Toastmaster Storytelling Manual - Speech 1 The Lion who thought it was a sheep...

Picture Roaring kindly provided by dynamosquito under CC

I delivered my first speech today from the Toastmaster Storytelling Manual on a story I wrote based on an old Indian spiritual fable, "The Lion that thought it was a sheep", I threw in bits of the Lion King and some last minute improvisations during the speech.

I was trying to do a lot in this speech, the intensity of my speech built up during the speech ending the speech with the climax of the moral of the story. I set myself some goals to vary the vocals, deliberate pauses, use of inflections, and adjusting the tempo. Its difficult to do that facing a roomful of 20 odd people, establishing a personal connection all at the same time.

Famous actors don't give award winning performances by reading the scripts the day before, they work hard honing in their skills on vocal training, facial expressions, acting day in day out, building these skills one at a time so that they can come together on the day that it is needed. So is it with speaking and anything else thing else really, what we are trying to do is work those skills into long term memory so they become automatic. Toastmaster is a great safe and affordable environment to practice speaking with impact...

Here is the speech to listen to, the first part is my speech the second is the evaluation.