"Your Body Speaks," Toastmasters Speech 5

On January 23 I gave my fifth Toastmasters speech on the subject of the Costa Concordia.  The goal of the speech, which the Competent Communicator Manual calls "Your Body Speaks," is to use body movement to enhance your speech and to eliminate any movement that detracts from it.  My speech was about six minutes long.  Here's what I said:




To start I asked who had been on a cruise ship before and followed that with a detailed description of some of the larger ships and what it is like being on them. 

Then I gave a little anecdote about the last cruise I was on as a segway to the Costa Concordia:

"I was fortunate enough to be on a cruise last month over the Christmas break.  It started out in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, went around Cape Horn, and ended in Santiago, Chile.  One of the days at sea we were in the Beagle Channel, which is just a little north or Cape Horn.  Our captain was telling us over the PA system about one of the tours that were being offered the next day when we landed in Ushuaia, Argentina, a boat cruise along the side of the channel.  He made a joke,  'I would move the ship a little closer now to show it to you, but if I did, we might become the largest hotel in the Southern Hemisphere.'  It seemed like a pretty good joke at the time, but I bet you he isn’t telling that joke anymore." 

Next I quickly went through the events of the 13th when the ship hit a reef of the coast of the island of Giglio in Italy.

If you're interested, I found a good timeline of what happened.

I intended to describe what this event meant for the industry as a whole, but time constraints made me remove it.  Essentially, these were the two main points:

• The bad publicity could greatly reduce the amount of business that the cruise lines get over the next few months.
• All of the major cruise lines will have to thoroughly check and recheck the readiness of the captain and crew on each of their ships when it comes to emergencies and retrain as necessary.

Lastly, and most importantly I feel, I went into detail about what it meant for people who take a cruise in the near future.  Ironically, it was all good things:

• The ship will have newly inspected and restocked lifeboats, freshly trained staff, and an increased focus on the emergency drill and safety.
• If anything does happen, which is very unlikely, the captain will order abandon ship immediately.
• People will probably get a great deal if they go soon and the ship won’t have that many people on it, which means no lineups on board.

I ended on a serious note, reminding everyone that this was a major accident but I also said we must remember that it will make ships safer in the future.

Overall I think it was a good speech.  there was a moment near the beginning where I had to consult my notes because I couldn't remember what I was supposed to say, which is strange for me, but other than that it went well.  I didn't use that many crutch words, I kept within the time limit, and I did use an appropriate amount of movement and gestures to emphasize certain points.

I'm really looking forward to speech 6, "Vocal Variety."