prepare my Toastmasters icebreaker speech

My speech was titled “Learning experiences” and giving the speech was of course a learning experience in itself too.

I was so nervous, and underestimated the length of the speech seriously, but I did not get stuck, or run away.

The feedback was very encouraging, I so happy to have done this.

I’ve written my speech, but it’s bordering too short and does not hold together nicely with the title. I’m considering chickening out. I feel (illogically) that if my speech sucks I’ll get judged not just for my speech but also for the events in my life being boring/lame/bad.

I did my Ice Breaker 1 year ago almost to the day. I cannot believe how far I have traveled since that day. I have barely looked back, other than to marvel at the progress I have made.

I was very nervous, did no gestures and said enough ums and ahs that they gave up counting.

Now, I am much less nervous, move around the speaking area with gestures and rarely use a filler word.

I want to encourage everyone here to go for it. It is the start of a wonderful journey where you get to learn a lot about yourself.

Actually, I planned to give my speech at the meeting after the one I finally gave it. When I showed up to that (earlier) meeting, all talks had been cancelled due to various reasons. I spontaneously decided to give my talk two weeks early. I had prepared it, but I had never practiced it… so it was kind of an impromptu prepared speech :-)
And—my fellow toastmasters liked it! It was a great day !!

god of seasons with motherly love created the good opportunity to make the family complete.

Iam 36 years old male.

Hopefully this will be helpful to everyone worrying about their speeches…

Mr Toastmaster, Ladies and Gentlemen.

I’m going to be honest here, I like to present myself as a well-read person. Let’s admit, there are books that we claim to have read but most likely just have collecting dust on our bookshelves.. Russian “noun and noun” literature like “War and Peace” or Crime and Punishment, most of Shakespeare, and my personal favorite, the Bible. I probably have three or four beautiful gold-trimmed bible’s sitting on my bookshelf and I’ve never gotten past the listing of names in Genesis. Despite this, books, and especially fiction have been an immensely important part of my personal development and looking back, I think I can pick three that found their ways to me at critical junctures in my life.

First, there was the Hobbit by JRR Tolkien. How many of you are Lord of the Rings fans? I still remember how I first found the book… I was sitting in the library for a class called Library Studies in 6th grade, bored out of my wits and staring at everything except for the teacher. I decide instead of listening to another lecture on the power of call cards, I start scanning the bookshelves for a book. Right at the end of the H row, there it was,this random book with strange runic lettering and a name that made no sense to me. So I start reading about Bilbo Baggins and his road and before I know it, I’m in a mythical world of dwarves and elves and of course, Gandalf, who probably would become the inspiration for all of my online account names for the next 5 years. The Hobbit lead to the Lord o the Rings which to me showed the power of fiction to really create new and compelling worlds with their own sense of things like morality. I still remember reading the final chapters of the Lord of the Rings and wanting to savor every moment and sharing that sense of loss that the hobbits had at the end of the story because I too had reached that point.

The second book that really changed my perception of the world was Atlas Shrugged. I was young and searching for a philosophy of life in which to believe and probably pretty ignorant of a lot of the way the world worked. I was also a computer geek and during this time, the media was starting to create computer geeks into mythical beings out here in Silicon Valley, the “john galt’s” of industry who were changing the world one pets.com at a time. So I fully committed myself to her philosophy, Objectivism, and became one of those annoying people who are fully committed to philosophies. I think my experiences in high school tempered my belief a little, but I still feel that the chance encounter I had with that book has somehow left an impression on me that still colors my thinking to this day.

Last but not least, I’d have to pick the Great Gatsby as the third life-changing book in the sequence. We had to read it for junior year English and I remember I couldn’t get through it the first several times I tried. I probably wrote two or three essays on the book without ever having read the thing – much to the chagrin of my teacher, I’m sure. However, two years after I first “read” it, I picked it up out of boredom and started reading it again. Maybe it was because I had seriously fallen for a girl or because at college I felt a little like Nick in his strange eastern world, but Fitzgerald’s writing gave me an appreciation of the English language that I had never felt before. After I read it again and again, I had this desire to drop everything follow in his footsteps and become an alcoholic while trying to write the great American novel. Usually I can get the first part down but I’m having trouble with the second.

These days I’m starting a new chapter in my reading and going back to reading children’s books.  Every book I read or reread brings me back to those days of innocence and because I take a lot more with me into those worlds, I usually get a lot more out of it.   Really, the hardest part about reading children’s books, is not looking like a weirdo in the children’s section of the library.  I’m reading off  a list of 100 great children’s books and I just finished Bridge to terabithia which was extremely moving and disturbing.  Now I’m reading The Once and Future King and I also have the lemony snicket books queued up as well.  What I like about children’s literature is that the characters are much easier to identify with and the stories are more written with primary colors.  I like the change of being absorbed in the action of the narrative and spending less time worrying about the characterization of motivation of each of the characters .

