I recently joined Toastmasters in order to improve my public speakings skills and I’m enjoying it a lot. I joined Club 59 at Kitsilano Yacht Club. The idea is that I will do 10 speeches over time covering a range of topics and using different skills and then I’ll be a “Competent Communicator”. Then I can go onto more advanced levels if I want. Toastmasters is a tiny bit like a cult but it doesn’t cost much and you meet nice people and improve yourself, so I’m willing to be inducted and become a convert.

How did it go?

Anyway, last Friday I received an email saying that there were some speech slots available on Monday. This felt a bit soon for me to do my Icebreaker but I thought I’d go for it anyway, so I sent off an email before I could change my mind. I prepared my speech over the weekend and did it on Monday night. It went very well and felt good, I wasn’t too nervous. Many people congratulated me on a great Ice Breaker afterwards and the club president said it was the best one he’d seen in a long time! This is certainly encouraging.

How I prepared

I managed to do the speech from memory without any notes and I did it in 5 minutes 55 seconds (I was aiming for 6 minutes). It was all down to the preparation. This is what I did:

- I figured out how many words I read aloud per minute. That’s about 150 words.

- I worked out that 6 minutes is about 900 words.

- I thought up a theme and carefully crafted an intro and an outro in MS Word.

- I filled in the middle bit with details of my past split into several sections. These sections acted as natural pauses in the speech and people commented that my pauses were very good, so it must have worked.

- I read it aloud several times and timed myself.

- It was taking longer than 6 minutes so I edited the text to remove some less critical sentences.

- I read it aloud some more and got the time to about 5 mins 50 seconds.

- I made an outline of the speech with bullet points for the details and practised it some more just looking at that.

- I made a list of just the section headers and practised just from that.

- Finally I practised with no list.

- Some important bits I repeated over and over to drum the correct words and delivery technique into my head.

- Most of the time I practised standing up so that I could move around and wave my hands (I actually did an Aikido move at one point during the speech followed by a block and punch and then some other similar stuff).

- I wanted to show Helen to get her feedback but she was really ill all weekend, so I asked my colleagues at work to be a dummy audience but only one volunteered. Anyway, it was good to practice in front of at least one person before I did it for real.

- I arrived at toastmasters early and made sure that I spoke to as many people as possible so that they were familiar to me and not scary later on when they were in the audience.

- When I did my speech I made sure to speak slowly and carefully, to breathe and project my voice, and to look at different audience members. Also I moved around the stage and used my arms to accentuate points.

- Oh and of course before I got there I visualised myself doing a great speech, feeling confident, and everyone saying it was good afterwards. This step is probably more important that all the others! But solid preparation certainly helped a lot.

Although I haven’t done many speeches before I guess I had a slight advantage over most noobs because of my 8 years of Aikido teaching (although that’s to a very familiar class and more physical than about speeches), and multiple years of computer system sales before that – it all helps to combat nerves.

So without further ado, here’s a transcript of my speech (my actual words varied a bit on the day as my memory is not perfect and I wanted to speak naturally instead of repeating verbatim). Of course, you had to be there to really appreciate it Enjoy!

My Ice Breaker Speech

Monday 24th August 2009

Title: From Nought to One Hundred.

Thank you Mr/Madam Toastmaster.
Good evening Mr/Madam Chair, fellow Toastmasters and most welcome guests.

Introduction:

Someone once asked me “If I take up a martial art, what is the percentage chance that I’ll reach black belt?”. And I said: Well here’s the thing, it doesn’t matter what the average percentage chance is. What matters is if YOU want to be a black belt enough then you’ll be one, and if you don’t want it enough, then you’ll never be one. The percentage chance for you is simply 100 or zero.

I turns out that for me… [pull out my black belt from my back pocket and hold up] … it was 100 percent.

I earned this black belt in 2002 for Aikido and I gained my 2nd dan (that’s a higher level of black belt) last year.

Tonight I’m going to tell you a bit about myself including why I took up Aikido and how I ended up here.

[put black belt back down on lectern]

Living in England:

Like most people in Vancouver I wasn’t born here. If my accent hasn’t already given it away by now, I’m from England.

I grew up in the countryside in the county of Dorset, which on the South coast. It’s a beautiful area steeped in ancient Roman and Celtic history.

My hometown is called Bridport. It’s a small town near the sea and I lived there happily for most of my life.

My First Computer:

My family moved to Bridport when I was 8 years old and that is when I got my first computer. In those days computers came with a BASIC programming manual and because games cost money I learnt to program them instead for fun. I continued programming games as a hobby for the next 22 years until it became my full-time job, but more on that in a moment.

Aikido:

In my early 20s I was developing business software in the day and playing computer games all night long. One day I came to the realisation that I needed to do some exercise or I was going to get pretty unhealthy due to my sedentary lifestyle.

Then a friend told me about an Aikido class that had started up at the local leisure centre. Aikido is a Japanese martial art that involves blending with an attackers’ energy to use against them instead of blocking and then punching or kicking back like most other martial arts.

I found the first class to be very intriguing and I was relieved that there was no smashing of bricks with my head or thrusting my hands into a bucket of hot coals.

Aikido encourages a positive attitude and we learn perseverance and endurance in a supportive atmosphere. During lessons we also mediate and do deep breathing to tune into Universal energy (more on that in a future speech!)

When my teacher moved on I was honoured to become the teacher and I’ve taught children and adults for the last 8 years.

