The Communication and Leadership Program, culminating in the CTM, or Competent Toastmaster, consists of a series of ten speeches. At each step, Toastmasters specifies that a certain particular aspect of speechmaking is to be addressed. Progressively, those aspects are combined and built on, with the final speeches exhibiting all the aspects and incorporating feedback received and lessons learned.
At the same
time, you will be assigned one or another role in some meetings – you will
evaluate other speakers, you will time the speeches, and you will be General
Evaluator or Toastmaster. Descriptions of those roles are to be found
elsewhere
on this site. The purpose of this page is to describe briefly the guidelines of
the ten speeches leading to the CTM, and beyond.
And don't be intimidated by the requirements of the later speeches – by the time you get there, you will have the skills and experience to deal with them. First, get through the Ice Breaker, then the next, ....
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1 |
4-6 minutes |
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2 |
5-7 minutes |
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3 |
5-7 minutes |
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4 |
5-7 minutes |
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5 |
5-7 minutes |
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6 |
5-7 minutes |
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7 |
5-7 minutes |
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8 |
5-7 minutes |
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9 |
5-7 minutes |
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10 |
8-10 minutes |
The best way to begin your speaking experience is to talk about the subject closest to you – yourself. You will introduce yourself to your fellow Club members and give them some information about your background, interests, and ambitions.
The general subject of this talk is you, but that subject is too broad for a short 4-6 minute talk. You must narrow the subject by selecting three or four interesting aspects of your life that will give your fellow members insight and understanding of you as an individual.
Don't bother with such details as avoiding notes, or trying not to sound stiff, or not coming out from behind the lectern, unless you feel sufficiently comfortable with your material and preparation that you want to avoid those crutches. You'll have plenty of time in later speeches to work your way out of your comfort zone.
And remember to leave something out – for your future talks! If you have a passion, don't unload on the Club members all at once in the Ice Breaker: leave something for your later speeches.
2 Organize Your Speech
You have now learned how to face nervousness derived from talking about yourself and from relating your passion on a subject to others in a formal presentation. Now you are ready to concentrate on delivering a fully structured speech by organizing your ideas and following a clear outline.
As a speaker, your business is persuading others to accept your ideas, and success comes only when you carefully organize your thoughts. Consider how you react to hearing someone else present his ideas: you internalize the ideas during the presentation, and this process gives rise to objections or counter-arguments. So when you present your own ideas, organizing the ideas and the rebuttals to the counter-objections will lead the listener to your point of view, or at least to recognize that your viewpoint has merit.
The audience will only be motivated by what they want, not by what you want. Analyze what will motivate your audience to agree with you, understand you, or take action on your behalf. Then develop your ideas so they supply that motivation. Good organization is the key to success in persuading people.
But this talk is not intended to be a serious attempt at persuasion, only to explore the requirements of effective organization. The subject can be anything that lends itself to clear segregation into a beginning, middle, and conclusion. The more narrow the focus of the talk, the easier it will be to organize it effectively.
3 Get to the Point
Every speech must have a general and a specific purpose. A general purpose is to inform, to persuade, to entertain, or to inspire. A specific purpose is what you want the audience to do after listening to your speech.
Once you have established your general and specific purposes, you'll find it easy to organize your speech. You'll also have more confidence, which will make you more convincing, enthusiastic, and sincere. Of course, the better organized the speech is, the more likely it is to achieve your purpose.
4 How to Say It
Words are powerful. They convey your message, and they influence your audience and their perception of you. Word choice and arrangement need just as much attention as speech organization and purpose.
Select clear, accurate, descriptive, and short words that best communicate your ideas and arrange them effectively and correctly. Use rhetorical devices to enhance and emphasize ideas. Eliminate jargon and unnecessary words, and use correct grammar.
Every word should add value, meaning, and punch to your speech.
5 Your Body Speaks
Body language is as important in public speaking as it is in everyday conversation, if not more so. By learning how to use gestures, eye contact, and walking around while you speak, you will illustrate and emphasize the points you try to make with your words, reinforcing their impact and improving audience comprehension.
A speaker who is sincere about her subject but locks herself behind the lectern and avoids looking at her audience undermines her own purpose. Her words say she cares about her subject, but her body language says she doesn't care to involve her listeners in her world. The result is that listeners don't think the speaker is sincere, and ignore her message.
A successful speaker uses words and gestures as complementary, the gestures and other body language reinforcing the words. This exercise will encourage you to learn how to associate appropriate gestures, and avoid inappropriate body language.
Also, after giving this speech, you will be encouraged to look back on your progress to date – a 7th-inning stretch. A self-examination guide is provided in the manual after the evaluation page for this speech, affording you the opportunity to determine how much work, if any, you might need in one or another of the particular skill areas dealt with in the five speeches you've given to date.
