I wanted to begin this post with the following:

“You’re angry. For your contest speech, you just told the heart wrenching story of how the war orphan’s puppy was killed by terrorists. You can’t understand how you just lost. It’s even worse that it was to some clown who had a fun story that didn’t have any puppies dying.”

As I thought about it the reality sometimes (not always) seems closer to this:

“You’re happy. For your contest speech, you just told the heart wrenching story of how the war orphan’s puppy was killed by terrorists. And you won! You pity the clown who didn’t know that you have to manipulate your audience with dead puppies to win the speech contest.”

I’m going to break character just for this post and be much more direct than usual. Please stop giving these manipulative speeches. Judges, stop rewarding them!

A manipulative contest speech is one where you so wallow in pity, sharing vividly awful descriptions of how bad life was for more than half the speech. A variation is when you throw in a painful story that has nothing to do with your speech just to one up your competitors in winning sympathy points. Over the years I’ve heard so much gruesome detail about what can go wrong with the human anatomy that I could skip the first year of medical school.

When I first joined Toastmasters I heard a speaker at an Area contest tell just about everything that had ever went wrong in his life. I was shocked that anyone would spill their guts like this to strangers just to win a stupid contest. The other speakers at that contest were quite good. I remember thinking, “I don’t know who will win, only it won’t be that clown with the sap story.” You see where I’m going with this. The fellow won of course and I was livid.

There’s the saying that when you go through the valley of death, you go through it and don’t hang around there. That’s the fundamental problem with the manipulative speech. It focuses so much on the negative that it saps the energy right out of us. A good contest speech may take us to the valley of death but they get us out of their quickly. A good speech focuses on solving problems, not on the problem itself. A good speech makes me want to go out and live, not jump off a bridge.

Maybe you’re thinking, “John, I want to win my speech contest. You’ve just said that manipulation works. Why shouldn’t I manipulate?”

OK - how badly do you want to win this stupid contest? And what type of speaker do you want to be? Someone who enthuses their audience with energy, or who makes them want to jump off a bridge?

Manipulation isn’t fool-proof. A few years ago there were two fellows competing in a contest I was judging. One had good delivery and stage presence, but he was playing the “pity me” card all the way. The other guy had a lot of flubs. But his speech was so much fun and had so much good advice that I would’ve paid to hear it again, flubs and all. So even though the second speaker got creamed on the 50 delivery points, I deducted a lot more from the first speaker for content. I wasn’t alone. The second speaker won. In fact, in 2007 I didn’t see any manipulative speeches at the Area level.

It’s not just us low level judges who are against manipulation. I’ve watched the tapes of quite a few past International Speech Contests. The winners don’t ever manipulate. I’ll talk about the things they do right in future posts, but rest assured they get us through the valley of death really quickly.

Ultimately they way to fix this is with judging. If new Toastmasters go to Area contests and see Debbie Downer speeches losing (as they should), then they’ll know not to play this game themselves. I’ll say it again.

Please stop giving these manipulative speeches. Judges, stop rewarding them!