Boy are you ever angry! You gave great advice for your contest speech and how are you rewarded? A crumby second place certificate. “A wise man is never angry.” That’s what your speech was about and you told the audience they had to live by it, again and again. The clown who won just got up and told stupid story about his life as a kid. His moral - if he had one - was about being happy. But he was so busy with the story that some in the audience may have missed his point. What a bunch of stupid ingrates!

What went wrong? Well - this isn’t the International Preaching Contest, but the Speech contest. To my mind the speech contest gets into story telling as much as moralizing. The preachy Toastmaster contest speaker gives the audience a lot of commands like “You need to this…” and “You need to that…

Look - I’m not some new age weirdo that rejects all preaching. The “you need to…” is a powerful, direct call and has its place, especially when it’s the theme you want to bang home. But it gets tired fast.

Most of us know not to do this anyway. But a lot of TM contest speeches come off like an advice column with gestures and grandiloquence thrown in. There will be some quotes, general advice and a tasteful call to action, and maybe some cute anecdotes. It’s not Jerry Falwell, but it’s not Stephen King either. It’s Ann Landers. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, my second all time favorite Toastmasters speech falls into that category. But in general you’re better with storytelling.

The ideal contest speech needs some Stephen King. Not gore or violence or manipulation, but story telling elements like believable characters, plot, setting, and suspense. With the great speech, it feels like the story just needed to be told for its own sake and the theme flowed naturally from it. This is different than advice column with gestures and grandiloquence, where it seems that the theme was just “a good theme to talk about” and there were some random anecdotes thrown in to bolster the argument, like a graduate student citing research in his thesis.

I’ve struggled with this post because this is subtle and because I don’t want to encourage overdoing things with a manipulative speech. Let’s look at some examples.

We’ll start with Ed Tate’s worldwide winning International Speech, “One of Those Days.” He tells how he was at an airport and everything went wrong for him - from getting a ticket on the way to being bumped out of the line to dealing with a rude, 6′4″ passenger. Because he stayed so nice, Ed was noticed by the airline and rewarded with an upgrade to 1st class. The theme of the speech was simply, “be nice.” Clearly “One of Those Days” isn’t “War and Peace.” It didn’t need to be. Ed painted an effective mental picture and drew us into the story first, then led us naturally to the theme.

My all time favorite TM speech is Darren Lacroix’s “Ouch,” another International Winner. Once again, his stories weren’t about his attempt to invade Russia. He told us about how he ran a restaurant in the ground and about his failure and ultimate success as a standup comedian and what he learned from that. Like Ed’s speech, he had well defined characters, enough background so I could get a picture of what was going on, and conflict.

Now my second favorite speech was by the 1997 International Toastmaster Winner (whose name I can’t find for the life of me - its title is “Beep”) broke this rule. I didn’t really get a strong story or even a great organization. I watched all 9 final speeches for that year and there was no doubt in my mind that “Beep” was the best. I was pleased the judges that year agreed with me. “Beep” got away without that much of a story because it was a lot of fun and told by a comedic genius (not standup though). As I’m not a comedic genius nor am I a preacher, I’ll stick with telling stories.