Build Your Confidence!!!

- July 08, 2013

Kicking up July in high spirit, we motivators started the month with contest preparations!

The menu for the night.

Our contest of Humorous Speech and Evaluation is scheduled for July 24^th, 2013. To prepare it, we set practice sessions the whole month. The theme on July 3^rd was “Building Confidence”, as confidence is one of the most important modals to be a champion.

Prawsident as TOM

The table topic questions were about how to be more confident, led by Ikhwan and participated by Muqsith, Tantia, and Arief.

Ikhwan as TTM and Arief as Table Topic participant.

Muqsith participating in the Table Topic.

Following the theme, Christina delivered her BM2, telling a story about her friend from high school, who was insulted repeatedly by their teacher, often being called “stupid” at class. She used the experience as a motivation and worked harder to be a better person. The result? She’s working at the Australian Embassy now ^____^

Christina’s message is to use negative inputs as a fuel to reach our dreams, instead of being depressed about it.

Erwin delivering his speech.

Erwin delivered his AM, telling his story about being bullied and mocked in school. He fought back by speaking up, “I don’t like this! Stop!”. Things could be scary when you’re bullied in school, but by speaking up, you do a good thing for yourself. It might not change much, yet at least you know you stood up to defend yourself. And that’s a difference that will teach you to be stronger.

Lineola presented her AM about briefing contestants and officers, so appropriate for us to know more about contest preparations and techniques. .

Next, we have DTM Harlina who gave a speech about “Evaluation Contest Practice”. She gave two sheets of paper, depicting points to pay attention to when we evaluate, such as body language, eye contact, vocal variety, intonation, and how the speech made us feel . “Don’t forget to say your evaluation with an opening, body, and closing, since it’s still a speech. Also, remember to summarize it before closing, since there will be points for it at the contest”.

Listening to the Educational Speech.

Prawsident giving a certificate for DTM Harlina's Educational Speech

Moving on, we practice evaluating exactly like the contest.

Bena evaluating Erwin.

Prawsident giving a certificate for Bena to thank her as a sample speaker.

Bena from JTC acted as sample speaker, telling an effective yet entertaining story about embracing differences, depicting real life stories she experienced in at school and dorm.

Five Motivators applied to practice evaluating and we were ushered to a different room, while the SAA for the event (Ronald) took our notes.

To be honest, I, the writer of this post, joined the evaluation contest because I was hoping it would be less nerve wracking than the Humorous Speech. I mean, evaluators don’t have to write speech, we just have to give feedbacks to fabulous speakers. How hard could it be, right?

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a proof that I am still a Toastmasters newbie. Locked in a room with other evaluators while my notes were taken away, it began to feel very impromptu. There seemed to be not enough time to think properly of what to evaluate, although I did focused on the sample speaker’s speech attentively. All contestant hopefuls for evaluation who practiced that night, Arief, Tantia, Ikhwan, me, and Ariel, were all nervous! Hey, it’s actually in our own club! Why did it feel so different?

The tips we try to calm our nervousness was to chit chat with each other, although Tantia said in the real contest, people usually don’t have to energy to chit chat anymore *gasp*.

Entering the stage and hearing your name called exactly like the contest also brought a different atmosphere to the night.

We all tried to give our best evaluation for Bena, using the points given by DTM Harlina.

Tantia evaluating Lineola.

Afterwards, DTM Harlina evaluated our reviews. She applauded us for already using opening, body, closing, and summary. She reminded us to not use words like “negative”, although intended for a good cause during evaluation, because we aim to motivate, always.

The night was even more exciting with an impromptu humorous speech by Bachtiar from JTC, who made the whole room laughed with his jokes. He also helped us as Grammarian.