by Praveena Raman
With the celebration of St. Valentine’s Day, the month of February has been associated with love and relationships. In our journey as a Toastmaster we continually strive to build relationships with our speeches, from the very first icebreaker to the professional speeches. In his article, A Speech is a Love Affair (Toastmaster. February 2015; p14) Toastmaster Jack Vincent mentions that a great speech is like a love affair as we focus on our audience, touch their emotions and also their minds creating an attraction and a connection. He talks about how to seduce, engage and win the hearts of our audience. Jack mentions that simplicity sparks emotion and attraction is a strong emotion; so with a simple but attention grabbing opening we can start seducing our audience. We then nail the seduction with a well-paced speech delivered with genuine confidence. Jack next discusses how to engage the audience with a well-developed content assuring them of a wonderful journey they will be taking with us and then winning their heart by delivering the content with passion and love.
Let us try and put into practice these recommendations from Jack Vincent and see if we can have a number of love affairs this year. As you all know to develop a great speech, apart from a powerful topic we need words to help us convey our enthusiasm, our passion, our love so that we can woo our audience properly. To help us in this effort, below is a 7 verse Jingle written in the 1930s by Elizabeth Scott Stam. It is available on Google, however the below verses are from a submission to The Toastmaster, June 1938;V4(n2):p22.
Once we have wooed and won our audience, let us keep building our relationship, strengthening and maintaining through our Toastmasters journey. In his February 2021 ViewPoint column in the Toastmaster, International President, Richard E. Peck, asks us if we are the String, the Bow or Both in Cupid’s bow? In his view Cupid’s bow can be used to describe relationships and he explains that just as there needs to be a balance between the tautness of the string and the bend of the bow for the perfect release of the arrow, in the same way we need to have the right balance between building and maintaining relationships.
Let’s continue to woo our audience and build our relationships not just this month but this year and more as coming together gives us a sense of belonging and learning and growing together gives us a sense of purpose.
City Speech Toastmasters 