You can predict what table topics will be asked this month because it’s the Valentine season.   Love is in the air. You could be asked about romance and valentine related topics such as

Your Experience:

• most memorable romantic experience
• how you celebrate valentine’s day

Your  Opinion:

• whether you believe in celebrating valentine’s day
• best way to celebrate valentine’s day
• whether you agree with some quotations on love and romance

Be prepared and you will not be caught off-guard.  Memorise some love poems and you can impress the audience by ending your speech with a short quotation or love poem.

This is your moment to impress.

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Here’s some tips on how to win a Table Topics Contest or session.

Think of your response as a mini-speech with an opening, a body and ending.

The Opening:

Open with a bang to catch the judges’ attention. Raise your voice as you dramatise a story.  Use props. Stand on a chair.  Shred a piece of paper. Use your handerchief.  Throw your pen on the floor. Sing a song. Lie on the floor.

One of the memorable acts was a toastmaster standing on a chair to enact a suicide attempt.

The Body:

Tell a personal story.  To inform the audience is not good enough. Strives to P.I.E. the audience – Persuade, Inspire, and Entertain.

If most of the contestants support the motion, be a contrarian. Take the opposing view. Take the path less taken. Stand out from rest by taking an unconventional view.

The Ending:

End with one lesson that you want the audience to take home.  End with a poem or a quotation.

Preparation:

If you are preparing for a competition, practice by asking your friends to throw table topics questions at you. For every topic, there are more than one way to respond. When you exercise your brain often enough, you will not suffer brain freeze. Preparation is the key to confidence.  If you do well in your training with people throwing all kinds of topic at you, you will have more confidence in the competition.

When you tackle enough topics, you will know for sure that nothing is going to faze you or catch you by surprise. In my ebook, I have listed all the topics for you to practice.  Over the years I have compiled a collection of table topics and I observed you can group them by a certain categories.

When you are at the stage, enter into the zone. When superman wears his costume, suddenly he thinks and behave like a superman. You don’t see him flying in his office suit with his briefcase, do you?

Think like an actor/actress and play the role. Think like a singer and sing as if you believe every word from your mouth. That will bring out the passion and emotion in you.

I hope these tips are helpful to you.

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Here is a beautiful table topics trophy. If your toastmasters club has any beautiful table topics trophy,  pse send to me. I will be happy to feature them here.

Photo Credit:http://www.flickr.com/photos/eiratansey/3922270644/

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Toastmasters District 73 Table Topics Final 2007

One way to excellence in table topics is to model after successful speakers and do what they do.

How?

Record these speakers during the competition and replay the tape.  If you are fortunate, you can find some of these recordings on Youtube.

Evaluate their performance and learn from them.

Below is a very good example from Darren Fleming, a Toastmaster from Australia.

The topic was “Someone famous once said if you obey all the rules you miss half the fun. Is this a good or a bad philosophy to live by?”

He begins by looking at the topic.  He stalls for time in order to compose his message. He started strongly by illustrating his point.  He breaks the rule in public speaking by facing his back to the audience. In his conclusion, he reinstate his point of view, that if he breaks the rule, he has more fun.

If you inject humour and make the audience laugh, you are a winner.

If you take on the unconventional view, you stand out from the rest.

Having a strong gesture and body language makes the presentation impactful and memorable.

Enjoy the video clip. Hope you learn something from him and implement in your table topics session.

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DTM Ron Kirchgessner, the Immediate Past District 11 Governor, share these tips:

Running Table Topics is one of those areas that I really enjoy.

• Have a membership roster that has people with duties marked off. That way you are calling on those who don’t have speaking opportunities. And it will help when you don’t know someone’s name.
• Have three levels of questions: softball, regular and challenge. That helps everyone feel comfortable, from the novice to the pro. Make sure there is at least one super challenge question for that 20+ year veteran.
• Variation on the challenge question is to take some figurines (I used Lord of the Rings) in three sizes. Let them select a small, medium or large figurine and then receive the appropriate easy, standard or hard question, respectively. This also works with candy or mints which the speaker can keep.
• A variation on the Picture entry in your document is to assemble a collection of vacation pictures of you and ask them to describe what is going on in the photo. The pictures were collected over several vacations with no two the same place.
• The Academic Challenge is modeled after Jeopardy. I have five topics (Religion, Gender, Math, Politics and History), each with a softball, standard and challenge question. They choose both the topic and difficulty level.
• This Day in History is a great source of topics. The site http://www.butlerwebs.com/holidays/default.htm is useful for finding and developing questions for a session on a particular day.

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Sandy Campbell shares a good tip:

To practise table topics I flip through radio stations while driving.  I turn on to a station and whatever is the topic that DJ is speaking about, or whatever topic the song playing is about, I use that as my Table Topic.

So the other night as I was driving to a Toastmasters meeting, I did a quick 2 minute speech on “Truck Tires in my driveway…” (country song!), and “Taxes due April 15th” and “melting glaciers.”

You can do that same thing with a newspaper in the morning.  Open up a page and give a table topics speech on the first headline you see.

Sandy

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When you buy my ebook “Table Topics Secrets Revealed”, you will get a bonus ebook on more than 50 ways to conduct a table topics session.

One interesting way is to use photos.  The speaker selects a photograph and tell a story about it, or just about anything related to the photos.

There’s a variety of subjects you can use.

It can relate to favourites things like games, food and love.

You can use nostagic pictures like scenery, old building and roads, or famous people in local history.

Using photos open up to a wider interpretation because every speakers see the same picture in a different way.

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February is Valentine month.  You can be sure that the favourite theme in Feb is Valentine. Sure enough, when I brought my students to visit a toastmasters club, the theme of the table topics session is LOVE.  As I predicted correctly,  one of the questions is a quotation “Love is Blind”

If I were to respond to this question, I will use a before and after technique. Before marriage, I was blinded by love that I cannot see the flaws of the woman I love.  Love was blind. She was perfect in my eyes. She can do no wrong.

But after marriage my eyes were open and I can see her flaws at close range.  But I choose to close my eyes to her fault. I choose to be blind cos of Love.

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