Why I signed up as a member of Katong Toastmasters Club

Project 1. The Ice Breaker
Time:	4 - 6 minutes
Objectives:	•	To begin speaking before an audience.
	•	To discover speaking skills you already have and skills that need some attention
	•	To introduce yourself to your fellow club members.

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Good evening fellow Toastmasters and honorable guests. Today I’m going to present my first speech on why I decided to sign up as a member of the Katong Toastmasters club.

The story actually began almost two years ago when I met Ray Barros, a very successful fund manager and trainer in Singapore. Now, I am not a stock trader, and I’m not even someone who is very interested in money matters but I found Ray extraordinarily interesting because of his ambition to help people and his very disciplined and structured approach to implement his plans. As our conversation went on, I started to tell him that I had a fear of public speaking and I wanted to tackle that problem. Before I knew it, Ray invited me to his “Discipline” class, which was a class designed for traders to become more mentally disciplined as they made their trading calls. But the offer came with a condition, if I attended the class, I had to give a speech to the audience to let them know why I was there.

I had serious reservations about accepting the invitation as I naturally shied away from public speaking engagements. Ray, however, assured me that it would be “fun” to challenge myself to do something out of the ordinary, and he enticed me with the promise that the class would have a “life-changing” effect. I knew I could not just wimp out and decline the invitation as I had talked so much about wanting to face my fear of public speaking. Besides, the promise of learning something that would change my life forever was intriguing and so I confirmed my attendance.

When the day arrived and the time came for me to speak, I mustered my courage, walked to the front of the classroom and started to tell the audience why I was there. I can’t tell you how frightening this was for me as I felt like the emperor without clothes since I had no knowledge of trading and had nothing in common with the audience. I nonetheless plodded on with my speech on discipline and why I was there to learn more about it. When I finished I was so relieved to be able to slink back to my chair without getting booed off stage. I gave myself a pat on back and a grade of B+ for my performance.

The moment of truth arrived a few weeks later through an e-mail with a link to a recording of my speech on youtube. With great trepidation, I clicked on the link and watched the video. It was truly cringe-worthy. Only after watching the video did I realise how much my body language conveyed my unease. I was hunched over, I had too many aahs and uhmms as fillers, my arms flailed around crazily with no coordination to the content or tempo of my speech, and worst of all, my voice sounded too “girly” which was not natural for me.

I promptly revised my grade to a D-, and then reflected on what I must do to fix my speech problems. It was good time to do so since Ray’s Discipline class gave me a framework to tackle this goal.

First I had to unlearn some things. Over time, I had become over reliant on speech fillers (such as ahh and uhmms) and slang words. This is probably because I have not been paying attention to my daily speech habits and no one I knew raised this to my attention as the people around me had become adept at understanding me despite the flaws in my speech. I knew immediately that if I wanted to remove the fillers, then I needed to be more mindful of my daily speech. I thus made a resolution to focus on my day-to-day speech habits as I knew that unless I stopped using fillers and slang words habitually, I will not be able to eliminate them in my formal speech.

Next, I had to tackle the girly voice problem . At first I was not sure if this was a psychological response to stress or if the problem was a physiological one. Because, in my view, it’s easier to fix a physiological problem, I decided that I would start exercising regularly in order to strengthen my breathing muscles thereby enabling me to have better control over my voice. This would also help me to be more energetic so that my speech has more “pep” to it. So in the past year and a half, I’m proud to say that I have been running three to four times a week. This has helped me tremendously to strengthen my voice. I know now that the issue was more of a physiological problem.

As a final step, I knew that if I were to become a more confident speaker, I needed a place where I could practice regularly. Toastmasters came to mind as a forum for my topics, and a place where I can get support from like-minded people. I’m also always finding ways to find new friends with similar interests as I do, so becoming a member of Toastmasters sounded like a perfect idea. So, after procrastinating for a year and half, here I am at Toastmasters making my first speech. I’ve said to a number of people here that I’m very excited to be a member of this club. I did not say that to be polite or agreeable. After being at my first Toastmasters meeting last month, I know that I can learn a lot from all of you and I look forward to your guidance as I start my journey to become a better speaker. I’m hoping that through my interaction with you, I will be able to have a better handle over my nerves and actually develop a taste for public speaking.

And that wraps up my topic of how I became a member of the Katong Toastmasters club. Thank you all for listening.

- contributed by new member Shamala