Inspiration from Christmas and my Niece

 Speech topics are all around us if we look for them.  By identifying an interesting topic and organizing our thoughts around it, we can come up with a wonderful speech!

Over the Christmas holiday, I went to visit my niece in Texas and learned of her new passion for gymnastics.  Watching her hope to receive gymnastics equipment for Christmas and her excitement and action when this hope was fulfilled gave me an idea for a speech that I have now given at two different Toastmasters clubs.

Here are the notes I wrote to formulate my ideas and prepare for this speech:

  • Tonight I tell you a tale of a great olympic gymnast - a young lady who literally set the example for what all the other gymnasts should aspire to. Her name is Emma, and I know her because she is my niece.
    • Presents – desire / hope
    • Practice – hard work
    • Judging (Emma is the example of perfection) - confidence
    • [Should be the end. She won the Olympics three times after all. But there is always a tomorrow…] Nervous the next day, felt like she had forgotten how to do the cartwheel - she won the olympics! No matter how great you are, you can still get nervous, but she got back on the beam and tried again. – persistence (don’t give up, keep going over time even after reaching the peak) / determination
  • Emma may never be a 'real' Olympic gymnast, but her dreams and imagination can teach us a lot. I challenge all of you to approach this new year like Emma: with hope (desire), hard work, confidence, and determination (persistence).

As you can see, I established a clear introduction and conclusion for the speech with bullet points for the main points I wanted to make in the body of the speech.  I did not write down exactly what I would say in the speech, but tried to capture the themes I wanted to convey.

You can't tell from my notes all the details that I shared.  In fact, the exact wording and details of how I delivered the speech changed each time I gave it.  But the key points and central message remained the same.  I hope you can see the main message:  things we can learn from what I saw in Emma.

There is a meta-message in this speech as well - to look for inspiration in others, even / especially the children in our lives.  That is a lesson that can help us improve ourselves as well as to come up with our next presentation topic!

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