[Slide1] Fellow Toastmasters and guests, thank you all for listening to my speech tonight. I am going to give a short speech on recruitment for building a team. I know you are curious about why I recruit members, but first I have to tell you what my project of Pathway is.
[Slide2] I am working on a Pathway named Innovative planning and my level is four out of five. This is my last but the main project of level four. I have a few projects to finish my Pathway journey. The project title is Manage Projects Successfully. So my goal of project is to come up with my own project and performing it successfully, managing members who are going to participate in my project.
[Slide3] So let me tell you about the detail of my pathway project. There are three stages in this project. First, Speech 1, which is what I am doing now. The time for the speech is two to three minutes, and the objective of the speech is to introduce my project and recruiting members in this club for fulfilling the project together. Second, performing a project. In this stage, I will manage members who are in the project and lead my project to be successfully done. Finally, I am going to give my second speech that is for reporting how my project went on, and what I and my project members had achieved throughout the project.
[Slide4] So here is the most important part of this speech. What is my project and what I want to achieve? I’ve been thinking about the purpose of my project for a long time since I ran into the objective of this project on the TM international web-site. And I finally select the theme of the project; it is a kind of capability all of us are interested in commonly as long as you are a non-native speaker.
To speak English. Am I right? No. We want to speak English fluently. So I have thought about what can give me fluency when it comes to speaking a foreign language. Reading? No. Listening? No. This is two passive way of handling a language and they don’t help us improve speaking skills directly. Let’s see the other two active ways. Writing? Hmm… it obviously helps speaking but let’s focus on the final way. Speaking. You have to practice speaking if you want to speak. Let’s think simply. What we do when we want to swim well? Studying fluid mechanics and physical movement can be sub-aspects, but the most important one is practicing swimming.
But the difficulty of practicing speaking as a non-native speaker is we don’t know whether what we say is correct or not. So I suggest, to practice speaking itself, to read out a good speech script repeatedly. How much we will? For two to three minutes speech script, at least two times a day. I am no expert in learning English but I know this practice helps us speak English. We have to move our lips and tongues.
[Slide 5] So I’ve selected a proper speech to mimic. This speech “How great leaders inspire action”, done by Simon Sinek who is an expert in inspiration skills, has been one of the best speeches ever in TED. This speech is good for mimicking because he doesn’t refer to his personal anecdotes and get straight to the point. He uses a lot of great words and expressions we can apply to the other situation.
[Slide6] We are going to read out the very first part of this speech. We are going to read out 467 words, and in the video, it only takes 2 minutes from the get-go since he speaks very fast. And we are not just reading out the script but we have to mimic other aspects of speaking like intonation, pause, and facial expression. I believe we can apply that skill to our own speech.
