Yesterday, we had our club level "Humorous and Evaluations speech" contest. I was ("forcefully") enrolled to the list of contestants for "Evaluation speech". 11 members had signed up for the Evaluations contest. This is my first time participation in the Evaluation contest. I picked up the lot and I was the 9th in the list. The "Test Speaker" was Shankar from Ford Toastmasters. He gave a speech on "Just Break It", motivating the guests to join Toastmasters. Once the speech was over, we were given 5 minutes for preparation. Then, the contestants were asked to go out. I had made all my observations and jotted them down on the paper. However, I couldn't come up with an impressive "Beginning" & "Ending". I was thinking about it for quite sometime. Finally, a thought crossed my mind. Why not use DTM and give a new expansion to it. Shankar had tried to market toastmasters with some drama. So, I decided to expand DTM as Dramatic Toast Marketeer. I adhered to the famous "KISS - Keep it Simply Short" principle. I had pointed out 3 things that Shankar did well & 3 things that he had to improve on. My evaluation had a clear introduction & conclusion. I tied the conclusion to the introduction. I felt that my flow was nice :) After delivering my evaluation, I thought that I'll atleast be in the 3rd place. Surprisingly, I was selected to be the winner in the Evaluations contest. The credit for this victory goes to my mentor "Warren Riley" (TGIF Toastmasters) who was constantly helping us to become better speakers. He spares his week end time to train the fellow toastmasters on public speaking. I'm very grateful to him and I miss his classes after returning to India.
I'm looking forward to participating in the Area contest.
