of bullet-pointed items in the hope that something sticks. That also goes back to the issue of committing to the topic. 

Stay with a sub-topic.  Explore its edges, but don’t dance from one point to the next unless you’re an extremely experienced juggler and think you can weave them all back together in a sparkling conclusion. That final step is usually beyond even the most experienced speakers.

3. Listen, learn and then evaluate

You listen to many more table topics than you deliver, so assessing what you hear is key in learning what does,  and doesn’t work for an audience. 

When I evaluated speakers, I rarely took notes while, (or even directly after), they were speaking. That may sound odd, but a table topic or a seven minute speech is something that should stick with the audience a fair while after the delivery. 

The vast majority of your audience, either in or outside TM, won’t be taking notes which is why as a speaker you need to leave them with something that sticks in their mind, and not on their notepad. As a listener or evaluator if something was particularly memorable about a speech (good or bad) it’ll stand out in your mind after the presentation, if you were actually listening. 

You need to separate out what stays in your mind naturally, and what minor quirks you felt compelled to write down.  If you have to rely on your notes to identify a fault or a good aspect in your evaluation fifteen / twenty minutes later, was it really a major fault/aspect? 

If I did take notes at all during the speech, it was a record of what the speaker was trying to achieve at a specific point in time. From that I could construct a set of speaker intentions that mapped to strategies they were attempting, and my recollections of the success (or failure) of those strategies. 

A record of their intentions was useful, as it helped me identify similar instances in my own speeches. It helped me decide whether the strategy was useful to follow or to avoid. 

Stuart's closing words on the topic
 

Lastly, I had a fairly bad stutter when I was younger, and table topics was an important step towards gaining the confidence to lecture in my life as an academic. It was scary then. It’s scary now, but the scariness is no longer an impediment but a source of energy instead.

It goes without saying that the more you do, the more comfortable you become. The trick is never to want to be too comfortable, but to always be enough, to make it up on stage.

The other key thing with table topics is that it is about trusting yourself to speak. Trusting yourself that if you open your mouth to engage with a topic that you’ve only just been given, (as is often the case in conversations), then words will come out that can be recognized as English sentences, and that they vaguely make sense!

Thank you Stuart!

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Next up we'll have Gael's tips. Stay tuned, and if you get the urge to share a tip on the topic go right ahead. That's what the comment box is for!