Eliminate the “I don’t have a topic” excuse forever.
This was originally a speech delivered as a Better Speaker Series presentation. As usual with these presentations, I largely ignored the scripted material, especially as I had attended an educational session at the District 56 Toastmasters conference all about crafting stories. Also submitted to the Spotlight Network.
If you’ve ever struggled to find material for a speech, this article is for you! Here you’ll find tips on finding material for speeches and stories.
As Toastmasters, we have all probably gone to look at our manual for that next project and likely thought, “What on earth am I going to talk about for this?” Would anyone here like to know a World Champion of Public Speaking’s biggest secret for coming up with stories that he uses in his presentations? What if I told you that secret was summed up in four words?
Fellow Toastmasters, guests, Jim Key’s master secret to getting stories to use is as simple as four little words: “Stuff Happens, Pay Attention.” That’s it. This same master secret is key to generating subjects and content for your presentations, whether they are here for the club or elsewhere. That said, let’s delve deeper into this.
What precisely does “Stuff Happens” mean, beyond the obvious? Where is this stuff happening? What stuff is worth our attention? We can get started with the following:
Books: Fiction or not, there’s a lot of material here. One great way to crystallize learning is to give a speech about it!
Movies: How about a biography of your favorite actor/actress?
Music
News: Already tends to be fodder for table topics, why not a speech?
Magazines
Hobbies & Interests
The Internet
Personal experiences
Experiences of others (but DON’T try to claim them as your own!)
The library / newsstands: Great way to surround yourself with a lot of material.
Other speeches & table topics
Television
Plays
There’s a pretty good spread here, but there’s one more source that may be of interest, and it’s called a “Scramble”. The idea is to find an activity you’ve never been involved in, and plan a weekend to go do it. That could mean going to a festival, going skydiving, whatever; the rule is that you haven’t done it before.
All of these sources can provide some useable topics on their own, but sometimes refining these raw materials is necessary. If you really want to take things to the next level, you’ll want to collect these reference materials and organize them, so that when you go to brainstorm you have them available to you, because one extra step you can take here is to start writing ideas down that come to you, referring back to the sources you’ve collected. If you spend at least 15 minutes of ‘free dumping’ speech ideas onto paper or computer screen, you’ll likely find the dam that was holding up your ideas will eventually rupture and everything will come spilling out.
Another tactic you can use is the “bubble” or “mind map”. In it, you have a central bubble, let’s say, the speech objective for your next project. From this bubble, you start drawing lines and connecting bubbles. Let’s say you’re working on an icebreaker speech. The subject is you, so you can stick “ME!” right in the center bubble. From this, you can start drawing lines to other bubbles of major possible sub-topics, like “work”, “family”, “hobbies”, “beliefs”, and so on. Off of those you can draw additional connected bubbles, keeping on until you have all your potential material mapped out.
One thing that impressed me about Mr. Key’s presentation is that he has a collection of 250-300 stories. Not only that, because he’s a self-confessed geek, all of these stories all stuffed into a personal database that has tags. If he wants a story about, say, “trust”, he goes to his database, searches for trust, and he’s set. You may not need this level of sophistication, but it’s something to think about. Build something, even if it’s just a box of 3×5 index cards or notes in a binder.
Once you’ve done this, your problem likely won’t be that you don’t have an idea, but that you have too many! This is a good problem. You can begin paring down what you will use or speak about now with a variety of methods.
Consider the audience. Who will you be speaking to? What is their level of understanding of the topic? What is their interest level?
Consider the project. Obviously, this only applies to your Toastmasters speeches, but still bears consideration.
Consider your speaking style and abilities. Obviously, if you’re not comfortable talking about a particular embarrassing moment, that topic will have to be shelved.
There are all sorts of methods to generating ideas for speeches, but the basic advice remains the same: “Stuff Happens, Pay Attention!” There’s a whole world of stuff happening to pay attention to, and as a speaker, we’re waiting for you to bring it to our attention. Build your treasure trove of Toastmasters materials, whether you do it with a computerized system, a file box of collected things, or whatever works for you. Pay attention to all that stuff happening in your life (and a little beyond), and come back with a great speech.