There you have it, the books that have shaped my perception of the world and the things in it. I feel like appreciating great literature is in itself a personal path, and definitely one that’s more enjoyable in the going then the arriving – so I’d love to get suggestions as I’m always looking for books that will help me along my own personal journey.

This is my temporary icebreaker for today @ 7Pm, Achievers Toastmaster CLub, WIllemstad Curaçao.

Wish me the best, and hopefully it will be the bomb.
Comments are welcome ;).

Well here I am finally doing my ice breaker
Introducing myself as a new world citizen an Antillean British boy.
Gwendell Mercelina Jr., a 18 year old Toastmaster, born on the 23rd of July 1988.
So yes I’m a Leo. A VWO Exam class Student, I live with my parents RUthsella Troncon, Gwendell Mercelina Sr. and my little sister of 15 Ruënna Mercelina

Toastmaster of the meeting, fellow toastmasters and guests,

I’m always dreaming of romantic relationships without having one :P.
The poetry charms me, so much reading it as declaiming it. Just like my co-citizen William Shakespeare William Shakespeare (who died on 23 April 1616 (391 years ago)) the greatest writer of the English language.
I also write stories, have participated in writing and poetry competitions, and got in the tops.
Reading is also a must, but I prefer the newspaper just like any British guy! Just like they say every morning: Newspapers Newspapers! Read all about it!

My true passion is acting since I was 8 I started in the Sentro Pro Arte with the play The Door. and through the years participated in many.
Last year a broke a record of 3 Big Plays: Safe Zone, Foi Skochi Mama, Te Na Fin di Mundu.
And now I just got selected to be part of the new play Kanto di tur Kanto.
So like you see I can be following here the footsteps of another citizen sir Anthony Hopkins.

I model, paint & design on my pc too. Another thing that I like is doing adventurous sports like climbing mountains, walking and running, I did athletics and karate.

And as an ambitious British Antillean boy I want to succeed in life, and one of them is to become a Prime Minister so that I can develop my country on the right path.
I’m already working on it after I won the youth parliament elections in 2005 with 601 votes, and end May I’ll become the youth parliament President.

And to finalize I’ll share with you my fellow toastmasters two great experiences of my life.
In 2005 I went to the World Youth Days in Cologne, Germany, where I got the chance to see Pope Benedict XVI just a few stairs away, I was the closest British Antillean to Pope after our Monsignor.
And last but not least didn’t you read in the newspapers of last year, how a boy kissed the Queen 3 times? Yup, it was me. I got the chance to be the master of ceremony on 14th of November 2006 for the Queen in the Odulio Willems Stadium. There was when I got the chance to touch her, when she came to congratulate me for a job well done conducting the ceremony, I couldn’t lose my chance to write my own story, by kissing our majesty Beatrix 3 times on her soft powdered make-up cheek. And that is not allowed.

I got through this also. ‘The best way out is always through!’

My icebreaker speech is scheduled for today.

Conveying yourself in 4 to 6 minutes is a challenging task. Although I sort of broke the ice in various different ways on personals sites, my fellow toastmasters seem a different kind of audience. One that I should be a bit more politically correct with, or else go down in flames. If you look at my goals, you’d find that I promote two very unpopular ideas: “healthy atheism” and “English as a global language”. Although the icebreaker will be delivered in a room with about 25 employees of a high-tech company in Silicon Valley, they still live in the USA, where 87% of the population never doubts the existence of God.

• a description of some of my character traits in the context of the Las Vegas controlled demolition story – passionate techie not giving up in the face of ridiculous adversity
• my gradual rejection of beliefs, starting with astrology (inspired by Julia Sweeney’s great talk), the paranormal (inspired by Carl Sagan’s There is a dragon in my garage argument) and finally, religion… oops!

As I type this, I have completely inclined the balance from the fuzzy fun story in favor of liberating truth:

I will come out as a proud atheist.

As fatigue is gnawing away at my ability to express myself without degenerating into a surreal stream of consciousness, I am typing my speech.

It is 6:30am.

[while pointing to imaginary newspaper]
“This is SO ME!!... again”
“And this one also… !”

