Impromptu speaking

Attended a workshop about impromptu speaking last night and really enjoyed what I had been taught. It was not the first time I attended this kind of workshop but perhaps the speaker yesterday gave me something more impactful and inspired me to think not only on the ways of making myself a better impromptu speaker but also in a bigger picture, how to change from a quiet introvert to an outgoing and more sociable extrovert who is usually seemed to have better communication and interpersonal skills. The speaker showed us the comments given by his teachers on the report cards to show that he was not good at interacting and socializing with people when he was in schools but what happened after his graduation encouraged him to improve himself and his own efforts made him an excellent communicator and professional trainer of sales and interpersonal skills.    

 

Three useful formulas to prepare an impromptu speech that he shared – PREP, Pendulum and 5W1H. PREP is about how a speech can be structure and organized by using the formula of point (agree/disagree) + reason + example / elaboration / story + point (summary / restatement / conclusion). Pendulum is about giving the listener the freedom to make his own decision by analyzing certain things in detailed without bias. 5W1H is about using “What, Who, Why, Where, Which and How” to ask questions and generating the content of an impromptu speech. In addition, there are two more tips. Firstly, for a topic with a long and complicated title, speakers should only focus on a few key words and avoid explaining the title at length to avoid misunderstanding and make full use of the time. Secondly, if the topic is something very specific that a speaker without prior knowledge on, “reframing” technique could be used in preparing a speech in short time. By “chunking up” a certain topic, things tend to be more general and with that, we could link the existing topic to something that we are more familiar with. The speaker gave a good example by sharing with us how Mr.Tony Tan, the ex- president answered a question raised by someone during the presidential election, “What was the biggest mistake that you ever made in your career?”

“Practise makes progress” We can only progress in what we are learning if we constantly make an effort to practise it. The speaker shared with us how he made use of his toilet time to practise his impromptu speech by using the quote of the day on the newspaper as the title. And only by repeating the practise numerous times, he made a breakthrough in his skill. Lacking of motivation, I must admit that I put almost zero time to practise my impromptu speech even though I always want to improve myself. An impromptu speech needs only a few minutes and it does not cost much of my precious time, I believe I can afford to repeat it a few times per day under the same topic. There will be an impromptu speaking competition on 6 March 2018, 13days from now. I want to challenge myself how much can I learn and progress in delivering an impromptu speech if I put in real effort every day. Let me start from today to make a difference!

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