I went through four drafts about all sorts of serious topics: my passion for personal information management, the Philippines, my family, and my educational background. On the bus ride home, I showed my seatmate the squiggled mindmaps I was hurriedly doing to organize my talk. He said, “Why don’t you talk about your pets?”
Hmm. Hey, it’s an icebreaker. They’ll let me get away with anything as long as I actually get up there, right?
I got to Metro Hall an hour early. I had plenty of time to throw together a couple of anecdotes related to my slightly psychotic cat and tie it all together with a good beginning and a punchline for the ending.
The word of the day was “detrimental”, and… well… I was talking about a cat who my sister wanted to name “Catastrophix” and who made my mom gnash her teeth over the state of her sofa. I had a lot of fun dropping the word into all the natural places, although I managed to resist the temptation to repeat it in a triple construction. ;)
I had tons of fun during the speech. The only hiccups were that I went overtime and rushed the punchline, and I had problems finding a way around the huge projector smack in the middle of the U-shape arrangement. I don’t like having anything between me and my audience during talks, so I ended up going in front of the projector and forgetting the people behind me. They felt very neglected during the talk, especially as the people in front were laughing at my cat’s misadventures. Mm. Lesson for next time: just move the projector out of the way!
That was such a fun speech. People gave me very useful feedback. They flagged “like” as one of my too-often-used filler words, gave me suggestions on how to manage U-shape arrangements, and told me how amazed they were that I did the speech without notes and without hiding behind the lectern. Little did they know that it was mostly ad-libbed!
I’m really looking forward to doing my second speech—this time with a little more preparation!
