First thoughts on Toastmasters versus Standup Comedy

I went to the first night of Wednesday Night Fever at Lee Harvey’s Backyard Club, courtesy of Hils Jago at Amused Moose where I will be starting a stand up course in a couple of weeks time.

There were 8 acts for the evening, and I stayed for 5 of them before realising that I was going to be left stranded in London for the night if I didn’t make a move for home.

Each of the acts was quite different in terms of style and delivery, although my favourite was a guy called Joe. He delivered a series of witty stories, keeping me on the edge of my seat anticipating what he was going to say next. His delivery was largely free of swearing as well which made it stand out from the other acts which featured swearing quite frequently. I believe swearing does have its place in comedy, but it’s much more skillful to deliver without resorting to that style of language. You certainly don’t see people swearing in Toastmasters speeches, although the audience is of course completely different so that must be taken into account as well.
The most immediate obvious difference was that the structure of the acts was much more fluid than for Toastmasters speeches - the various stories didn’t really seem to connect and often went off at a tangent. The delivery came across as being much more off the cuff than Toastmasters where you can tell that the speeches have been prepared in advance. Although I’m sure some parts of stand up routines have also been prepared, it was intriguing watching the delivery style and how it made it feel like they were making stuff up on the spot.

There was audience interaction yesterday which I have very rarely seen apart from by the most experienced Toastmasters. I think this probably made the stand up acts a bit more engaging as you felt part of it all whereas at Toastmasters the speeches are being delivered to you.

My feeling is that the best Toastmasters speeches are more polished and cleaner all round - there were still a few rough edges with the stand up acts and more hesitations than I had expected to witness.

There seemed to be more build up to certain sections in the stand up acts whereas Toastmasters speeches are straight to the point from the off from my experience.

One thing that was similar was that they both cater for their respective audiences and give them what to hear. Toastmasters speeches are by the very nature more serious in tone and are more business presentations than for entertainment. Perhaps this explains some of the differences noted above.

Of course I have seen many more Toastmasters speeches than stand up sets so I am looking forward to seeing how my opinions change as I see more of each.

Toastmasters Speech Review - C7: Comfort Zones

I did my C7 in the Toastmasters CTM manual last night at Epsom Speakers Club, where I have been speaking since last January.

It was by far the best one that I have done so far, and one of the guests came to me afterwards and said that listening to me had inspired him to get involved in the topics session later on in the evening. He won the competition for best topic so I was really chuffed for him. A pretty impressive start to his Toastmasters career! Far superior to mine anyway.

The speech was all about comfort zones, which is where you stay in an area where you feel comfortable, where there is not much opportunity for you to learn, where everything comes fairly easily. It’s a nice place to be but in order to make positive changes in any area of your life it is necessary to leave this behind and step up to the plate so to speak. Now in general if you are at Toastmasters it is probably because you already believe this so perhaps I was speaking to the converted anyway!

Enough of the talking though, just what is Toastmasters?

For me it’s the opportunity to speak in front of a group of supportive people and be given advice by more experienced members on the areas that you could look to improve upon.

The evening is split into two distinctive parts:

The first half is focused on prepared speeches, and a pre determined group of speakers of varying experience will come up on the stage and speak about a topic they have chosen. Each of these speeches will then be evaluated, where the evaluator is looking to boost the confidence of the speaker by noting good areas of their speech while also covering areas for improvement and preferably giving examples of how these improvements can be made.

There is a break for 15 minutes or so before the second half gets underway - just like football!

The second half is all about off the cuff speaking. The format varies slightly depending on who is running the session but the idea is that you are given a topic to speak about, you get maybe 30 seconds to think about it, and then you come up on the stage and speak for up to 2 minutes. It’s certainly a challenge!

I was 4th on the stage last night which was strange as I had really got used to the idea of being one of the first to speak when it was my turn! What was not so good about the speech was that a) I ran over the time by about 40 seconds or so and b) It didn’t fit strictly to the objectives laid out.

These were both pointed out by my evaluator for the evening, as well as the fact that sometimes I seemed to move around the stage just for the sake of it.

