SpeakEasy

Wayne is one of our biggest supporters, and as a contestant is going to write a series of blog posts for us.  We’re really excited!  Let’s let him take us inside the 2010 World Championships of Public Speaking!!

“Looking at the 2010 Contest from the Inside

The 2010 Toastmasters International Speech Contest is well under way.  The contest starts each year in January at the local clubs and winds through contests at higher levels until it culminates at the World Championship of Public Speaking at the International Convention.  This year the convention will be held in Palm Desert, California, August 11-14.

I am a participant in the contest this year, so I can tell you about it “from the inside”.  As a new Toastmaster, this is yet another new Toastmasters experience for me, and really, for almost everyone in my club, SAIC Huntsville Toastmasters in Huntsville, Alabama.  Our club was formed in August last year and only one member, Tim, has ever been in Toastmasters.  Fortunately, Tim has had quite a bit of experience and is serving as our club’s president.

The International Speech contest is one of four held every year.  This contest is sometimes referred to as the “Serious Speech” contest or the ”Motivational Speech” contest because, although humor is used, the speeches are usually aimed at motivating the audience.  The competitions start at the club level and work through the higher levels of the organization.  Depending on the district, either the top one or two finishers advance forward to the next round. In my district, District 77, only the first place speaker goes on.  These organizational levels and my estimate of the number of each of are:

Clubs          12,500
Areas          2,500
Division      500
Districts      81

The International Speech Contest is the only one that goes above the district level.  Winners at that level travel to the International Convention and compete in nine semifinal rounds of nine speakers each on Thursday.  Thru the semifinals, contestants are allowed to use the same speech through all levels of the contest.  However, the nine finalists will compete with new speeches in the final round on Saturday night in front of over 2000 people at the finale of the convention.  Since there is not time to prepare a new speech after the semifinal rounds, all the semifinalists must come to the convention with their second speech already prepared and rehearsed.  Previously, the semifinals where held at regional conventions before the International Convention.  This change will allow more people to experience the convention since Toastmasters pays the travel expenses of the contestants.

Next time I’ll tell you about the club and area contests I was involved in and perhaps a little bit about the other contests Toastmasters has.  You can read more about non-Toastmasters stuff in my personal blog, Wayne’s Word, at http://word.goode.info “

We need an update!!

What’s going on out there?

Okay, everyone.  Sandra Bullock got my vote for best speech.  Leave favorite speeches in the comments section!!

The Toastmasters World Championships of Public Speaking has a documentary devoted to it.  We are the guys who’ve done it.

We looked at a cut today and are very, very pleased.  No music and it’s still compelling and dramatic and funny.  I really enjoyed myself watching it.  We’ve solved some structural problems, and it’s really humming along.  Obviously we had to say goodbye to some precious footage and it hurts, in a way.  We also couldn’t cover the early rounds of the contest like we’d wanted to.  If you’re a Toastmaster who’s used to following the stages of the contest, you may feel like we’ve left out a lot of detail.  You’d be right.  But there were so many characters jumping back and forth and so much information for an audience to process and then the finalists and their stories and the final itself was soooooo compelling…. I mean, you’ve gotta make decisions.  So we did, and it’s happening for us.

We are ready to start submitting to festivals.  First up:  Cannes.  Let’s see if we can make history and break into the world’s most prestigious and difficult to get into film festival.  We wanna defy the odds and and come out  of nowhere.  We have a slim chance, but we believe anything’s possible.

Excited around here.

So… looked at the next cut.  It’s close.  One thing that we hope people and most Toastmasters accept is that the film is more about the contestants and the World Championships than anything else.  We can’t get into the ins and outs of a Toastmasters meeting because there’s just too much ground to cover in 90-100 minutes.

I worry that many Toastmasters will be upset that the film doesn’t delve deeply into the organization itself.  I can already hear the note “You didn’t mention table topics, we are much more than just a contest, you didn’t talk about Ralph Smedley” etc etc.  I hope we’re forgiven for this, because the contest footage accomplishes a lot of things:

- it’s inspiring to see people – speakers – pouring their blood sweat and tears into winning such a contest.  Win or lose, I personally love seeing people who are passionate putting it all on the line to achieve their dream.

- it shows the general goodness of heart that is a hallmark of most Toastmaster members.  Toastmasters, as a group, I think come across very well to the average viewer.

- it demonstrates the power of oratory, and our universal human need to speak.

- we talk about the fear of public speaking in a funny way that is also insightful.

We will also have different editions of the film – especially one that will have as much Toastmasters promotional information as you could possibly imagine.  Maybe that’ll be included as a DVD extra.

But for the time being, you’re gonna see the contest in its full glory.  We’re pretty damned psyched.

I know we’ve been saying this for awhile, and it’s very possible that many of you are rolling your eyes at this point, but we really are going to be looking at a very, very advanced cut of the film tomorrow.  Our hope is that after this, the essential structure and shots are in place, and we’ll be fine tuning, adding music, pacing, doing sound design, color correction, sound mix, etc. etc, all to bring it to the finish line.  My hopeful guess is that we’re almost there.

There have been so many twist and turns on this long road to completion, we hope that most people are still ready to see it.  It’s funny, dramatic, tense, and actually pretty darned moving, if you ask me.  Alas, we think we have a winner, and we hope you do, too.

In the meantime, we saw an amazing documentary that was a huge hit at Sundance this year, and for good reason.  ”Catfish” is absolutely amazing, and the problem is I can’t talk about it because there are so many surprises that you can’t divulge too many details without ruining it.  Suffice to say, I’m sorta glad we didn’t go up against it this year.  I mean…I think our film is far more commercially appealing, but “Catfish” is disturbing and tense and superweird and pretty sublime, actually.  Kudos to the filmmakers for finding a story and following it all the way to the end, and then some.  Put it on your list when it comes out.  A must.  Just be prepared for some darkness.

I didn’t like his statement of apology or whatever it was today.  He could use some public speaking training, don’t you think?

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We’re feeling really fortunate in SpeakEasyLand today. Bob McTeer, the former President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas – as well as former Chancellor of Texas A&M University – has been exposed: he was a Toastmaster!!   Now he’s on the public speaking circuit and, from what I’m told, is fantastically entertaining and insightful.   We’re obviously honored he sent us a brief “guest blog post” about his Toastmaster experience.   There’s plenty more on his site bobmcteer.com (special thanks to his son and great friend of SpeakEasy, Scott McTeer…the best fitness guru around… www.ybyl.com
www.youtube.com/traineraustin)

His thoughts below:

“I had the good fortune to participate in Toastmasters in the 1970s while working as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. A big part of my job was speaking to various groups, and I was eager for all the help I could get. In addition to the practice I got speaking and being critiqued, I found working my way through the various officer spots (including president) to be helpful since we got to practice running meetings from different perspectives.

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The controversial yet acclaimed HBO series “Big Love” mentioned Toastmasters on Sunday night. Details to follow, but I’m looking for the clip right now. Any little plug helps, right?