Flying Off To Give A Speech? Conquering Your Fear of Public Speaking. My ten top tips

Angela Lansbury, President of Braddell Heights Advanced Speakers' Club, standing left. 

Sylvia, second runner up of the club's International Speech contest and the Table Topics (impromptu speech) contest. Standing on the right, Arinjay, first runner up in both contests. Seated on the right, is Faith, winner of both the club's International Speech Contest and the Table Topics (Impromptu Speech) contest.

As they say, you've got to be in it to win it.
Conquering Fear of Public Speaking

My ten top tips

1 You are the most confident person in the room.

The members of the audience are more afraid than you are. You are on the stage. They are sitting at the back and avoiding the front rows.

2 Don't tell them you are afraid. 

Would you want the the pilot of a plane to tell you he was nervous, or a train driver, or a bus driver, or the chef in a restaurant, or the person on the till counting out your change? Instead look confident to reassure the audience they are not wasting their time. 

3 Take a deep breath and speak loudly. 

Several members of the audience are worried they won't hear. They are aged over 50, have hearing loss, are sitting behind somebody with a large head, are distracted by somebody nearby whispering, or speak English as a second language. Be kind. Be audible.

4 This is not the hardest speech.

The speech at your mother's funeral is your hardest speech. Same goes for any other funeral speech. No other speech comes near. Practise speaking this silly speech so that when you have to give one of life's hardest speeches you can be fair to the audience and the occasion. 

5 The audience are hoping to enjoy themselves. 

Make sure they do. Smile at them Focus on what they want. Their chief concern is: - what is in it for me?

6 Go to a Toastmasters International meeting.
Do a table topic (impromptu speech). 

7 Add a quotation.
This adds importance to your speech.
The audience will be impressed. You will feel enthusiastic about the hero or heroine you are quoting.

8 Add Drama
Add conflict, conversation, or song.

9 Use one prop to symbolise your message.
You can use up to three props, If you have three stories, have one prop for each story. That will help you remember the message and will help the audience remember. 

10  Repetition Adds Clarity And Memorability.
If your title, your opening line and your clsing line are your message, the audience will remember it.

The USA
In America there are online clubs speaking English and Spanish.

Singapore
One online club is bilingual. My club based online in Singapore is English speaking. Singapore also has bilingual clubs, and clubs speaking only in French, Chinese (Mandarin), and Tamil (an official language in Singapore and spoken in Southern India and Sri Lanka).

If you are interested in finding a club near you, at home or on holiday or a business trip, go to Toastmasters International Find A Club.

Useful Websites
https://www.toastmasters.org/find-a-club

About the Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.
member of:
Harrovians Speakers Club, London, England, UK.
President of Braddell Heights Advanced Club 2019-2020.
Please share links to your favourite posts.

Where and Why To Attend Speechcraft And Gavel Clubs Worldwide For Students Learning Public Speaking

Angela Lansbury presenting How To Structure A Speech workshop. Photo from Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

I presented a workshop on How To Structure A Speech to students at Singapore's ITE technical college. The college teaches students of engineering, hospitality and management. 

Speechcraft is a condensed course on public speaking, intended to attract students or adults to commit

to attending the Toastmasters International programme, which is usually held weekly for one evening. (Sometimes schools and businesses meet in the morning or afternoon, or later afternoon after classes.)

What Is A Gavel Club

A Gavel Club is a club for under 18s. Such clubs are usually started in schools and colleges. Why are they separate from adults clubs?

1 Students at school or college like to be with their friends and their own age group. 

2 The group can be run by their teachers and / or outsiders.

3 The students are taught in their familiar environment, their campus, no stress or cost of travelling.

4 The activity can help them confidently write and construct their course work. 

5 It can help them pass exams.

6 It can help them present to classmates in lessons. 

7 The training helps with speaking at work meetings during work experience, job interviews, and confidence in their first job.

8 It helps with confidence during the stresses of adolescence, a new school or college, gaining confidence to make friends and start relationships and pep talks which help optimism before exams and coping with the ups and downs or breakdowns of romances.

9 Why not just send students to adult clubs?

Children and students often attend adults' clubs. 

a) Babies and Toddlers Welcome At Jauhari Toastmasters Club

One club, the Jauhari club, a bilingual English and Malay speaking club, where you can present a speech in either English or Malay, is a family club. Mothers and parents with babies and tiny children can be bring along children, so children are familiar with the idea of public speaking and young parents or grandparents do not have to stay at home childminding. 

This tends to disrupt the meeting and distract speakers and the audience. However, the people who run the club like it that way. The system works well for them. The management team includes last year's district winner (winner in a contest of all the 200+ clubs in Singapore).

b) School Age Children Welcome

You are asked to call the club and inform them if you are bringing along school age children. This helps the organizers and speakers adapt their material and language and activities. 

