Toastmasters

Impromptu speaking in front of an audience is challenging for most of us. Even the famous author and public speaker, Mark Twain, has been quoted as saying “I never could make a good impromptu speech without several hours to prepare it.”

If you struggle with scattered thoughts, or mind blank when impromptu speaking, then this blog post will help you.

In this blog post, you’ll learn some techniques to structure your speech when you’re on the spot, and some ways to quickly generate ideas when your mind goes blank.

I joined a Toastmasters public speaking club back in November 2016. There are lots of resources out there, I found they were fragemented, and none really resonated my personal style of speaking, especially for the club I’m in, which adheres to the Toastmasters structure and rules, yet has a much more natural speaking than other clubs I’ve visited.

After performing each of the roles several times (Chair, Grammarian, Table Topics Master, etc) I found it useful to build up, and revise templates as my skill and personal style evolved. Below are my current templates, which I will update over time:

• Toastmasters Grammarian Template

I spent two weeks in late August on the island of Koh Tao, which is located in the eastern Gulf of Thailand.

The weather was perfect. Every day, I’d head out on the boat to go scuba diving at various dive sites around the island. I’d been a qualified diver for several months prior, so no training was needed, and I signed up for the fun dives, where we would be taken on underwater tours by a guide called a dive master.

I was planning on diving virtually every day around the beautiful island of Koh Tao. In particular, I was hoping to see some big sea creatures such as the Whale Shark.

Now I should give some context. Some of you might hear the word “shark” and think of danger, or perhaps a film such as Jaws

A whale shark, while being huge at up to 14m long and 21 tonne, is nothing like the kinds of sharks that you might see on the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. Instead, a whale shark has no teeth, and is a gentle, slow-moving, filter-feeding carpet shark, feeding only on plankton (not on humans!!)