Armed with a large spreadsheet, videos of Toastmasters International Finalists, and an overwhelming sense of curiosity, I set out to learn what sets the champions apart. I watched 10 champion speeches and 5 speeches that placed second or third. I manually recorded everything about them in a spreadsheet: aspects like how many laughs they received, what style of speaker they … [Read more...]
The Complete Guide to Adding Humor to Your Speech (10+ Ways and Ebook)
Humor is one of the simplest ways to go from being a boring speaker to an engaging one. If you're able to successfully add humor to your speech, you'll be able to connect better with your audience. I'm about to give you over 10 ways to add humor to your speech—and there's even more helpful material in the free ebook accompanying this post. All you need to do is give me your … [Read more...]
Toastmasters division champion humorous speech (self-analysis video)
Division champion humorous speech analysis I won the Toastmasters division contest with this speech! This video will go over how I managed to keep it together after forgetting a critical word (and substituting it for basically an oxymoron), as well as several other valuable lessons you can learn from the speech. Posted by Potent Speaking on Monday, October 16, … [Read more...]
Types of public speaking anxiety and how to deal with them
Many people experience public speaking anxiety, but most people are not aware that there are actually multiple different types of public speaking anxiety. The types of public speaking anxiety can be sorted into contexts and causes. There are two anxiety contexts Some people get nervous before the speech, while others get nervous during the speech. If you're someone who … [Read more...]
Analysis of my own humorous speech “Unleash your inner Stillman”
Transcript: Hey everyone, I recently competed in a Toastmasters humorous speech contest and I actually was fortunate enough to win the club level contest so I'm moving on to the area level and representing my club there soon. And what I wanted to do is take the video of my speech and do an analysis on it and show you what I did wrong and what I could improve on as well as … [Read more...]