C8 and C9 Speeches: Post Mortems

The C8 and C9 speeches didn’t go quite as well as I’d hoped, but at the same time, I’ve stopped taking it all so personally. Even if a speech falters, it’s still a learning experience.

I delivered them in clubs in which I knew barely anyone, so it was a little difficult to build up a good rapport with the audience. I’m still scared to pull out my jokes in this kind of situation, and since both speeches were so packed with content, I had to cut many of the jokes out anyway.

That caused my speeches to suffer I think, as I was lacking a personal connection with the audience.

So the first lesson I learned from these two speeches is that building a relationship with the audience is vital. I think something as simple as a show of hands is very important when I’m in these tough atmospheres. I’ll definitely do this for my C10 speech this Friday.

I learned more from my second speech in which I made the call for vegetarianism, or at least to make more conscious choices over the food we eat. I’ll probably post a lot of my arguments in a blog post regarding my switch to vegetarianism, but the thing I wanted was to stress that I didn’t want people to become vegetarian, rather for them to know the costs to the planet if we keep eating so much meet.

There were too many points I was making, and my message fell kinda flat. There was nothing particularly wrong with my speech, but with the lack of time I had available, I didn’t quite know how I wanted to deliver my message. In this sort of persuasive speech, I should perhaps have taken a more personal and emotional approach, rather than the broad environmental message that I wanted (even though that’s my own reason for making the switch.)

I felt somewhat guilty for trying to persuade people to become vegetarian, as people will defend their meat eating as if their life depended on it. So in the end, I didn’t take the message one tenth as far as I might have.

I’m going to pull out all the stops for my next speech, and deliver it with a lot more confidence. I have a lot more time in this final speech, and I’m going to try to give it without a script, so that I can really build up the crowd. I spent a vast amount of time preparing the previous speeches, and it doesn’t seem worth it when it’s clear that no-one is putting in as much effort as I am. Time spent on stage is the best way to learn, and I’m interested to see how I’ll perform when I haven’t got my rehearsed delivery to fall back on. I’m curious