breaking the ice with toastmasters

I'm not sure if I joined Toastmaster's last year, or in 2015. Either way, it had been too long since I joined for me not to have given my first speech -- the "icebreaker." And I might not have given it yet if not for Tracy, one of the auditors I work with. She kind of pushed me to do it.

It's not as if I haven't participated at the meetings. I've done the "Table Topics" -- impromptu 2 minute speeches on a topic that you pull from a hat -- a number of times. But this was my first prepared speech. I asked someone to tape it, but, for some reason my phone cut out partway in. And it saved the video sideways. I don;t know why. At any rate, the following is what I managed to get, and it gives a flavor of what I said.

I continued talking about the roadtrip from Phoenix to Denver. Instead of covering three states, we covered 11. Blair tackled me in the snow in Yellowstone, we enjoyed the roads in Montana (which, at the time, had no speed limit), and we accidentally found ourselves at Carhenge. After another road-trip anecdote, I talked about how we celebrated after I'd been to all fifty states -- a big party with commemorative T shirts. And Blair conspired with friends to give me the gift of media coverage. The New York Daily News ran an article, John Montone (who does -- or did -- a human interest radio show for WINS) ran a piece about me, and four governors proclaimed holidays to honor my visits to their states.

I closed by saying that we still enjoy road trips, and the only thing better than seeing new places is seeing them with Blair.

The feedback I got was generally positive. And I do think it went well, though I note that Toastmasters -- or at least my chapter -- is very positive in feedback. So I can't be sure that it was as good as the feedback would lead me to believe.

One bit of criticism that I saw a lot of was that I put my hands in my pockets too much. Valid point. Seeing the video, I realize that that's one of my crutches. I also noticed that I have a tendency to exhale in a puff when I am transitioning between thoughts. I have to work on that. Finally, seeing the video reminds me that I really need to lose weight.

One thing that's interesting about this talk is that it's a complete last minute rewrite. Originally I wrote an icebreaker speech called "Dreams Can Come True (Sort of)." It's about how, as a kid, I had a copy of Dr. Seuss' My Book About Me. On the page about what I wanted to be when I grew up, I wrote in "officeworker." I did that because I wanted to do what my dad did. But I didn't know what he did. I just new he was an office worker. Now, decades later, that dream has come true. I practiced that talk, but the night before delivering it I decided that it just wan't working for me. So I started again from scratch, and wrote the speech you see above, calling it "Dreams Are Better When Shared."

Now I have to prepare the second speech.