The fact that I had felt so at ease on stage and had managed to make quite a number in the audience laugh without intending to meant that it was a fantastic experience for me. Just before I got on stage I realised that there was a table on the right hand side, and I decided to make use of it in one area of the speech. I was talking about being absolutely terrified at a party I went to in Vancouver a couple of years ago, and wishing the table had been there to save me! I actually hid behind the table while on stage - it went down pretty well.

Overall though my delivery was much more controlled, much slower than normal and was covered with pauses - an area of speaking that I have found particularly difficult in the past.

Finally, after 15 months of practice the stage feels comfortable! Somewhat ironic given the choice of topic, don’t you think?

6 positive things

An idea that I’ve been playing with for the last 3 weeks or so is that of sitting down at the end of each day and noting 6 positive things that have happened during the day.

Positive is self defined so it can be anything you want really…from a nice quiet walk on your own, to hanging out with your best mates, you choose.

I’ve generally found it quite easy to do because I try and put myself in positions where I am doing enjoyable things as often as possible, but it can be quite a challenge sometimes! For example last Saturday was a shocking day for me - I was around the house for most of the day not doing a great deal and then went to watch the United v Portsmouth match at my mates house. United lost so I was in something of a gutted state for the rest of the day and when it came to write down my 6 postive things for the day I was really struggling. I decided it wasn’t going to happen and went to sleep having only managed 2!

The next day I was determined to find something good about the day and not give up on this process because of one comparatively bad day…and I eventually came up with 6, although it was hard work!

For the record these were the 6 positives for last Saturday:

1. Completed the LFU cache practice project 2. Went for a run - very painful but good to get outside 3. Really sunny day - brings the best out of London 4. Found a route through Mitcham to get back home from Tooting 5. Mum’s steamed vegetables for dinner were quite nice for vegetables 6. Read Prison Break forums - some interesting potential plots

Obviously yours will be different to mine but I have been encouraging people to try this out and see what happens. I also used it in a Toastmasters warm up session.

From my experience it is very very easy to focus on the negative things, and therefore to end the day thinking of all the good things that have happened can be quite liberating.

Why 6 things?

Well it’s very easy to think of 3 things, 6 is double that and it can possibly help you find some things you enjoyed about your day that weren’t immediately obvious at the time.

That’s my experience anyway, but I encourage you to give it a try. What have you got to lose?!

Let’s try again

After a Mace style hiatus I am typing here after a 7 month laziness streak. Inspired by Ade Oshineye and having recently been reading Penelope Trunk’s blog I have decided that I will again write down some of my ideas on here just for the hell of it.

September 2006 was the last entry so since then what’s been going on…

Well I’m now in London after my two months at ThoughtWorks University and am very much enjoying the quality weather that we are currently experiencing in the capital. It looked like I might be going to the states at one stage but it wasn’t to be for now so the UK it is for now.

I’ve finally given in to Ade’s constant encouragement to start putting my photos onto Flickr instead of Picasa so I’ve been spending quite a bit of time this weekend putting my pictures up there.

I’m now working on a Java project having not done any Java since the second year of University, so that has certainly been an interesting learning curve for me after a year or so only doing C# and ASP.NET at RBI. My only comment with regards to that is that I did not understand how people could wax so lyrically about an IDE as ThoughtWorkers do about IntelliJ. I must now eat my words, it is indeed incredibly good and makes development so much easier than any other editor I’ve had the pleasure of working with.

One of my new year’s resolutions was to try and take my NLP skills to the next level and in that spirit I signed up for an 18 day NLP Practitioner course with ABL World Ltd. I’ve done 3 out of the 6 modules so far and it has been a fantastic learning experience for me. I’ve met some people that I would never have met otherwise and heard some ideas that I’d never previously considered. No doubt I will cover that a bit more in some future posts.

In the interests of stepping outside my comfort zone I have also signed up to do a salsa class with the Bishopsgate Institute starting in a couple of weeks time and hopefully I will be doing a standup course too, starting in May - assuming I got my deposit cheque to them in time to secure a place.

That’ll do me for now but I will expand on some of the above in the coming days.