6 Vocal Variety
The speaker who drones in a monotone is the archetype of missed opportunity. The speaker has his audience, and puts them to sleep instead of exciting them with his passion. Without proper vocal variety, the audience is unable to appreciate that the speaker really means what he says.
We are more likely to be influenced by voice than by spoken words. Thus we are more influenced by how a speaker talks than by what he says. Coherent, organized expression is important, because the listeners internalize logical thoughts – but only when the voice gets through to the listeners first.
A good speaking voice should be balanced between extremes of volume, pitch, and pace, while having a pleasing sound quality. Each of those reinforces the others and the words themselves, in a manner completely analogous to that in the previous exercise with gestures.
7 Research Your Topic
The most challenging part of preparing a speech is gathering the material. If you want to convince an audience, you need the facts to support your message.
This talk will combine all the discrete skills you've used in the preceding exercises, but will also delve more critically into the organization. In speech 2, you employed a relatively simple organization; now, you'll embellish that organization by providing detail to your topic. You will have to do more work in researching your topic, more effort in planning and composing your speech. At the same time, you will be expected to pay attention to the particulars you dealt with in the 4th, 5th, and 6th speeches – vocal variety, gestures, eye contact, rich vocabulary, pacing, etc.
8 Get Comfortable With Visual Aids
With this exercise, you will explore the use of visual aids to enhance your presentation. The precise nature of this aid will be yours to choose – it can be a chart, or poster, or 'show-and-tell' prop, or something else of your selection. Up to now, all the aids you've used have been part of your physical body – hand/eye/mouth gestures, vocal adjustments, and so on. Now, you learn how to deal with something external.
You will be expected to select a speech topic that lends itself to enhancement by any visual aid, and then to select the appropriate aid.
In the same way that appropriate gestures and voice pitch can emphasize your message, the use of visual aids can add substantial impact to your talk, facilitating improved understanding, appreciation, and retention by your audience. The right visual aid can make a big difference.
9 Persuade With Power
Up to now, your purpose in giving a talk to our Toastmasters club has been simply to satisfy the guidelines of the manual and to learn from those experiences. With this (and the next) talk, you will be expected to go beyond the inherent limitations of speaking to a Toastmasters audience, and try to move your listeners with your words.
What is expected is that by your presentation, your audience is driven to recognize your message as one worthy of consideration – for the reasons you will present and justify in your talk. If they agree with you, reinforce and strengthen this agreement. If they appear indifferent, try to engage them to consider that they should take an interest in the subject, preferably in agreement with you. And if they disagree with you, try to get them to recognize the merits of your position and perhaps reconsider their own position.
This will call for applying all the skills and experience you have built up and developed through this point, including, it is expected, evaluating others talks, participating in Table Topics, and taking on other roles in club meetings. You can be expected to depend on the familiarity and knowledge you have gained of your particular fellow Toastmasters, but try to go beyond that familiarity. Knowledge of your audience is an important aspect of effective presentations. However, imagine yourself giving this talk to another audience, perhaps non-Toastmasters, in order to stretch yourself beyond the experience you have gained so far.
10 Inspire Your Audience
This is the final speech in the basic C&L manual – the culmination of all you have worked for to this point. That is why this is longer than the previous speeches. This talk will go beyond the simple impact in the previous talk of getting your audience to accept your message as legitimate – in this talk, you will actually try to motivate them to specific action. You should select a subject that has deep meaning to you and your audience, and organize the thoughts and beliefs you and the audience share into a dynamic, inspirational speech.
To be effective, an inspirational speech cannot be superficial. This type of talk calls for dignity (and therefore confidence) and emotional rapport with your audience (and therefore effective vocal variety, gestures, and eye contact). Since you will put into words the shared sentiments of your audience, you will not be expected to present earthshaking new ideas. Rather, you will
bring the audience together in a mood of shared desires,
build the audience's enthusiasm and draw it out, and
give the audience a clear sense of purpose.
Finally, after giving this speech, you will be encouraged to evaluate your progress to date – a repeat of the exercise you conducted after speech 5. A self-examination guide is provided in the manual after the evaluation page for this speech, affording you the opportunity to determine how much work, if any, you might need in one or another of the particular skill areas dealt with in the ten speeches you've given to date.
With the achievement of your CTM, two avenues for further progress are available – the Communication Track and the Leadership Track. Because it is more involved (three steps as opposed to two, and more manuals to guide you through the track), Toastmasters assists you in selecting the Communication Track by awarding you two free Advanced Communication and Leadership manuals free with your first CTM. Topics stipulated by those manuals are: