Last week, the International Speech Contest within the Toastmasters International Convention took place in Las Vegas. Although the full speeches that competed are not available yet, Toastmasters has released a short clip (3 minutes each) of the three first qualified speeches (remember these speeches normally last around 7 minutes). In spite of not having the full speeches to evaluate them properly, we can still learn a couple of things from these videos for our future speeches.

There is something all three speakers use in their speeches, and they are safe bets when preparing a speech: humor, personal stories and take-away messages. Humor is key to make people feel good while listening to your speech: if you make them laugh, they will like you. A lot has been written about storytelling (it is trendy nowadays), and when those stories are personal, the audience attention increases greatly. Take-away messages are key to reinforce the message you have been leading the audience to, and are a nice way to finish a speech.

The third place was for Manoj Vasudevan with a speech called “We Can Fix It“.

The title is extremely important here, as it is the motto of the speech, which seems to have been repeated many times during the speech. This makes the audience learn the key message and provides the speaker a tool to interact with them, even leaving the audience say the two last words in the speech. Another nice example is when he refers to Niha, a character of the second speaker, which shows empathy with both the previous speaker, and the audience, who is now friends with Niha.

The second place has been for Aditya Maheswaran, with his speech “Scratch“.

Aditya’s way to interact with the audience is the classical rhetorical question. He uses it at least twice during his speech. First time is when he starts his speech “Do you remember your first big gift to yourself?“, and in that moment the audience is remembering it and engaged with the speech. The second time he uses this resource is when he asks the audience “When did you scratch another person?“, which is probably a way to recover anyone who might not be with him at that point of the speech, while allowing him to insert a long pause, which also helps them breath before the end of the speech… and after the question, he connects again with the audience, by making a small joke to everyone in the room when talking about the Sergeant at Arms.

The winner is Mohammed Qahtani, with “The Power of Words“.

For me, his opening is just fantastic. He uses a simple prop (a cigarette) and does not say a word for too many seconds (considering he is in a public speaking contest). Instead, he communicates by staring the audience with his eyes extremely open. Then, starts providing a lot of facts about smoking, surprising everybody and confusing some others (I can imagine the doctors in the room shaking their heads), ending with a touch of humor “data which I just made up“. The rest of the (cut) speech does not inspire me a lot of comments, but I see he concludes the speech with the cigarette again. This is a very nice and simple way to provide structure to a speech: link the opening with the conclusion in such an evident way as possible.

What do you see in these speeches? Feel free to comment this post with your view.

PS: Remember that if you want to see other International Speech Contest Winners, you can check our section in this web.

Written by Nacho