I subscribed to the Humorous Speech competition of my Toastmasters club in Toulouse, Rosemasters, before the summer break. The contest was held last Saturday. I had competed in the previous round of contests of the club back in March, when I was lucky enough to win the speech contest. You may see the speech in this post.
I say “lucky” because, even if the message of the speech might have been valuable, and the delivery was OK, I did not prepare then as I should have. I procrastinated. I wrote the speech the week of the contest, read it some times along the week, but only practiced the morning of the contest. However, my procrastination was not punished…
For the speech contest of last Saturday I procrastinated a bit more. I thought about the topic during the week of the contest: self-deprecation about my integration in France, OK. But only got to write the speech the morning of the contest. I enjoyed the delivery of the speech, but I guess it was not as good as it should have been. What is worse, even if nobody but Luca and me noticed, I forgot a whole minute of speech with a couple of good lines… this is what happens when you don’t prepare. I came in last of the 3 contestants in terms of judges’ evaluation. Deservedly. Hopefully I will learn the lesson for the next time.
The winner, Dominique, on the other hand made a wonderful speech using an ukulele, which he had purchased for the speech about a month ago, learnt to play few notes to accompany the speech, thought of tens of uses for the ukulele within a speech, put up a great structure, used lots of body language, storytelling… I loved his speech. Congratulations to Dominique!
The Blog by Javier 