Toastmaster Speech: What I want to be when I grow up

Two things you may or may not know about me:

• I like to blog here about once every weekday as it keeps me actively writing and generally allows me to be a giant ass express myself creatively.
  
• I am an active member of a few Toastmasters groups, where I write and deliver several speeches in an effort to improve my public speaking and leadership abilities.

Every so often, I get lazy and want to multitask. This is one of those times. After the break, you can find a speech I plan on delivering at tomorrow's Toastmaster's meeting "What I want to be when I grow up". It's meant to emphasize storytelling elements of a personal natures. In it, I retell a recent story on how it was confirmed to me that teaching is what I ultimately want to do.

It's posted, as always, after the break.

I never really understood the whole notion of "finding your calling". Certainly, people have natural predispositions and strengths that help dictate what someone may be good at. Someone with great interpersonal skills may excel and gravitate towards a career in coaching. Someone who has great analytical skills could wind up an actuary. But I'm under the impression that people more or less winded up doing what it was they were good at, not something that compelled and inspired their vocation.

Or rather, this was my way of thinking until about 2 weeks ago. That was when I realized I knew teaching was my calling.

The facts of the story were these: my girlfriend is a wonderful elementary teacher who is finding it, along with most of her fellow young teachers-to-be, difficult to secure a full time teaching position. This has more to do with the employment landscape and economy than anything else. Since she will need a master's degree at some point to get tenure, she decided to look into full-time masters programs about a month ago.

One such program, Boston College's Master's in Education, had really appealed to her. When she had contacted them, their deadline to apply had long since past. But with a little persistence, a lot of courage and an excellent personal background, she was able to convince BC to accept her into the program.

On one condition: she would need to take and report to them GRE scores. Their deadline: 3 week's time.

Now, my girlfriend is an amazingly smart and talented individual. She can write and manipulate language as easily as you or I could breathe air. And I have met very few people who have the ability to network and possess the interpersonal skills she does. But taking standardized tests and math in general (one major component to the GRE) are not among her strengths. Fortunately, they are among mine.

So we got Kaplan GRE preparation book, and made promises to one another. I promised to tutor and help her in any way that I could to prepare for this test, and she promised to give her very best effort.

Unfortunately, her schedule was complicated. She was teaching a classroom full time for a teacher on maternity leave. For those who don't know, teaching - at least at the elementary level - is a very taxing profession. I know first hand that a teacher's job is not done at the end of the school day. It requires lesson planning, preparation, grading, and dealing with children, parents and administration every day in ways that can border on chaos. So when she had some time to actually prepare for her GRE, oftentimes she was run down and wanted to sleep.

In preparing, for math, I helped re-teach her old concepts she'd long since forgotten, developing my own additional tests and practice exercises to further reinforce concepts. We took practice test after practice test to get her familiar with the format of the tests and the types of questions she'd be likely to face. We did this for as many hours as she was able, seven days a week, for three weeks.

This preparation was grueling - she was often exhausted when trying to learn materials. The practice test scores kept coming in much lower than we both had hope, which were particularly demoralizing for her. She would question why it is she's even bother taking a test she believed she wouldn't do well in. But I kept cheering her on and she persevered.

Test day came and it was the moment of truth. She went off to take her 4 hour test, and I was anxiously waiting for the result. When the phone rang, I heard a smile in her voice. Her scores were way higher than we had expected. In a test who's maximum point score in any given area is 800, similar to the SATs, she improved 80 points over her best verbal score, and 140 points over her best math score.

When she told me this, I was driving at the time, and had to pull over to the side of the road - the tears that were welling up in my eyes made it too difficult to see clearly. What came out of both our mouths for the next 5 minutes were a mixture of shouting, expletives and joy. I had never felt such pride for accomplishments that weren't my own.

I knew, then and there, that teaching was for me. It was then that I was confident that my decision to go back to school this fall to ultimately teach at the college level was the right one. I guess every now and then people really do find their calling.

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Quick Thinking

I gave a speech today for Toastmasters entitled "Quick Thinking". The speech completed another requirement in the "Humorously Speaking" manual, and asked that I started and ended the story with an amusing story. I was impressed on how it came out considering I realized I had to write and give a speech only an hour and half before the meeting.

The speech itself can be found after the break. Please forgive any spelling/grammar mistakes, being a speech (which are typically delivered orally), I decided not to fret over any of that with the time crunch.