Business Software to Game Developer:

As I mentioned earlier my day job was developing business software. Specifically it was stock control, accounting and reporting systems for bookshops. Sounds pretty thrilling doesn’t it?

Well anyway, eventually I became the manager of the company and the software became very successful. However, I was aware that I was making the owner of the company big money whilst working myself into the ground. Does that sound familiar to anyone here?

So I decided to follow my passion and set up my own company and make computer games for a living. I quit my job without any real plan or savings but with a belief in myself and my abilities and with a determination to succeed. I somehow *knew* that I could make it work – that it was going to be 100% chance of success for me.

Moving to Vancouver:

And to cut a long story short, it did work. I made 6 commercial games and then Big Fish Games in Seattle offered me a job in a new studio that was opening in Vancouver.

I had to think very carefully about their offer because I have a family with two boys aged 8 and 5, and it would mean completely uprooting and moving to a different continent, which I’m sure some of you may be familiar with.

However, we thought that it was a great opportunity for us all to gain experience and have fun, so we moved here last November and we’ve been loving it, especially this awesome summer!

Future Aims:

Over the years I’ve got more and more into personal development and so joining Toastmasters was a natural progression for me especially because I want to begin teaching personal development soon. I believe that communicating clearly is extremely important in personal, social and business situations and I look forward to becoming a Competent Communicator with your help.

Conclusion:

So I hope that I’ve demonstrated today that to go from zero to 100 you need to really want to achieve something and really believe that you can do it. Then you can take dedicated action towards that goal and succeed. Go for it!

I just had a busy but fun few days. On Friday Nick Newhard from BFG Seattle came up to Vancouver and we prepared notes for our Vancouver Game Design Expo presentation called “10 Secrets to Designing Instantly Addictive and Enjoyable Games”. Nick is an industry veteran game designer – he made a game called Blood back in the Doom and Duke Nukem 3D days.

Vancouver Film School

On Friday night we got invited to a speakers’ Dinner at the Vancouver Film School cafe and then got taken on a tour around the Game Design Campus. It’s a pretty cool place and the course seems well thought out. I’ve was given a CD containing some of the students’ final projects (Flash games) to check out. Oh and I got a free jacket, a free bag, a free water bottle and a free pen, neato!

On Saturday we there were a whole load of presentations at the VFS Theatre and we watched one about prototyping by a guy called Matt who use to work for Nexon but who is now “Independent” (he said that sounded better than unemployed). It made a lot of sense and I hope to use some of the info for my next game. Then we continued working on our presentation notes and were beginning to wish that the presentation was called “2 Secrets to…” instead

Visualising Success

That night I spent some time visualising a successful presentation. So like me not being too nervous, smiling, making jokes (which the audience laugh at), and applause at the end, plus people telling us it was a great presentation. This is the kind of thing I learnt to do years ago before my Aikido gradings and before important sales presentations when I was selling business software.

Technical Hitches

Sunday morning we wanted to run through the presentation a couple more times but we ran into some technical hitches. Nick’s laptop had ceased to boot and so he wasn’t able to make some important edits. So we downloaded a trial version of Office 2007 (500+MB) in order to install Powerpoint 2007 on my PC, but when we ran Powerpoint we discovered that it was a crippled version that wouldn’t allow us to edit the notes or save! Damn you Microsoft! In the end we were able to edit it in an older version but we only got to practice the presentation once and that meant that we were nearly late for the presentation – oh and I left my notes printout in the office in the rush! We got there just in time to discover that they hadn’t set up the laptop to display the speakers’ notes whilst the main slideshow was projected onto the big screen. So this required a bit more technical jiggery pokery to resolve.

All of these last minute hitches that seemed to be conspiring against us and made us feel pretty nervous. I was more nervous than for my 2nd dan black belt grading in Aikido where I got attacked with a real knife for example! I guess I felt way better prepared for that, ha ha. But I did some deep breathing and walked around on stage and familiarised myself with the audience before we began, which helped.

The presentation

The presentation itself lasted exactly 35 minutes, which was the target time, and went very well. We didn’t sound too nervous, I encouraged some audience participation by getting them to name the game screenshots, and the jokes went down well. I actually made more jokes than planned because when I relaxed I imagined I was just talking to one person and so the jokes came out naturally. The presentation was jam packed with vital info and loads of people were making notes, even game designers from mainstream AAA game companies. We made sure that the presentation referenced both Casual games and mainstream games so that people could easily see the parallels. Also some of my notes just said RIFF, which meant waffle in an adlib manner about a particular game or topic. These sections added life to the presentation because they don’t sound as dry as when you read from notes.

At the end of the presentation loads of people rushed up to us and asked us questions, and one game designer from a AAA game company said it was the best presentation of the weekend (this was something specific I had visualised the night before), so that was pretty cool. Then we chilled out and had a big congratulatory lunch in Yaletown and I resumed adding sound effects to my current game.

Conclusion

Overall doing the presentation was fun, but it’s a LOT of work to deliver an info packed half hour presentation. It probably took us a couple of days to plan and make the slideshow (lots of screenshots) and a couple more days to make all the notes and practice it. So if you are asked to do a presentation somewhere, don’t underestimate the work involved. Also definitely try visualising a successful presentation so that you get into a positive mindset, not a worried mindset. Hopefully now if I’m asked to do another one I’ll be less nervous and better prepared.