An example of basic project “Ice Breaker “

Tips on making your first speech, couple of our members are preparing for their first basic project ‘The Ice Breaker”. I hope this will help

Ice Breaker Objectives:
• To introduce you to speaking before an audience
• To help you assess your speaking strengths and weaknesses
• To tell the club something about yourself

This Article was written to help new members get off to a good start with their first speech.

By Erich Viedge, CTM

Tips on making your first speech memorable for all the right reasons. Even experienced speakers who join a Toastmasters club find their Ice Breaker assignment nerve-racking. Whether you perform well or achieve less than you hoped for, one thing is for certain: You will remember your Ice Breaker for many years to come. Here are five steps to make your experience memorable – for all the right reasons!

1. Don’t schedule your Ice Breaker too soon. If you are the impatient type, you probably joined up on your first or second visit, and eagerly await your first speech. But it’s a good idea to let your first speaking assignment be a toast or a word of the day, just to get you used to taking on a meeting role.

2. Try a different approach. Toastmasters seem to have selective memories when it comes to their Ice Breaker. “It’s the easiest assignment,” they often say. “The manual even tells you what to speak about.” But you may wonder how to talk about yourself without boring everyone to tears or revealing too much. One way around your difficulty is to talk about yourself indirectly. When you introduce yourself to a stranger, you don’t go through your resume in chronological order from birth to the present. So why do it in your Ice Breaker? You can talk about a seemingly unrelated topic, and still fulfill the assignment objectives. One of the most thought-provoking Ice Breaker speeches I ever heard was about the sun. The speaker told us how, when he was a child, he saw the sun as a God-given fact; later, as physics major, he saw it as burning ball of gas in space. By telling us his views on the sun, he was indirectly revealing his life’s events and how they shaped his personality.

3. Lean on your fellow club members for support. Every Toastmaster has been through the Ice Breaker experience; many will let you have a copy of their first speech or share how they approached their first assignment. Ask more experienced Toastmasters what they would change about it, or ask them to tell you about a particularly memorable Ice Breaker they might have heard.

4. Prepare, prepare, prepare, prepare. Speaking in public can be a terrifying experience; even old hands get nervous before an important speech. Through the ages, people have tried many ways of controlling their panic, but only one way seems to work — excellent preparation. This doesn’t mean learning every word of the speech verbatim in fact, learning a speech word-for-word is counter-productive because it will come across wooden and over-rehearsed. The right way to prepare is to be thoroughly familiar with your speech’s outline and its major points. Then, when it’s time to deliver, you can still be spontaneous within your speech’s outline.

5. Don’t set your sights too high. No matter how well you have prepared, you will probably never feel completely ready to deliver your first manual speech. You will always feel that, with just a little more preparation.

6. You can deliver a truly excellent speech. Remember, this is only your first assignment. You are doing it precisely because you are inexperienced and want to learn. Nobody is expecting you to be the next JFK or Martin Luther King

The Elements of Speechwriting and Public Speaking

How to Write and Give a Speech