An officer was being questioned by a defense attorney and the attorney wanted to press the officer when he said he trusted his fellow police officers with his life. The attorney asked the policeman on the stand “Is there a place where the police change into and out of uniform every day?”. To which, the policeman said that there was. The attorney then asked “And do you have a locker in that place?”. The policeman said he did. The attorney then asked “And do you have a lock on your locker to secure your stuff?”. The policeman said he did. Finally, the attorney then asked “Well, if you trust these men with your life, how come you need to lock your possessions during the day?”. Thinking quickly, the cop replied “because we share our building with the court complex and sometimes lawyers are known to walk through that room.”

Bobby Unser, a famous NASCAR racer, once said “Success is where preparation and opportunity meet.” While that is sage words to live by, you don’t always have an opportunity to prepare. Like when that officer was being grilled, things can come up that you didn’t originally expect. And when you can’t prepare, quick-thinking can help fill that gap in a pinch.

Quick thinking, as I define it, is any successful action taken towards a situation you could not or did not plan for. Are your sales clients irate about something that you couldn’t have forseen? A little quick thinking can help find a solution and smooth things over. Are you about to rear-end someone who slammed on their brakes in front of you? If you were alert and thinking quickly, you could have moved onto the shoulder instead of slamming on the brakes. A Toastmasters speech catch you off guard, and you’re scrambling to prepare one prior to the meeting? If you’re thinking quickly, you can come up with some relevant self-referential topic.

So how can you improve this skill? First, keep your mind sharp. This means make sure you get enough sleep and that you’re free of unrelated stress and distractions. It’s tough to think of anything at all when you’ve been up for 24 hours straight, and if you’re mind’s elsewhere it won’t be focusing on the situation that just arose. If you’re mind is sharp, then it will do its best thinking.

Additionally, practice, practice, practice. It’s kind of ironic that the answer to unpreparedness is preparation, but that’s exactly the idea: preparing for the unprepared. The more you think on your feet, the better you get in doing so. I recommend trying to do brain teasers, crossword puzzles, Sudoku as quickly as possible. Strategy games such as chess also require you to think quickly to adapt to the current situation. The more practice you get, the better you’ll be when you need to think quickly.

I do want to emphasize, while this skill is versatile and can help in a pinch in any number of situations, there is no substitute for being prepared. Therefore, I’m not recommending you live your life only getting by on your quick thinking, but I do recommend developing this skill and it can come in quite handy for those times where life gets in the way. I’ll close my speech with another anecdote that highlights the benefits of quick-thinking:

One time when I was much younger, my family took a trip to Maine. Like all families do a few times a day, we needed to eat because we were hungry. We stopped in at a local diner and were ordering food. Now, I have two sisters, Amy and Sarah, who were sitting at their own table. Sarah, being quite unladylike, broke wind rather loudly… to the point that everyone in the room heard it and stopped what they were doing to understand what it was that just happened. My family of course realized it immediately, and my Mom shouted “Sarah!”, followed shortly by my father shouting “Sarah!”. At which point, Sarah slapped Amy on the arm and shouted “Sarah!”. At this point, Amy nearly cried as everyone in the diner looked at her, believing SHE was the one who committed the faux pa. Sarah’s quick thinking had gotten her out of an embarrassing situation, much to the chagrin of my sister Amy.

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Mailing it in: Toastmasters edition part 3

Having been tied up with many things this evening, I'm going to shamelessly mail it in. One of said things was the writing of a Toastmasters speech that I'm going to deliver tomorrow. It's entitled "Weightwatchers 101", and the purpose of it is to get the audience laughing early on. I have included it after the break for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

Fellow Toastmasters, I love food. You can probably tell by looking at me, that I've loved food for quite some time. But lately, I've noticed that my size is starting to take a toll on my body. Nothing major, but being 25 and hearing my knees click when I run long distances is something of a wake up call for me. As such, I recently joined Weightwatchers as I had heard good things about it from friends, family and co-workers. Today, I hope to tell you more about the program and give you an idea as to how it works.

What is Weightwatchers, you ask? Well, I wasn't so sure myself at first. You see, when I went to the first meeting they were talking about food and points like it was some kind of game - like Candy Land, minus all the candy.

And the people there were... interesting, to say the least. At one point during the meeting, the conversation had turned to reasons why we eat, and we were encouraged to share some of the reasons we eat. People were giving the usual reasons: hunger, celebration, boredom. But out of nowhere, a woman behind me shouts "ABANDONMENT", which had to be the funniest thing I've ever heard at a meeting. As I was stifling my laughter, which is horrible of me to say and would be the equivalent to heckling someone here at Toastmasters, all I kept thinking was "this woman's in the wrong meeting... she needs a hug, not a diet".

