Public Speaking and Fish & Chips 🎤🐟🍟

Yesterday marked my fourth Toastmasters club meeting across three consecutive days.

This time around, it was a joint meeting of the ITF and Kajang Toastmasters Clubs. The venue was much nearer for me – at the Blue Reef Fish & Chips @ TTDI Kuala Lumpur. I was grateful to secure a speaking slot, where I delivered my project assignment, "The Sprint". 🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️This was speech #953.

The title refers to my decision to actively continue making speeches – a commitment that has evolved into a 1,000-speech marathon. To reach this goal is, I reckon, an incredible milestone. 

To put it into perspective, delivering one speech every single week without fail means it takes nearly 19 years to cross the finish line. It truly is a lifelong marathon made up of many intense sprints! 🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️

What was supposed to be a standard meeting quickly transformed into a rigorous test of my focus and adaptability. I came mentally prepared for just one major task: to deliver my prepared project speech. However, due to a last-minute change, I was pulled in to serve as the Table Topics Evaluator as well. 

In the end, it was a high-stakes, fast-paced mental workout – especially since I flew completely without notes for both my own speech and the evaluations. The unique sequence of the meeting kept my brain running in overdrive from start to finish. 

Definitely, a dynamic yet demanding discipline.

To wrap up Saturday's meeting, my co-author who is from the Kajang club – the irrepressible Ahmad Fakhri – predictably did an amazing job as General Evaluator, and we were stoked to send three of our books (one Diamond, two Pearls) home with new readers! 🥳📖✨

Frightened, Fearful, Fragile: The Architecture of Connection

On Friday, I attended another Toastmasters meeting – this time at YMCA Kuala Lumpur – where I presented a prepared speech. 

I am indebted to NAWEM's Catherine Paul who connected me to Ranjina Jacob of YMCA KL Toastmasters Club, who kindly gave me a speaking slot. It means a lot to me because the speech "Frightened, Fearful and Fragile" represents my #952 speech! 

My speech reframes public speaking anxiety not as a sign of weakness, but as a metric of deep respect for the audience and the cost of achieving excellence. By openly weaving the raw realities of being "frightened, fearful, and fragile" throughout the narrative, I served as a living example of the message. 

When all is said and done, this reveals a speaker who views the stage not as a comfort zone, but as a crucible for constant self-challenge.

This is my personal opinion 👉. I felt that the whole meeting ambience was low-key and reserved. I wouldn't say that the members were rigid, and yet, the environment felt restrained. This is likely because most of the members present are relatively new and naturally finding their footing. 

However, the deeper issue seems to be that they haven't properly understood why things were done the way they were done, possibly because the foundation passed down by the club's seniors wasn't entirely clear, coherent or even complete to begin with. 

Having said this, of course, the club is free to choose how they wish to run their meetings. I note that my views may not be agreeable to others – and I accept that.

Yay-y-y! I'm delighted to have pushed out 3 more sets of my public speaking books (6 copies total across both titles).

A SAL Error 404: Emotion Not Found Speech

"Error 404: Emotion Not Found". That was the title of my latest CSL2(2) "Lead with Clear Structure" speech, which I delivered this past Thursday during our regular SAL meeting at Sunway Mentari.

The lineup was packed with 12 speeches, highlighting five project presentations alongside seven quick elevator pitches. With my plate already full from delivering the two speeches, I also took on the roles of speech evaluator and language observer.

Before I summarize my speech, a quick disclaimer: this recap is a highly edited, best-case scenario of what I just said, mostly because I didn't write a script and my brain was actively malfunctioning. 

To recap the core message, my face has exactly one IBL – Instant Blank Look – setting, and if my head were a webpage, the banner across it would permanently read: "Error 404: Emotion Not Found". 

Therefore, it's not true that I don't give a damn about anything; it's just that my facial muscles completely missed the latest Windows driver update. I swear, beneath this utterly frozen exterior, there is actual human activity happening. My face is simply operating on a tragic 14-second delay, so if I look entirely expressionless, just give me a minute to reboot. 

The ultimate takeaway here is simple: never judge a book by its cover – even if that cover looks like a glitched computer monitor. At the end of the day, whether your system runs on high-energy, real-time animation or functions like a quiet, living corpse, the underlying software is exactly the same. We all possess the same core human feelings and emotions; some of us just happen to have a much slower rendering speed.

The one-minute speech topic is "light". I decided to turn it on its head and talked about L.I.G.H.T as in Let's Incite Good-Hearted Trolling. And it's not about being mean, malicious, or leaving moronic comments online. It is about using harmless, clever humor to disrupt the mundane and bring people together through shared laughter. 

Looking back at my speech during the self-reflection session, I have to admit it wasn't up to my usual standards. It was a good performance, but there is definitely room for improvement, and I know exactly what needs to change.😅

A good meeting overall.  Photos:

Surviving the Engaging with Humor Pathway (Without Dying of Embarrassment)

On Wednesday, I visited the Super Speakers Toastmasters Club at Bandar Kinrara 5 in Puchong, Selangor. I went because I had an invitation from its president, Kong Meng Shen, whom I met at the Hashim Adnan event in Jalan Tandang, Seksyen 51, PJ, on August 25.

The meeting featured two project speeches, and I took on the dual roles of speaker and evaluator. 

As a speaker, I tackled the "Know Your Sense of Humor" project from the Engaging with Humor pathway. My task was to identify what makes me laugh, discover my personal brand of comedy, and deliver a 5-to-7-minute speech that shares how my humor translates to an audience. 

I must confess that I am not a funny person but I took this on as a challenge to develop my comedic speaking skills. 😅

I relied on self-deprecating humor – the safest style for the occasion – in a speech titled “Enigmatic Me”. According to my evaluator, Gan Shin Wei, the speech went exceedingly well. I was pleasantly surprised by her comprehensive feedback, which showed her strong potential as an evaluator.

Afterward, I evaluated Khalid Idris, who delivered an excellent presentation from the Successful Club Series. With several young members in the audience, I used the opportunity to showcase the "sandwich method" of evaluation to model constructive feedback. 

The evening concluded on a high note commercially. A Toastmaster guest, Nina Randhawa, who had previously bought my two books, kindly promoted my work to the audience. Thanks to her endorsement, I sold one copy of Diamond and two copies of Pearls.