An otherwise formal meeting with formal language can be adapted. 

The children can be acknowledged and welcomed at the beginning, their names learned by the Toastmasters Of The Day.

An interactive table topics session for impromptu speeches can be lengthened so they can all participate.  Subjects can be prepared with topics they will know about and on which they can have opinions. 

If possible, the toastmasters of The Day, or the Topics Master, will start the meeting by asking, Please, everybody, tell us your name, your current or last school and your favourite subject. When it gets to time for table topics (impromptu speeches), for example, instead of a long complicated question on the 'intervention of government', they could be asked, Do you like wearing school uniform?, or Do you prefer weekdays or weekends? or What Is Your Favourite Sport or Do You prefer to Watch Sport or Join In?  The topic can be picked from what they mentioned in their self-introduction. 

I imagined that the international organization run from the USA was concerned about the dangers of under age pupils being molested. Just one accusation could damage the reputation of the organixation and its members worldwide.

What if the organizers, who were teachers and already had police clearance, accompanied the children during the meeting and during the mid-meeting toilet break. Supposing the parents delivered and collected the children or accompanied them?

You still could not vet every stranger who turned up at a meeting, nor get their name and address or identity, nor check anybody who walked in late after it started.

Equally, adults might not want to have their pasts investigated. A visiting politican or other VIP guest or speaker might fear the risk of being wrongly accused of molesting a youngster, whether because of mistaken identity, malice, misunderstanding or any other reason.

In the UK one committee opened up the question of whether under 18s should be allowed to attend meetings. Totally different concerns arose. Speech Subjects.

Censored Speeches

Four Letter Words and Language

One speaker wanted to be able to use a four-letter word in a specific speech - or any speech. He also wanted to be able to deliver a speech discussing the use of four-letter words, which would have to be spoken or written on a board. 

Speech Subjects

Other speakers wanted to deliver a humorous speech about the difficulties of conceiving, or a humorous speech full of innuendos, which would cause at least embarrassment, at most objections, if children were in the audience. I have seen humorous speeches about underwear, and speeches depending on puns. Even a speech on  innuendo in Shakespeare's plays might cause a speaker to self-censor and lost a contest by ending too soon, if children were unexpectedly in the audience.

Now we understand the assorted reasons for a Gavel club, a junior club or cadet club, what is a gavel?

10 What is a Gavel?

The gavel is a wooden hammer used to strike the lectern for attention to open the meeting, and again at the end to signal the end of the meeting.

How to Pronounce Gavel

The word is pronounced 'gav=all' or gav-ill not gave- ell. Short 'a' as in hat, not hate.

You can visit 250 or more adult clubs for speakers in Singapore, and more in the USA, UK, Europe, Arab countries, and most countries of the world. Most clubs are for English speakers, but there are clubs for speakers of French, Spanish, Polish, Chinese, Malay, Tamil, Arabic, and teaching materials in several languages.

More Information From

website toastmasters International

toastmasters.org/find-a-club 

Travel Information

Singapore Airlines

singaporeair.com

Author

Angela Lansbury is a speaker on language, travel and other subjects, the author of books on wedding speeches and quotations, travel writer and photographer. Please share links to your favourite posts. Contact Angela if you would like a workshop on business English or any other subject for a college or business.

How To Learn Any Language

Flag of Singapore, where four languages are official.

Problem
I want to be a polyglot. Poly, as in polytechnic, means many. Glot, as in glottal stop, is connected with language. A polyglot means a person who speaks many languages.  When I was at school I wanted to learn German and Spanish, but the way the timetable was arranged, I could learn only French.

Czech Linguist
I was impressed by people who spoke many languages. The father of a relative of mine spoke eight languages. He came from the Czech Republic. I assumed he was a very bright person. If you look at the map, you will see the Czech Republic is surrounded by countries where other languages are spoken. Czech is not a language taught widely so when Czechs meeting others, have to be the ones making more effort.

Bilingual Canadians
Some people are forced to learn to speak two languages proficiently. When lived in the USA we travelled across the border to Canada, and learned that in the capital, Ottawa, government officials have to speak French and English and documents must be in the two languages.

Romania
When I went to Romania on a hiking holiday with a group of hiking ex-pats from Indonesia, I discovered that Romanian is similar to Italian. The name Romania comes from Roman, because Romania is near to Italy and they were influenced by the Italian language, in the same way that many English words have Latin roots.

This reinforced the new idea that learning languages was not difficult. You could not help doing it. Starting is the hardest part. Once you have got over the fear that another language is too difficult, it becomes easy and fun.

