Maile Collmer 7/17/12 speech

From Maile Collmer 7/17/12 One of the benefits of being in this Toastmasters’ group is that I can practice speaking on topics for my business. This week I spoke on Social Capital as it relates to Networking. I will be speaking about Networking at two chamber events this week so this was a great exercise in working out some of my topic ideas. Because I was working on completing my Competent Communication Award in Toastmasters, I formatted my speech to fit my last speech in that manual. Toastmasters is great at giving you many different ways to structure a speech, different aspects to work on your speaking skills, and a variety of strategies I might not thought of otherwise. I left this one for last, “Research Your Topic”. It was number seven out of ten. The cool thing is you don’t have to do the speeches in perfect order. With this speech I completed my Competent Communication Certificate, yay! Next I will be working on speeches from the Persuasive Speaking and Professional Speaker advanced manuals. Stay tuned!

Fate, Hope, and Love

A little over a year ago I wrote an original story for a project out of the “Entertaining Speaker” manual. I spent so much time on the writing of it that my speech date arrived before I had time to memorize and rehearse it. I ended up reading a lot of it and going over my time limit. However, the feedback on the little hand-written notes contained much praise for the story itself, along with strong encouragement to try it again when I’ve had time to prepare and rehearse the presentation.


That is what I did for today’s speech. I had it memorized, well-rehearsed, and I had the timing down. My evaluator poured on the kudos and noted that the audience was riveted. The little feedback notes confirmed this. I was so happy to be able to do the story justice. The main lesson here is that you can re-work and re-use any of your earlier projects, especially when you feel you weren’t quite finished with it, didn’t deliver it as you had wished, or didn’t have enough time to say all that you wanted to say. When you’re finally happy with it you can keep it in your portfolio of “back pocket” speeches, ready to deliver it whenever the need arises. Jim Morphy, Member Early Word Toastmasters

Project Planning!

This week I spoke about project planning at our Toastmaster meeting. The fun part is that I spoke off the cuff!!! I was thinking about it for a couple of minutes into the meeting and spoke for 5-7 minutes and got great feedback as well. The thing that I am happy about is that I remember the first time I spoke at Toastmasters, I could not peel my eyes off of the paper I was reading from... and a year and half later I collect my thoughts and am able to give a speech that is well received by an audience! This is the charm of being here every week. Gurpreet TM member at Early Words