Madam Toastmaster, fellow toastmasters, dear guests,

Those were my words one October 2nd morning when I was first shown my birth certificate. I was a bit over 14 years old, the age when Romanian teenagers need to apply for ID cards. My grandmother took me aside and told me:

Grandma: Vlad, I need to tell you something. September 2nd is not your birthday, it’s October 2nd.
Me: WHAT?!
Grandma: Listen. The cut-off date to start kindergarten was September 15th. So I told them that your birthday was September 2nd, and since I wasn’t sure that you weren’t going to just tell everyone otherwise, I started to tell you that your birthday was September 2nd. But don’t worry, Vlad, you were so ready to start school, and it saved me a lot of trouble with our teacher neighbor you used to annoy with your crazy questions. Like “Why is the sky blue?!”. Now be a good boy, go to school, and you’ll have a re-run of your birthday tonight, with cake and all!

The first thing I did in the break after the first class was to get the local newspaper and look at my trusted new horoscope. I had been a Virgo and had read my horoscope for years, and IT WAS SO ME! Now I was a boring Libra, but when I read my horoscope, it was again, SO ME. !? I read Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, and they were all SO ME! I got a national newspaper. Leo, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn – there I was again!

What was this? A massive industry of deception? People were actually guiding their lives based on horoscopes and biorhythms. If your “intellectual” was at a low, you’d skip a job interview. If you were a guy and your “emotional” was high, you’d hit on all the women in sight. And resort to a cheesy old pickup line because your “intellectual” was low.

That was an eye-opening moment. It was the start of my journey towards truth, and away from superstition and unsupported beliefs. I started reading critically about astrology. I read that the reason why our lives are supposed to be influenced by the stars is the subtle gravitational attraction between their mass and our brains at the moment of birth. However, other people pointed that given the enormous distances to those stars, the mass of the hospital building exercised a much greater influence. The beauty about this last statement was that it was verifiable: all I had to do was to use Newton’s law of universal gravitation, and look up the estimated mass of a typical star and hospital building. I did the calculations. It was true.

I found out that the biorhythm theory for some reason rarely matched the days when victims had accidents or heart attacks. The Backster effect – plants reacting on a polygraph test when a human was about to burn their leaves – was proven untrue, and never properly replicated. Satanic backward messages in rock music were little more than practical jokes. Chain letters compelling you to forward them to become incredibly lucky in 10 days, or else die a horrible death – now really, who would believe those? Yet, there were enough people who would.

A 2003 Harris poll showed that among Americans, 51% believed in ghosts. 31% believed in astrology, and 27% believed in reincarnation. It became increasingly clear to me that the popularity of a belief had nothing to do with its validity. The next step was predictable: what were the most popular beliefs? Religion and God.

I had been raised an Eastern Orthodox, and had gone to church regularly, although I didn’t exactly know why. I was just doing what I was told. Until I realized that the popularity of worshiping an unseen being had nothing to do with said being actually existing. Rather, if you think about a supposedly all-powerful and all-loving deity, what stops Him from preventing a big chunk of the evil in the world? Yet evil exists.

I was wondering: how vast would a catastrophe have to be to shake the world’s faith? The Holocaust didn’t do it. Neither did the genocide in Rwanda. 500 million people died of smallpox at the beginning of the century, including millions of infants. At this point, which is more likely? That there is an all-powerful and all-loving God who doesn’t care yet concerns Himself with issues such as gay marriage, or that there is no God?

I don’t believe in God. I believe in life, love and passion. I don’t believe in a religion. I believe in reason, learning and community. I don’t believe in an afterlife. I believed that when we die, we die. Which makes THIS life, here on Earth, much more precious and worth fighting for! Let’s make the most of it!

I would like to acknowledge my sources of inspiration: Julia Sweeney (for the DOB change idea), Sam Harris (for the catastrophes idea), SoCalLifer (for the final “I believe” statements) and many others. Thank you!

Note that my speech is, according to Toastmasters guidelines, not necessarily factual. For example, my date of birth had obviously been altered.

I delivered the talk today in 5 minutes and 18 seconds, a bit too fast according to evaluators, and walking too much (blame Dean Kamen). The audience seemed impressed by the speech, laughed much more frequently than I expected, and apparently applauded more, and commented more positively, than I would’ve expected as Toastmasters courtesy to icebreakers.

The mini-evaluations reflected quite a large spectrum of opinions. The legend is 1=excellent, 2=above average, 3=satisfactory, 4=should improve, 5=must improve. There were 5 evaluators. Here are the evaluations, numbers being listed with the most qualified evaluator (in my opinion) first:

I’m giving my icebreaker this Friday!! I’m pretty nervous but feel confident I can get through it!! I’ve got 1 or 2 things that I’d like to talk about, but not so much myelf; more like struggles I’ve gone through… What are your thoughts?