Toastmasters. Singing during the speech

I started to sing. My singing sounded very unsure and I did not follow the tune, I think. When I had been practicing at home, it all had sounded much nicer. Now I was really scared and uncomfortable while looking the audience in the eyes and singing.

My green heart is filled with apples 

Your dark face is filled with stars

I am the one that you’ve forgotten

You are the one my heart desires

Dance when you think of me

Sing to remember me

Sing till your heart can see

Who we are

This is my third speech at Toastmasters, an international public speaking club. The divisions of the club are spread all over the world (there are several in Russia, Ukraine and there is a prospective club in Belarus). I joined Utrecht Toastmasters club several months ago. My main goal is to overcome this disgusting fear of any stage and any talking of an audience which is more than two people. I have already described how my second speech went. 

My speech titled ‘Who we are’ is my third one. And I had great expectations for it. I thought that my initial intense fear and clumsiness are gone and I can concentrate on content, movement on stage and body language.

Topic for the speech

The story was about how my friend during the teenage times criticized my ear for singing and voice and said that it’s better not to sing for me. Later I realized that this episode influenced me more than I thought. I never sing in public, never sing drunk, never sing in the shower and hate karaoke nights out with colleagues. I recalled this story during Julia Cameron training and decided that this can be a topic for a speech.

We were sitting at a school desk, waiting for the next class to start. We were probably thirteen years olds. My classmate, a girl, was attending a music school next to our normal secondary school. She told me that she can detect whether I have an ear for singing if I will sing her any song. I thought I should use this opportunity to know. Maybe I have talent? It should not be lost. I sang a song.

It’s horrible. Don’t do it again. My advice. My musical classmate said.

I had an idea that right in the middle of the speech I can start singing a song and demonstrate in such a way that we all can overcome our fears (well, my original idea was even to encourage the audience to sing).

Then my mentor advised starting with the signing from the very beginning in order to shock the audience. Well, I think I managed to shock. I saw that a couple of people sitting on the first row stopped making notes (probably they were still writing down their feedback for the previous speaker and started to watch me without attentively).

The attention of the audience was focused on me, but I could not use it to my advantage: I stared at the floor a couple of times, forgot the next sentence at some point, uttered about ten ahas-sos and other useless sounds, did not make a pause after saying a rhetorical question(When is the right time? The right time is always now!).

My main conclusion was that not every speech that is ideal on paper, will become ideal on stage, but definitely, something that was not ideal on paper will never become ideal on stage. Next time I really want to bring my speech on paper to impeccable level, to ideal structure and clearness that would make me happy with the speech before I start talking on stage.

Follow my progress in Toastmasters club using ‘toastmasters’ tag.