Despite being a Toastmaster geek, sometimes I hit a speech manual project that I don’t want to do. My “speaker’s block” was the first project in the story telling manual, telling a folk tale. The assignment just held no interest for me. Some folks get discouraged when they hit the uninteresting project, go months without speaking, and finally lose interest in TM. It doesn’t have to be like that.
Skip It!
You don’t have to do the speeches in the order they’re in the manual. Toastmasters doesn’t have a KGB unit waiting to “reeducate” anyone not following the recommended project order. If you feel passionately against some new tax, you don’t have to do an uninteresting folk tale first. It sounds pretty obvious, but a lot of people assume they have to do project #4 after #3 and before #5 just because they never sit down and think about it. I was one of them until a more senior member set me straight.
You’re better off skipping around the manual than doing a half-assed job just to knock the next speech in line off. Exhibit A: John Spaith, circa 2003. For my “Visual Aids” speech, I used a cheap toy sword as a prop for about ten seconds. Then I put it down and gave my speech without any visual aids. Ugh! I should have skipped to the speech on “Inspire Your Audience”, skipped the stupid sword, and then skipped back to “Visual Aids” when I had a topic that fit better so I could practice using a real visual aid.
Suck it up - It Ain’t Supposed to be Easy
Toastmasters are so focused on clapping, backslapping, and feeling good that that we forget that it’s not supposed to be easy. The Toastmaster manuals give us screwball assignments like the folk story to make us stretch. It helps the motivation to view this as a challenge, not an obligation.
My main motivation was that I was having an article published in this month’s edition of the Toastmaster and I told the editor to credit me as an ACS , promising I’d be one by the time it came out. I had to finish it or I’d be a liar. Nothing like having a goal to beat speaker’s block!
Not that I plan on becoming a professional folk story teller anytime soon, but I was happy with how my folktale went. And I’m happy I actually had to stretch to do it.
in 11-14-2007 @ 15:32:56
Funny. I actually really liked the Folk Tale assignment, and here’s why:
The club I’m in (Microsoft Early Birds) has a hugely diverse membership. Being at Microsoft, we have people from all over the world. Easily more than half of our members have English as their second language.
But more interestingly, from a speech-crafting perspective, is that the audience for my speeches LACKS the shared set of cultural references that typifies a “standard American audience.” Which means that when I write a speech, I can’t draw on references to well known TV shows, rock bands from the 80s, or whatever and expect my audience to know what I’m talking about. It’s a real challenge sometimes, but on the whole, I feel it forces me to write better speeches.
So when I saw the Folk Tale assignment, I rushed to do it because it gave me the chance to turn that very problem into an opportunity: rather than bemoaning an inability to use cultural references, rather, I took the opportunity to TEACH my audience an American cultural reference. I told them an American folk tale–the story of Brer Rabbit and the Briar Patch. It was a great excuse to give a little bit of insight into a part of American history that a lot of people in my audience, having grown up elsewhere, won’t be familiar with (the deep South in the time of slavery), and tell them a funny story at the same time.
So my advice, John, would be to think about exactly why the concept of a Folk Tale speech is off-putting to you, and see if you discover a problem that can be turned into an opportunity. If you do that, I bet you’ll get real excited about the speech, real fast.