Toastmasters

How would you feel when you are forced to give a speech?

Speechless would be a nice way to describe the resulting feeling of chaos and confusion in you mind.

But wait...what if you brought this on yourself?

"Where's my semi-automatic?"

That would have been my reaction.

This was how I felt 2 minutes after I signed up to give my first speech at the toastmasters club at my workplace. The background celebration and praise for my heroics all faded in those 2 minutes and the truth dawned upon me.

With palpitations, I looked for the objectives of my speech. The first was a little bit obvious. It asked to begin speaking before an audience. The second said that the speech would help in pointing my areas improvement. And the third was to introduce my self to the club.

My reaction to these objectives were as follows: Rather then speaking, I would make an ass of myself before the audience. Time for pointing those areas of improvement would not be enough. No one will want to talk to me after that.

But it had to be done at what ever cost. Just like you cleaning up after a bird used your head for target practice for the upcoming Olympic event. So I started out by trying to pick a topic. Hmmm..I thought, what would keep the guys at the club on their seats for at least 5 minutes without them running for the door? Interesting question, but unfortunately I had to come up with an answer. And I did.

I would speak about a bike race that I participated in college. Would tell people about all the near skull breaking incidents that I had. Hoping that this would give them a fair idea about me and the sort of stuff I consider normal.

Here is the draft I used for the speech:

Hi,

I'm Kiran Kadambi.

Am from.. I did my ...

let me tell u a story from my college days, which would hopefully be a good introduction to me.

bms is famous for utsav..Annual event...Treasure hunt..with high stakes..and on a bike..speeding thru city traffic.... as always, my knee jerk reaction was...i'm in..the thought of the dangers that were ahead of us, somehow eluded me

my brother had a powerful bike which i decided to borrow.

with the single goal of participating in the race, i headed off to the mechanic and got the required tuning done.

the excitement was upped a notch further when the prizes up for grabs was announced...which was a years membership to the most hip club in town.

on race day...after a start filled with fan fare...things started to build up..Adrenalin pumping...trying to out do myself, which i generally try to do with any task, however trivial that might be.

here is the interesting part...as we are heading to the final leg of the circuit... i hit a bump on the road at high speed and this caused the chain guard to buckle and jam the chain. so...you can imagine what my reaction would have been when i heard that keeechh at 80 to 90 km/h. People would normally stop at this time..but the last thing on my mind was that..all that i wanted to do now was to get to the finish line..no matter at what cost.

but i find that i did not have the required spanner to get the job done...so what do i do..i flag down a passing taxi, rikshaw actually, and request the driver for the spanner...remove the guard and hand it to the navigator and we were back in business.

And in the end, we completed the race. But we were quite a site...2 guys with dusty clothes and grease smeared hands, face and bike with a chain guard in hand..now thats really out of the ordinary.

and the result...we didn't win...but it was real fun.

:

The result of the speech was good, considering that not many moronic stories like these come by every day. Another factor that made me hope that the speech got over fast was the attendance to the club that week. Just my luck to find that it was at the maximum.

Phew...now that its done, I thought i could rest easy. But I didn't see the second one coming along. Now I need to start the whole process again, but with different objectives.

lets see how that goes.