Contestants were given some training in impromptu speaking.  Here’s some tips:

1.  Do not be defensive when the question seems insulting or challenging to your belief.

2.  Differentiate from the rest by telling a story to illustrate your point. It is not enough to answer factually or correctly. One must make a connection with the audience and touch the audience’s emotion.

3.  One kind of questions you must practice comes in this format “What does _____ means to you?”

For example:  “What does success means to you?”, “What does winning the title means to you?”

4.  Practice by having someone shoot you a series of questions and see how fast you can think on your feet.  My strategy is that you must have a mental structure  and fill in the blanks.

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Hi Sam,

Cherrie

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Say, you are given this topic: BEHIND EVERY MAN is A SMART WOMAN!

Here is a story you can use:

Barbara Walters, of 20/20, did a story on gender roles in Kabul, Afghanistan , several years before the Afghan conflict. She noted that women customarily walked five paces behind their husbands.

She recently returned to Kabul and observed that women still walked behind their husbands. Despite the overthrow of the oppressive Taliban regime, the women seemed to, and apparently were happy to, maintain the old custom.

Ms. Walters approached one of the Afghani women and asked, ‘Why do you now seem happy with an old custom that you once tried so desperately  to change?’

The woman looked Ms. Walters straight in the eyes, and without hesitation whispered, “Land Mines.”

Action Plan

Whenever you come across good short stories, file them.  Practice telling these stories. Use them to illustrate your points. Stories go very well with quotation questions.  If a table topic master give you a theme, you should be able to pull out a story from your mental library of stories and wow the audience with your story telling skill.

One of the masters of story telling that I have watch live in action is Anthony Robbin.  Watch good story tellers and learn from them. You can find them in action at public libraries.

These and many more tips from the ebook “Table Topics Secrets Revealed“.

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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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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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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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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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If we cannot share our jokes, we can share humourous stories. Think ‘Stand up Comedy’.

I heard that William Robin is so good with comedy, that if you give him any topics (from A to Z), he can tell you a joke on the spot.  You can do it if you practice often enough.

The problem with some people is that they rehash the same jokes from Internet. It is better to extract from one’s own experience.

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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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