The Reverberation-2015 event held in the scenic hill country of Sri Lanka was one filled with many an adventure, fun, laughter and excitement. Whether it be the Hantana hike, The 6 Masters cricket tournament, or the Evaluation &Humorous contest finals this remained true.
But the crowning jewel for me was the Educational session from the Champion speaker TM Palaniappa Subramaniam from District 51.
The reason being TM Palaniappa was able to give a glimpse of what it takes to deliver a world championship level speech in a very simple and concise manner graspable by anyone. He provided a methodology of building a championship winning speech in ten simple steps.
- Find a reason, a concrete and convincing reason on why you wish to compete. It definitely needs to be something you really yearn for.
- Finding a message to share. A message on which your whole speech will be based upon.
- Develop and write your speech. One important tip when writing your speech is to share your own story which will ensure sincerity and conviction. The words used needs to be natural to you. For us who struggle to find a story, TM Palani advises on creating a log of stories and incidents to assist with this task.
- Discover your style. Just be yourself. Try to discover your rate of natural speaking i.e. Words per Minute, the style of humor and adapt it to your speech. Here TM Palani introduced 4 types of humor The Punch-line King, The Pause King, Intellectual Humor and Mr. Bean. Find out on what is your style of humor and develop on it.
- Name your speech. The rule of thumb is that the Title of the speech should be less than five words and should be anticipation building.
- Get relevant feedback. This can be from either Judges who’ve judged you before, fellow contestants or close confidants. The one thing to note is that the best feedback is not sugarcoated.
- Don’t use all the feedback. This is in order to avoid the speech losing its identity by doing too many chops and changes.
- The little things count. What ‘the little things’ are, are the Body Language associated with emotions, Hand Gestures, Footwork and Voice Variation. To bring out the emotions associate the feeling to an incident that is Joy, Anger, Sadness, Happiness, and Disgust etc. The hand gestures need to be non-offensive to an international audience and the Movement needs to be with purpose. The Voice Variation is tied to the psychological and emotional state of mind. It’s not what you say, but how you say it. The six aspects that needs to be considered are the Volume, Articulation, Pitch, Pause, Inflection and Tempo.
- Record and watch yourself speak. This is in order to provide yourself with self-evaluation while noticing your Stage presence and other Habits on-stage.
- Most importantly have fun. Just think of what the worst case might be?
With the parting message of having butterflies fly in formation, NOT having butterflies is the key, he definitely has instilled confidence in the audience present to take up the challenge of competitive speaking armored with the wisdom of the ten steps to reach the peak at an international stage.
By
Ishfaaq Uvaim, CC, ALB