My big breakthrough came when I discovered Duolingo, the online course which offers free language lessons. You can opt for as little as five minutes a day. The system sends you a reminder every day. When I want a break from work, I do five minutes of learning a language.

It is now my policy to learn a few words of the language of every country I visit. Every time I speak to a taxi driver, a waiter in a restaurant, or anybody else, I ask them their native language and ask them to say a couple of words, such as goodbye and thank you, or count from one to three.

I worked out that if I learn only one word of another language every day, by the end of the year I will know more than 300 words. Three hundred words is get by level, enough to read a map, a menu, and signs in a street or hotel.

If I learned a new language every year for the next ten years, I would have a smattering of ten languages.

Some people have a head start. They have parents from different cultures, or live in countries with another language across a nearby border, with street signs in two languges. Learning a new language impresses others, helps you start conversations with other people, and gives you confidence when travelling and a sense of achievement. Those hours spent sitting on a plane or train or waiting at bus stops need not be wasted.

Useful Websites For Travellers and Language Learners
LANGUAGES
Earworms 
earwormslearning.com
(This is a shortened version of Berlitz where you hear the words, provided on a disc or download, but the addition of music in the background makes it relaxing when you listen and they claim improves the speed and ease of learning). I bought the German and Spanish, then added other languages when I saw the discs available at low prices second hand on ebay. The booklet is amll and easy to carry. The print is small and hard to read in a poor light at night but much better in daylight, outdoors, such as when waiting at a bus stop.
It is written with the traveller in mind, starting with words you need on a flight.

Duolingo - my absolute favourite system. It's free.
duolingo.com

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker, teacher of English and other languages. Workshops and speeches for students and businesses. 
Please share links to your favourite posts.

Easy Bulgarian Words Similar to English, German, Spanish, or Russian

Problem
How to remember Bulgarian words? It is depressing when you read a lot and can't remember a thing.

Answer
You aim to learn 1 -10 words a day in a foreign language. At the end of the 365 days of the year, allowing for a few days off for sickness or holidays, you should have learned a minimum of 300 words to get by, maybe as many as 3000! That means quite a conversation.

Pick out a few words which are easy. That maintains achieving your daily target of five minutes a day. You keep up the confidence which gives you momentum.

Here are mine for today, at least ten:

English - Bulgarian

"Fir0002/Flagstaffotos". in Wikipedia under bananas.

bananas - banani

bus - autobus
nose - nos
passport - pasport
pullover / sweater (US) - poolovyer
son - sin (Sin also means blue. My son, for my sin, also makes me blue.)
student - stoodent
3 three - dri/tri 3
trousers - pantaloni (US pants)
taxi - taksi

Bulgarian-English

autobus - bus

"Fir0002/Flagstaffotos". in Wikipedia under bananas.

banani - bananas

3 dri/tri - three 3
nos - nose
pantaloni - trousers (US pants)
pasport - passport
poolover - pullover / sweater
sin - son / blue
stoodent - student
taksi - taxi

Words like German
English - Bulgarian
potatoes - kartofiWikipedia Photo by Renee Comet for Cancer Soc.

Words like Spanish
English - Bulgarian
table - masa (like mesa)

Words like Russian
brother - brat
sister - syestra

Useful Websites
http://ilanguages.org/bulgarian_grammar.php

Author
Angela Lansbury
Travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. See my other posts on learning Bulgarian, Russian, Spanish, German and other languages.

