**Here are some of my notes from the “better speakers” series on selecting speech topics. This manual can be freely downloaded online from the Toastmasters international shop. This is not my speech, but rather an altered version to make it more suitable for reading. **
If I was to ask the any member here “would you like to do a speech next meeting” there are two possible answers
- Yes! I have a burning topic I want to talk about
- No! I have no idea what to talk about
This speech really is just my own personal opinion on what you can do when you’re in the latter group, stuck with no topic in mind. Selecting speech topics are highly subjective and there isn’t really a 3 step plan that I’m aware of at least. But I think the remedy is quite simple, I think the best topics for speeches are the the most mundane and uninspired parts of our everyday life. Tonight I’ll go through the two main reasons, (aesthetics and practicality) and also give some examples of how past speeches have made use of this.
There are practical advantages to choosing something in your everyday life. The topic will be guaranteed to be suitable for you audience, (unlike a topic of say mathematics). It would be suitable for the context, on a monday evening where people don’t really want to think too hard. And it’s impossible to go beyond your own abilities knowledge and expertise; relieving yourself the pain of building rapport with your audience. The topics would undoubtedly be relevant to everyone in every walk of life, since it would have been catered to something that is in fact very basic. This vastly simplifies the speech crafting allowing you to focus your energies on aspects like deliver to a stunning speech.
Now that we’ve considered, very briefly, the art and practicality of appreciating and using the mundane as the basis of our speech topics, how does it actually work in real life? Just last meeting Nad shared with us how he got to where he was in toastmasters over the last few years, whilst Sharmaine shared with us literally how she got to the actual meeting, whilst battling the emotional rollercoaster with Sydney transport, using that as the introduction to her table topics. Last year Evan shared with us about drinking water, whilst I did a speech on eating instant noodles.
To be honest, travelling through a foreign country, the scenery merely reminded me of lesser versions than the beautifully photoshopped brochures promoting the various countries. Instead what remained in my memory was the memory of standing at the corner of the intersection on a busy street in Peru. What I saw was the of course a working traffic lights and also a traffic cop. It seemed so redundant, why would you need both traffic cops and lights. But what became clear was that the purpose was simply to ensure that no one queued over the intersection. What was jarring (and undoubtedly) in this incident wasn’t so much watching how the traffic flowed, but how very ordinary incidents like these question and challenge the assumptions that we may have in our everyday lives; this is what creates a strong speech topic.
We are often tempted to go with the exotic, because that would always be interesting, whilst the average just feels well, boring! This is normal, we should indeed feel that exciting things are ones not from where we are! But we should not deem it necessary to pursue the exotic or even topics different from our day to day life. Next time you’re stuck and have absolutely no idea what to present a speech on, just think about the most mundane and uninspiring thing that you do. Perhaps that could be your inspiration for your next speech.