Today I evaluated an Ice Breaker speech. The woman who presented was very good and very funny - we heard how she learned how to operate a particle accelerator and ride a unicycle in college and how a boss fell asleep when she was giving a speech and a few days later told her, “Your speech was great!”

I encouraged the speaker that as she worked her way through the CC manual to pay close attention to the projects and to swing for the fences on them. The speaker today stood with her hands on lectern the whole time - one of the few things she did wrong - so I said to go crazy on the “Your Body Speaks” speech. I don’t believe in going overdoing it in most outside TM situations. But the point of the manual is that you should push yourself beyond the comfort zone in TM so you know what works and what doesn’t when it matters. And on the offshoot you’re ever on Oprah and you want to jump on a couch and start screaming, moving around so much won’t feel so strange.

The “look at future manual speeches” is also good when a beginning speaker does a number of things wrong. I’m not going to get up and tell a nervous new speaker, “Please work on your gestures, vocal variety, props, and eye contact - all get all that figured out by your next speech.” It takes multiple speeches to get all this stuff even halfway working for most of us, and some of us are still working at it, and the manual can help.

I didn’t do my basic manual like this. I had a speech I wanted to give and did a half-ass bolting on of the speech goal to make it work. In my “Use Visual Aids” speech, I brought in a crappy three dollar plastic sword, held it for ten seconds during my opening, and then put it down and talked about what I was going to anyway. I didn’t learn too much about visual aids beyond how not to use them with an effort like that.

A cohort told me how great my evaluation was for encouraging speakers to look to future projects. Unfortunately I admitted that I stole my material from someone else. I should’ve kept my mouth shut. As I work my way through the Competent Self-Aggrandizement Manual, I’ll get to the “Taking Credit for Other’s Ideas” project soon enough.