Swimming Safety In the USA and Australia - Lessons For The World

On reading a tragic story about a woman in Florida losing both her small children to an accident (One dead, once critical) in her apartment complex pool, I look at the picture of the swimming pool. It is not gated and the internet news story reports that Florida has more deaths to under fives than any other state.
   I am reminded about safety rules in Australia and other parts of the USA. I visited a Singapore apartment complex (they call the grander ones with swimming pools condos) for a writers' group meeting. The pool was closed off. The reason was a child had just died in the pool. Later I read in the Singapore newspaper that the child had died during a family celebration. I think it might have been a wedding. The mother and the maid (equivalent of a UK au pair or nanny) were both busy preparing food or cleaning and each thought the child was safer with the other person. the child had wandered off and fallen in the pool. Or even jumped in, not realising the depth and danger. I thought back to my earlier overseas stay in the USA and the safety rules in that area.
    USA Safety In Swimming Pools
   When I lived in Rockville, Maryland, way back in the 1980s or 1990s, our complex had safety rules in place. Netting the height of a tennis net surrounded the pool, locking the pool, making it inaccessible to children and adults at all times, except when unlocked by the life guard.
    (The pool was open only in summer. In snowy winter and during cleaning the pool might have been empty or covered, could have frozen over like a dangerous and tempting ice rink, or been concealed under snow.)
   I  understood it was a rule of either or both the local regulations or the insurance that the pool had to be enclosed to prevent access by adults when there was no lifeguard.
    (This prevented all kinds of accidents adults accidents, such as people taken ill, drunks and trespassers) also children (accidents and pranks).
  You had to have two life guards. That ensured somebody could take over if the other one went off to answer a query, eat or use the bathroom/restroom (US terms - UK toilet).      
   The life guards were arranged on a rota. The lifeguards were paid little, but got free use of the pool, experience for a cv. They were often the young adult children of families living in the complex.
   I assumed these rules applied all over the USA, but it must have been only in the suburb of Washington DC where we were living. The Florida pool in a newspaper picture in March 2014 seems to have no barriers.
Australian and New Zealand Safety  in Swimming Pools
   I learned about Australian swimming safety measures when I was on a skiing trip in New Zealand (round trip from UK with stopovers in Singapore). I went to look at the stamp album display at the local post office. The texts under the postage stamps showed the stories behind each postage stamp.
   If I remember correctly, an Australian safety organisation tracked down the accident records from drowning and were surprised to find that most accidental deaths were not in the sea but in the back garden swimming pools. As a result they brought in regulations that swimming pools (and probably ponds) should be fenced in, gated and locked when unoccupied, to prevent children accidentally falling or, or going swimming unsupervised.
    I presume Australia and New Zealand have similar rules.
Learning To Swim
    As soon as I got pregnant I insisted my husband learned to swim. If I had not already been a swimmer I would have taken swimming lessons. At some time you are likely to be near a pool or beach with your children or others. The complexes with pools should organise swimming and life saving.
  Lifesaving Skills
     Whilst anybody can wade into a paddling pool and pull out a baby, it's not so easy saving an adults in deep water such as the deep end of a swimming pool or in waves in the sea if your feet can't touch the bottom of the pool, - especially if the person in trouble is large and heavy.
   I tried to save my mother, a non-swimmer, who crossed into the deep end of a hotel swimming pool, when I was a teenager. I screamed when she went across the line and sank. I jumped in. She grabbed my neck and we both went under.
   You have to know how to turn somebody around and support them from underneath so they don't drag you under.
   Luckily I had shouted and my father, fully clothed, and another man both jumped in. They both took one arm of my mother and rescued my mother.
   I was left to find my way back to the side. I'd been under water for a few seconds. I nearly choked, coughing and spluttering, gasping, trying to doggie paddle back to the side.
  Schools should be teaching swimming and life saving. I realise that you have to have access to a pool to practise. You cannot learn to dance or swim without actually doing it. But the first half of any lesson is when the teacher tells you and shows you how it is done. The expensive part of the lesson is the demonstration.  The demo shows you what to do. It gives you the confidence to try it out. Afterwards you keep practising by yourself.
   Even showing videos of swimming and life saving would be better than nothing. It would encourage children to speak to their parents, or ask their parents for lessons. The parents might then raise funds for school or out of school lessons, write letters to the organisers, or take their children for lessons.
   It would give them the first half of the lesson, so that they would progress faster. Even a non-swimmer in an accident would at least have the blueprint in their mind and some clue as to how to take action to reach the side of the pool or boat. Whilst in many cases just the video is not enough, even if it made the different to one pupil in 100, or one in a thousand, that would be several lives saved every year.
   What are the readers' comments? Some have the same thought as mine - why is that pool not gated? Another comments on babysitter safety rules. An excellent suggestion - when you are in the bathroom and can't supervise the children, you ask them to stand outside the door and you keep talking to them. While listening to them, you know exactly where they are and what they are doing. You hold their attention and can be sure they have not wandered away but are alive and safe.

Travel Tip
   Think about all the situations you might be in and check out what safety devices you can take when travelling. For example, At home you might keep your toddlers in a playpen at home. You probably can't travel with this by plane. But a foldable one probably can go in a car or caravan.
    What about when walking. Young children when walking with you in busy streets, near cliff tops, rivers, beaches, swimming pools etc, could be attached to you, perhaps by extending reins.
   I would not want to fall asleep with a child on a rein. It could get tangled or strangle itself.
   At home you might consider installing a horse box door or bar door, so you can see under or over the door, whilst still having some privacy.
   What about the talking idea - keep children talking when you are in a bathroom. If the toilet has a gap under the door and you are inside, ask to see their shoes.
   Give them something to do. e.g. ask them to read to you from a book, tell you where they want to go later, or for older children, give them a map and ask them to call out details of attractions or instructions for a computer.