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.

Paper Prototyping

Josh Evnin ran a brief session on User Centred Design for some of the graduates at TWU on Monday evening. He’s a bit of a hero when it comes to ‘putting the user first’ so the turn out for his session was pretty good considering it was nearly 9 in the evening.

After a few definitions, the majority of the session was spent doing an activity I have not done previously – paper prototyping. We had to design the interface for an in car music entertainment session that would allow the user to plug in their iPod and then select the song they wanted to play. After 10 minutes doing this we had to showcase our design to the ‘user’ and get their opinions as to how useable the design was.

We were in teams of 3 plus one user - the 3 roles being computer, facilitator and observer. The job of the facilitator was to talk the user through the process, the computer held up the screens for the user (basically acting as a computer screen), and the observer took notes on the way the user interacted with the ’system’, focusing in particular on areas where the user appeared to be confused by what they saw.

We finally concluded that usability of software systems is something that seems to be quite far down the list of priorities. In fact it is quite vital if you want to create a great user experience, and all the attendees have promised to speak to the project manager of their first project and try and get usability testing including in the project plan.

It remains to be seen how successful we will be with this.

The big cost of avoiding little risks

Excellent article on the BBC website about companies persuading customers that they need to buy insurance on just about everything that they purchase, with particular reference to mobile phones and hire cars.

I personally have never bought mobile phone insurance – it tends to be excessively priced to the extent that you’d have to lose your phone at least once a year to make the policy worthwhile.

One type of insurance that has proved worthwhile for my brother (and is not mentioned in the article) is watch insurance. I don’t know the exact details of his insurance, but I do know that everytime anything has gone wrong with his watch the company has replaced it with the latest model, no questions asked.

Now that’s customer service!

Getting started with NLP

No updates for a week, what is the world coming to! Well I don’t actually have any specific subject matter that I want to talk about right now so I’ll just reference a few links to some interesting articles that I have read about Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP).

I heard about NLP about 10 or 11 months ago when I was browsing Amazon for psychology related books. I started reading psychology based material about 13-14 months ago, and I’m still reading material now so you could say it’s one of my topics of interest I suppose.

Wikipedia describes NLP as follows:

Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is a set of techniques, axioms and beliefs that adherents use primarily as an approach to personal development.

That describes it better than I ever could so I think I’ll leave it at that! I feel reading NLP related material has helped me to better understand my emotions and feelings, and has been useful for me in helping to overcome some ‘fears’ that I had previously.

One particular concept which has been useful to me is visualisation. I won’t touch on it too much in this post, but it’s basically the process of imagining a situation in your mind going exactly how you want it to with reference to your own actions. I find this really useful for preparing for situations where I have to speak in front of a group of people – I previously found this a petrifying experience.

The book ‘Introducing NLP Neuro Linguistic Programming’ by Joseph O’Connor was my first reading material on the topic, and I think it serves as an excellent first read. I found everything explained in terms that I could easily understand. I also bought the workbook that goes alongside this book earlier this year but have yet to read that. No doubt I will report back on its usefulness when I do get the opportunity.

Finally, if you don’t feel like splashing out on a book, there are loads of free resources available on the internet. The best I have found so far is a free course run on NLPWeekly.com. I haven’t completed it yet but the material I’ve read so far seems to take a more practical approach than I have witnessed before so I think this could be an excellent resource.

Active listening

One of the first unusual (to me) things that I noticed from the trainers at ThoughtWorks University was that when they were listening to participants they would often ask questions and re-frame the participants’ comments. Intrigued and impressed by this I spoke to one of the trainers and was told that they were engaging in ‘active listening’. Wikipedia defines the term as follows:

Active listening is an intent “listening for meaning” in which the listener checks with the speaker to see that a statement has been correctly heard and understood. The goal of active listening is to improve mutual understanding.

I believe this is a very useful skill to acquire, and I certainly hope to improve my ability in this area.

It reminded me of the 5th Habit that Steven Covey speaks of in his book titled ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’: Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood. Certainly easier said than done…but then again we do have two ears and only one mouth so perhaps there is a good reason for that!

Browsing the ThoughtWorks Blogs yesterday evening I came across a link to an interesting site which spoke of the ‘Eight barriers to effective listening’. I found this particularly useful as not only does it point some of the common problems one can have when listening to someone else, but also suggestions as to how these can be overcome.

A couple of months ago I read a book titled ‘Coaching Yourself to Leadership’ – although I found it quite heavy going in places, it too touches on some listening barriers, namely:

Advising: After hearing only a few words, you believe that you know how to solve the person’s problem and you start offering advice. Comparing: As you listen to the other person, your insecurities get triggered, and you start comparing yourself to the person—assessing which one of you is better, more knowledgeable, more competent, etc. Daydreaming: You get triggered by something the other person says and you’re off in your own world. You don’t have a clue what the person said to you. Derailing: You find the subject matter uncomfortable, so you abruptly change the subject or interrupt with a joke. Filling-in: You don’t let the other person finish her sentence; instead you finish it for her. Filtering: You only listen to the part of the message that is important to you, and tune out the rest. You either pay attention to things that might be emotionally threatening (and fail to hear anything good), or you only hear what is good (and fail to hear the parts that are negative). Identifying: You identify with what the person is telling you and swing the conversation back to yourself, telling how something similar happened to you. You become engrossed in telling your story, and don’t really listen to the other person or allow her the space to continue her story. Judging: You make hasty judgments about people before completely listening to what they have to say. Mind Reading: You look for what you perceive to be the truth, and end up making assumptions that have little to do with what the person is actually saying to you. Placating: You want to be nice and supportive; therefore, you voice agreement with everything that is being said, even if you don’t really agree. Because you don’t really want to disagree, you don’t listen deeply enough to fully examine the other person’s viewpoint. Rehearsing: Rather than listening, you are mentally preparing what you are going to say. You might look interested, but you’re really concentrating on planning how you’re going to respond. Sparring: You quickly disagree with the other person because you have a strong point of view. The other person feels like she hasn’t had a chance to be heard.

I hope this is ok to post on here – I’ve just written up the points straight from the book. Copyright of the author Peter O’Brien and all that.

I know I do at least 3 of those, and that’s being kind to myself!

Giving effective feedback

One of the most interesting things I have discovered since starting at ThoughtWorks earlier this month is the emphasis that is placed on giving feedback.

The first lesson we were taught about giving feedback was that it could be one of two types. Either it should Strengthen Confidence or Increase Effectiveness.

In Layman’s term that means that if you want to make a positive comment about somebody’s contribution then you should make reference to something specific that you believe they have done well so that they can continue doing it. Equally if you believe there is an area that they could improve it, a specific example of this behaviour/fault should be noted along with a suggestion for how they can improve.

As a member of Toastmasters since January I was already used to this concept of feedback and there are certainly parallels in the feedback system encouraged at Toastmasters and that used at ThoughtWorks.

Although Toastmasters do not define types of feedback, there is an expectation that evaluators will apply themselves in a certain manner when carrying out their job.

One of the things which is frowned upon is known as ‘whitewashing’. This is where an evaluator would say that a speaker was ‘brilliant’ or give a summary just using complementary adjectives. Although the speaker may well be flattered, it does not really tell them anything or leave room for improvement. The use of the word ‘brilliant’ or ’superb’ is only the perception of the person using it, and the failure to make use of the word with regards to a specific behaviour or action means that it is rendered meaningless.

Equally when the evaluator believes there is an area that the speaker can improve in they should make a reference to the specific negative behaviour or action so that the speaker can recall their mistake and go about making the improvement. When giving feedback it is very poor practice to attribute your own feelings to the speaker – you are giving them control over something which they do not have control over! For example, if an evaluator were to say: ‘I felt bored listening to your speech, you should make the next speech more interesting’. In this case the evaluator is giving the speaker the power to make them feel bored. It is ridiculous to let someone have that amount of control over you and if we consider that another person listening to the same speech may have felt really engaged, a property of the speech cannot be that it was ‘boring’.

This is very similar to the way that ThoughtWorkers are expected to give feedback, although it is also emphasised that when giving feedback one should speak only for themselves, and not try and speak for a group of people. Doing this would assume that mind reading is possible and as far as I’m aware this feat has yet to be achieved. An example of committing this mistake would be to say something along the lines of: ‘It would be better for us if you could do x’. In this case ‘us’ is not defined and it is unlikely that one person can speak precisely of the feelings of other people.

This concept is very similar to that of Generalisation in the NLP Meta Model, which states the following:

“Generalization is the process by which elements or pieces of a person’s model become detached from their original experience and come to represent the entire category of which the experience is an example.”

This is an area that I am actually working on myself, and I am finding it very difficult to speak only for myself because I’m so used to generalising! Of course there are still times when generalisation is vital, and we would find it very difficult to live our daily lives without generalising on some things. Giving feedback, however, is one area where this ‘technique’ is counter productive.

Inheritance and Delegation

One of the major learning points this week at TWU has been understanding when it is appropriate to use inheritance and when delegation is the better choice.

I had heard stories about how inheritance could be misused but I didn’t think I would be stupid enough to fall straight into that trap! We were taught the concept using ‘Measurement’ as the problem domain. So to translate the previous sentence into English: The aim was to design classes which could handle old school measurement types such as Inches, Feet, Yards, and so on.

I went about the task by first creating a base Measurement class and then created Inch, Foot and Yard as sub classes of this. The code looked pretty slick to me and I was quite pleased with how it had turned out. I was feeling pretty confident that I had nailed the objective of the session. Alas, it was not meant to be!

Upon reviewing the code my partner and I had created, one of the trainers pointed out that the sub classes did not actually do very much at all. They were effectively useless classes and there was barely any difference between them! One of the other requirements for the code was that it should be possible to compare an instance of the Inch class with an instance of the Foot class, an instance of the Yard class with the Inch class and so on. No problem I thought and promptly created methods called ‘ConvertToFoot’ in my Inch class and ‘ConvertToInch’ in my Foot class.

One of the cardinal sins of object orientated programming had been committed! I now had 2 methods which did almost the exact same as the other for no additional benefit. What if there were 100 different measurements? That would mean 99 different conversion methods each to convert to all the other types of measurement. Clearly not an optimal solution – I had taken the bait and fallen into the trap of over use of inheritance.

Anyway, the lesson of the session was that in this particular case it was better to use delegation or composition. In this example it means that there is only the need for one Measurement class, each instance of which comprises of a Unit object. The concept of a ’slug’ was introduced – no not one of those nasty little insects, but in this case meaning an instance of an object with a private constructor and one public static instance. In other words slugs are like a poor man’s Singleton. The code looked something like this:

class Unit { public static readonly Unit INCH = new Unit(1); public static readonly Unit FOOT = new Unit(12); }

This made it far easier to add future measurement types, and meant that only two classes were needed instead of a potentially infinite amount.

I read an interesting article on this topic by Robert Martin, titled ‘Template Method & Strategy: Inheritance vs Delegation’ which explains the reasoning much better than I have here along with a code example.