My Mini-Session

I gave my mini-session at the D2 Conference today. So how did it go? Ugh. Let’s just say that the Free Food Goddess gives with one hand and takes with the other.

Having mini-sessions is brand new. We usually just have hour long educational sessions from the “big guns.” When I did my mini-session, there were four hour long talks I was up against. My attendance was bad. This is where the audience asks, “How bad was it?” It was so bad, there were five of us giving mini-sessions and I believe eight attendees split between us. Yikes! I was scheduled to talk four times but only did it three times, since I’d presented to all eight people by the third go-round.

Thoughts about this:

Know & Control Your Environment - I’m loud. I’m REALLY LOUD. The mini-session presenters were seated close together (just a table away) and I knew I would distract the other folks in Spaith voice, so I consciously practiced being quiet. Ironically one of the other speakers was the loud one and I was the one getting thrown off. I’m friends with the guy so I walked over after the first session and told him to pipe down, which he did. If something is bugging you, no whining, just fix it.

Suck it up - When Harry Truman was running for the US Senate he sometimes gave speeches to just three people. He went out and put as much into those as he did for the huge halls and that’s what I tried to do, too.

Forced Innovation - Toastmasters aren’t as open to new experiences as we like to think. The mini-session thing was just too out there, which is a shame since I know three of the mini-session presenters in my block and they are all fantastic. In 20-20 hindsight, they should’ve had an entire hour block full of mini-sessions, with no competition from the hour long guys. There were fifteen mini-sessions split out over three hours, so it would’ve been easy to have had fifteen tables going simultaneously. Moral - if you want Toastmasters to do something new, you have to force them.

Bragging - What really killed attendance of my “Art of Bragging” session was, appropriately enough, bragging. The “big-gun” presenters who spoke for an hour had a lot of real estate in the program to brag. All I got was my name and speech title. It shows that I’m not wrong when I say we need to brag about ourselves.

Contest Results

The best part of the Conference is that a member of my club won the Humorous Speech Contest! It was so much the better because he deserved to win - which doesn’t always translate to winning. My small contribution was telling him to make sure he used a lot of “low-brow ethnic humor” (my exact words) - he’s a Russian immigrant complaining about English.

Why did he win, beyond having a funny speech? Like the typical immigrant he just out worked his ass off. (The #2 speaker, who was also really good, was also Russian and had lots of low brow ethnic humor and must have worked like crazy on her speech, too.) He put ungodly hours into practicing this since pretty much at each level he came out with a completely new speech and each time it was much better than before. Congratulations Leo!

Free Food?

What about the Free Food Goddess thing? Well, what they wanted for the dinner was exorbitant - $38 or something. I planned to eat elsewhere and come back for the contest. When I was walking out, a Toastmaster I kinda-sorta know (we’re talking casual acquaintance at best) walks up to me and says, “I’m an old man and I’m tired and going home. Do you want my meal ticket?” I took it of course. It also saved me from paying $12 for the contest.

This was the second time in eight days I’ve had circumstances outside my control completely tank my speech, only to get rewarded in the end with free food. Last week I was interrupted twice in a two minute speech as ribs were brought in and this week it was having crappy attendance at my talk only to get a free banquet ticket.

I’m struggling to make this Free Food Goddess stuff relevant and not just self indulgence. How about this - every dark cloud has a silver lining or something like that.