But despite these initial impressions, I came to understand exactly what Weightwatchers is. First off, it's not a diet... at least, not in the traditional sense. I'm not regulated to eating only rice cakes or being deathly afraid of carbs. I can eat largely what I want - at a cost. Every food has a point value, and I need to eat exactly (or a little over) certain number of points a day. Good choices, like fruit, vegetables and lean meats are worth less points (so I can eat more and feel more satisfied); poor choices like pizza, ice cream and Taco Bell are worth more points (so I can eat less).

More than anything, the strength of this program is that it enforces 2 behaviors: making conscious, mindful choices; and having the diligence to track your progress. Making conscious choices means that you understand the point value of the foods you're eating. I've looked at more nutrition facts, online and on the food packaging, than I ever have before. Did you know that a regular cheeseburger at Chili's is almost 800 calories? Or that the Aussie fries at Outback have roughly 2,900 calories and 182 grams of fat? Knowing what you eat allow you to make better choices for yourself.

But knowing is only half the battle. The other half is having the diligence to keep track of what it is you're eating. A rule of thumb on Weightwatchers is "you bite it, you write it". Tracking food throughout the day gives you a good indication of how you're doing on your choices and lets you know exactly how much more food your body needs for the day.

I can say from personal experience that Weightwatchers works. My body just feels healthier, and I've lost a good amount of weight so far in the short time that I've been there, and I expect to lose even more as I continue on with the program. In my first week on the program, I lost 7.4 pounds. Even if don't think this program is for you, I ask that you take away from this what I take away from the program: be mindful of what you eat, and be diligent about how much you eat.

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Choose your own update adventure!

Feck I had a lot to do today, so I never really got around to posting anything tonight as originally planned. Instead, you can choose one or both of the following for your reading/viewing pleasure:

1) A hilariously bad 80's Wendy's rap about burgers and grills:



2) My Toastmaster's speech that I spent a good chunk of this evening writing. It's a persuasive speech meant to convince people that the Paulson $700 billion dollar bailout is a bad idea (hint: It is). You can find it, if you're interested, after the break.

I’m not one to debate politics, but there is one issue right now facing lawmakers that I feel demands our attention. Show of hands, how many people are aware that right now, in light of all that is going on in the credit and mortgage crises, that there is a proposed 700 billion dollar bailout planned? By the end of this speech I hope you’ll agree with me that the current proposed bailout is the wrong way to fix the economy’s woes.


Before we talk about the remedy, let’s take a quick look at the ailment: a lot of expensive mortgages that people couldn’t afford were being written on the assumption they could refinance when their houses went up in value. When the housing bubble this was all predicated on burst, suddenly people are stuck with mortgages they can’t afford and default on them. What were finding out now is that a lot of major financial institutions (which thankfully ING is not among) were highly leveraged with these bad mortgages and it’s causing all sorts of serious liquidity issues in the market as all of this bad debt has to be written off. There’s some additional naked short selling of stocks exacerbating the issue, but that’s it in a nutshell.

So if there’s a credit crunch, a logical step would be to inject liquidity into the market right? On the surface, that sounds like a sound approach. And on the surface, it is. However, it’s the execution of this idea that makes the proposed bailout a bad idea.


The current proposed bailout plan calls for the Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to use $700 billion dollars of taxpayer money to fix the economy. That comes out to about $2,300 dollars per person - $2,300 of my money, $2,300 of your money, and your money and your money. And with this money of ours, his only directives are to:

“1) providing stability or preventing disruption to the financial markets or banking system and 2) protecting the taxpayer”

These are vague and overreaching goals, with absolutely no definition of what success is for these directives. What are we to measure against? How do we know we used the $700 billion correctly? Especially since it’s my money (yours too) that is being thrown around, I’d like to know how it was used and why it was good it was used that way.


And the oversight on this is negligible: the only requirement Paulson has to report to anyone is a report to Congress 3 months after the act in enacted and semiannually after that. The format and nature of these reports are not even defined in this piece of legislation. Paulson gets to set his own price for the assets that he’ll be purchasing on our behalf, even if we’re purchasing at a premium. And the absolute kicker is, and I’m quoting from the proposed legislation:

“Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

Basically Secretary Paulson gets a free pass on whatever he does. He’s not going to be held responsible for any of his actions in the bailout. This is something I’m not comfortable with.


