No Limits

written by Sha last Tuesday, April 28, 2009

I delivered my 9th speech during the President Toastmasters Club meeting at Legend Villas last night. I wasn't really ready to deliver the speech at 8pm last night considering that I just finished writing my speech at 5:30pm! But the show must go on.

I delivered my speech titled "Get Physical" wherein I encouraged the audience to engage in sports because of its physical, psychological, and emotional benefits. I was successful in eliciting postive response from the audience but I believe it was not my best performance ever. I forgot some of the lines and I had to adlib a few times. After I delivered my speech, I told myself to really really prepare my speech in advance.

During the evaluation portion, my evaluator Ms Innah (one of my favorite speakers) gave justice to my speech. I would say that her evaluation was fair and kind. She said that I was able to meet the objective(s) of my speech (major objective: persuade with power), there was excitement in my voice, my gestures were okay. Point for improvement was to add more vocal variety and to detach the microphone from the lectern at the start of the speech to avoid distractions.

During the meeting, we were privileged to have our District Governor Liza Paylago as our General Evaluator. The role of the GE is to evaluate the evaluators. After she evaluated the evaluators, I can't forget how she said this. "Oh! Before I forget...Sha! You are a great speaker. You should join the international speech contests!"

I was dumbfounded. I can't believe what I heard. Wow! Really?! I was so delighted. I didn't see myself as one but one great mentor actually saw me as one. I'm very thankful to Gov Liza for that remark. As she was looking at me, and so is everybody else, I just smiled (obviously pleasantly surprised) and managed to say "thank you".

There is no limit to the amount of success that we can achieve. What the mind can conceive, the body can achieve. =)