At my last club meeting the Toastmaster gave us the day off. He brought in DVDs that had the speeches from five of the previous year’s International Speech Contest at the worldwide level and we watched some amazing speakers. (The International Speech Contest pits Toastmasters from around the world in a tournament style arrangement. Winning the whole contest in an organization of +200,000 is a big deal.)

As I watched the tapes and reflected on the dozens of contest speeches I’ve seen over the years, I got to thinking about what makes a successful contest speech. I came up what I think are six of the keys to winning the contest - at any level. I’ll go into these in more depth later.

• RTFM
  
• No manipulation
• Humor
• More story, less preaching
• Practice
• Passion

You’ll take what I say with a grain of salt when I confess that I’ve never competed in a TM International Speech contest. I’ll justify this in a later post - there is a good reason. In my defense, my club has had a lot of success in various contests over the years. And since it is different people going very far in these and not one superstar, I think our club culture that promotes the above points has a lot to do with it.

The Toastmaster was very inspiring when he said that while these were great speeches on the DVD, anyone could operate on that level if they wanted to badly enough. I believe that too.