And let’s not forget what kind of message this bailout sends. Without any oversight, and without any accountability in the execution of the bailout, basically we’re saying to corporations “hey, you can screw up, and if you screw up on a large enough scale, we the taxpayers will bail you out”. What incentive does the market have to succeed if the US Government is just going to help it out?


We are in unprecedented times, and I wish I knew the right way out of it. I don’t. But I do know this proposed bailout is not it and I urge you to get involved. Write your congressmen and women and ask them to look into alternatives. At the very least demand accountability. Demand transparency. Demand they not to allow this plan to be enacted. It’s your money – make sure it gets used wisely.

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Toastmaster's speech? In my blog post?

It's more likely than you think.

I am a member of Toastmasters, a most excellent organization that encourages and fosters public speaking and leadership skills in a friendly, supportive environment. From time to time, I'm called upon to give a speech. Tomorrow's meeting is one of those times.

Of course, like the responsible adult that I am, I've put writing the speech until the last minute I've had a full schedule and wasn't able to write my speech yet. So I'm multitasking and writing both this post and my speech at the exact same time!

Look at that, I've just doubled my productivity!

The meeting's overall theme (selected by the meeting's Toastmaster), is about music. Keeping with that theme, I'm doing the Vocal Variety project in the manual I'm working, which asks that I emphasize and vary my voice and tone throughout my speech. Also keeping with the theme, the title of my speech is "The Sound of Silence", which I've included after the break. Enjoy!

P.S. Grammar Nazis, I know this isn't exactly how full paragraphs are formed. It's a speech, not an essay.

Today's theme is around music, but I decided to take things in a different route for my speech. I'm going to reintroduce you to Silence: Silence, meet Audience. Audience, Silence.

How many of you heard Silence? I suppose that's a loaded question that could be answered from scientific, philosophic or zen point of views. But one thing I think anyone can agree on is that we don't get much of it these days anymore. Silence is truly under-appreciated in our society.

We as a culture have a problem with silence, almost as if we have an irrational fear of it. Is it because we fear the unknown? Certainly, that would explain why we force small talk in our day-to-day interactions. After all, we can't get a read on what other people think unless we hear them speak, right?

Or maybe we fear being alone. Maybe silence reminds us that all we ever really have is ourselves. That's a bit depressing, actually, but perhaps there's some truth. Have you ever gotten lost? Like, really really, lost? I know I have, plenty of times. Did you ever call someone up on the phone, knowing full well that they didn't know where you were either? I sure did and it was incredibly reassuring. It wasn't helping the situation in the least, but just hearing someone else's voice was calming.

Whatever the root cause, we fear it. So how do we as a culture combat this fear of silence? Noise. Lots and lots of noise. It's the reason we all listen to background music when we're working or exercising. It's the reason cars are equipped with radios. It's the reason we sing in the shower when we think we're alone. We're dependant on noise.

Left unchecked for many many years, this noise has permeated to all aspects of our lives. Spam in your email box. Television programs designed to hold your attention. Advertisements upon advertisements upon advertisements. People everywhere shouting and vying for your attention just to be heard over all the noise.

But silence isn't all that bad, really. Sure, I wouldn't recommend taking a religious vow of silence or anything but when used appropriately, it can be a powerful tool.

First, and perhaps more obviously, silence improves our ability to sleep. It's almost ridiculous to point to this as an example, but how many of you can go to sleep with a lot of noise? Not many?

Silence gives us the opportunity to reflect and take an introspective look at ourselves. This "alone time" allows us to re-evaluate our goals and tasks to ensure that we're doing what it is we've set out to do.

A bit ironic, in our "NOISE NOISE NOISE" world we live in silence denotes importance. We observe moments of silence as reminders of important events - tragedies, sacrifices, etc. In the same vain, but to a lesser degree, silence is a great way to emphasize points when giving a speech.

Lastly, and I may only be speaking for myself on this one, a really good litmus test for how well I know someone is not how well we converse, but how comfortable we are being silent together. That, I feel, requires deep trust and understanding between people to not give into the natural urge of breaking the silence.

In conclusion, silence isn't something to be feared. It affords us better sleep, it allows us to reconnect with ourselves, and it can be used to confer importance. These are but a few of the many benefits silence can give you.

I recommend people take steps to try and get more silence in their daily lives. It's as easy as turning off the television, radio, computer or whatever source of noise you have for 15 minutes.

Having said that, make some noise as I turn the meeting back over to our Toastmaster, Thulani.

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