What an exciting day! I was so engrossed in my speech, "Life Begins at 50!" that I almost forgot to look at the light device. When I realised, the light was already at amber I panicked. Trying to round off my speech without making the conclusion appear too abrupt was quite an uphill task and by the time I finished I had passed the deadline by 10 seconds!
Then came the table topics. The question, "He who has no courage to take risks will not achieve great things in life!" What a mouthful! Sometimes when one is on stage, one's mind seems to be easily intimidated by long sentences like this! Luckily for me, I managed to summarise what the whole sentence is essentially about, ie. No gain, no pain! and began to speak along this line.
Fortunately for me, though I disqualified myself in the international speech because of overtime, I managed to clinch the champion award for table topics. On hind sight, it was fortunate that I heeded my vice president for education, Vanessa Yong's advice to try my skill at the table topics contest. I had originally only wanted to focus on the international speech because I had very little chance to be a table topic speaker all these eight months as most of the time I was either a prepared speech participant or evaluator. I must ensure I give myself sufficient practice on the various table topics.
The contest at Divisional level will be even more tough and challenging. There is still so much more to learn. What a great learning experience at toastmasters' clubs!
Gan Chau
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