Friday, April 10, 2015
Be Prepared with "Quotations" - the speech I gave
Dale Carnegie, the author of How To Win Friends And Influence People, said, There are three speeches, the one you prepared, the one you gave, and the one you wish you had given.
The speech I prepared was called Be prepared with Quotations. Somehow the publicity simply listed Quotations as the title. The organiser had elderly parents and he was in the midst of moving house so the parents could move in - therefore he had more important things to worry about than my speech.
He offered to postpone my speech to another date. However, I had agreed to give the speech, had spent a week researching and worrying, had blocked the hall of my home with props, and wanted to go ahead whilst the subject was still in my mind and the props were to hand. So I spoke to a cosy, small audience. Another quote 'springs to mind': Strangers are only friends you haven't yet me.
As I left the house on the way to my speech venue I had picked fresh daffodils to illustrate Wordsworth's poem about daffodils. As a precaution, the previous day I'd already packed five daffodils in a plastic bag in my props suitcase. If I forgot or was in too much of a hurry to pick fresh flowers, I could present wilted or dried flowers. But I had just a moment to grab fresh flowers which I put on the venue table, where the flowers served as memory aid for me and a visual aid for the audience.
Preparing The Room
I arrived early. Vital. Even so, I was so busy setting up my props that I committed the dreadful speaker's first sin, rejecting conversation with the welcoming host or first person to arrive in favour of busying myself unpacking props, looking for the easel, moving the easel. However, the first arrival obligingly helped me so we had a conversation, although entirely practical, consisting of discussing the room layout.
Talking to people before starting the speech is a chance to develop rapport, so the audience is ready to listen, already listening, you as speaker feel confident speaking to them, as you are already speaking to one of them, just have to keep looking at the others to be sure they feel included.
The Start
The speech starting time was undefined because the person due to introduce me was delayed on the train. So I began by saying who I was, the speaker, an author - spread my books on the table in front of me, one book raised vertically on a display stand.
Hats and Opening Lines
I wore a witches hat, which was to identify me as the performing speaker. My hat also remind me of my opening line, When Shall We Three Meet again (cue to aside on the weather) in thunder lightning or in rain. On previous occasions I'd worn a hat or carried a prop and the audience had been distracted and puzzled the whole speech waiting for me to use or explain the hats, which on one occasion I never used.
However, the witch's hat led to confusion, because one lady thought my entire talk would be about witches and she did free association and started a discussion about witches and everything she knew on the subject. I tried to remind her, then the others, that my talk was on quotations, so I would have a quotation on witches. Since I was wearing the hat, I'd have been better off with two or three quotations on witches, otherwise by revealing the Three Witches, I'd given away my opening line.
As late as the day before or morning before I decided that as we were meeting in Harrow, even though the audience might not all be from Harrow I could pick characters from Harrow.
Harrow Characters and Quotations
As your train passes through Harrow you see the spire of the church where Byron used to sit reading and writing, and where his daughter is buried.
If you go to Harrow school you will see the statue of Queen Elizabeth on the wall. She is the lady who assured everybody, 'I have a bath once a year, whether I need it or not.'
I'd previously talked about and written about characters from Harrow:
Harrow School pupil, Winston Churchill (Harrow School) - lots of quotations from Churchill:
"If you are doing the quiz and don't get all the answers right on first reading, remember Churchill's words:
Never, never, never give up.
He told his wartime audiences:
I have nothing to bring you but blood, sweat and tears.
Fortunately we are now enjoying peacetime, and I have for your entertainment, information and amusement.
This is not the beginning of the end. (I could place this is appropriately.)
Byron (must ensure I remember which are Byron which are Shelley. Need card index cards. Or a mind map - but mind maps on an A4 sheet are small for quotations.
Roger Bannister - I have a quotation, but it's long.
***
I like to keep my agenda/speech on a small red clipboard. The clipboard looks official and stops the flimsy paper shaking in nervous hands or floating or tumbling to the floor.
A simple sheet can easily get lost under a pile of papers. A coloured clipboard is easier to notice and keep on the top of the pile.
Let's travel around England and up to Scotland
If you rainbow colour the sections with highlighter it's easier to find where you are on the page. For example, I might have a black outline in felt tip around the witches hat quotation, a yellow highlighter around or through the Wandered Lonely as a cloud daffodil quotation. Or blue around the line on the cloud, yellow around the line on daffodils. Wordsworth lived in the Lake District. a remote area. Before the age of cars, trains brought tourists and carried letters.
Night Mail
WH Auden was commissioned to write about the Night Mail which took trains overnight anywhere in the country, to deliver first class post the next day.
Link - black as night - the night mail. This is the night mail crossing the boarder, bringing the cheque and the postal order ... If I were sitting in a circle with a group, and had no clipboard, I would pass the poem to somebody in the audience to read. That involves the audience, gets a variety of people speaking and gives me a break to think about my next quotation r reach for my next prop.
Coming back to this area, who has heard of Anne Frank? (Everybody raised hands.) And how many of you know of her connections with this area? 9To my surprise nobody. They don't live in the area so they don't read the local papers.
Anne Frank has connections with Edgware, where I lived as a child. I didn't know, but when I was living in post-war Edgware in the Fifties and Sixties, reading The Diary of Anne Frank, her father was living with his second wife somewhere in Edgware. His name and location wee a secret. He had good reasons for wanting to stay hidden, having spent months in hiding in Amsterdam and having lost his wife and both daughters int he war.
He married a lady who had lost her husband in the war in similar circumstances. When I first read about this I thought it was a coincidence. It wasn't. I later learned that for several days, week, months, after the war ended, people would go to the offices of the Red Cross looking at lists of names of people who had returned and those who were confirmed to have died. So the people who went looking for their families would go there every month, or every week, or every day, and see the same people, and when another person got good news, would be delighted for them, and when they got bad news, would sympathise. So Mr Frank had known this lady for a long time when they eventually decided to marry.
The second Anne Frank connection is that Mr Frank's wife had a daughter, giving him a replacement wife and daughter, and after her stepfather, Mr Frank died, at the end of her life, this lady, Eva Floss has written a book about her life and her mother and stepfather.
Finally we come to the quotation from Anne Frank, which is on the wall of the council Chamber in Harrow Civic Centre.
How wonderful it is that we need not wait a single moment to change the world.
I took a picture of this to show you when I was invited to tour the Civic Centre, by the mayor, who came to present prizes at Harrovians' Speakers' Club.
Whenever I think about the Civic Centre or drive past it (sometimes over a pothole), (Laughter) I think of Anne Frank's saying and hope the Council are working at improving our world. (Laughter)
The speech I prepared was called Be prepared with Quotations. Somehow the publicity simply listed Quotations as the title. The organiser had elderly parents and he was in the midst of moving house so the parents could move in - therefore he had more important things to worry about than my speech.
He offered to postpone my speech to another date. However, I had agreed to give the speech, had spent a week researching and worrying, had blocked the hall of my home with props, and wanted to go ahead whilst the subject was still in my mind and the props were to hand. So I spoke to a cosy, small audience. Another quote 'springs to mind': Strangers are only friends you haven't yet me.
As I left the house on the way to my speech venue I had picked fresh daffodils to illustrate Wordsworth's poem about daffodils. As a precaution, the previous day I'd already packed five daffodils in a plastic bag in my props suitcase. If I forgot or was in too much of a hurry to pick fresh flowers, I could present wilted or dried flowers. But I had just a moment to grab fresh flowers which I put on the venue table, where the flowers served as memory aid for me and a visual aid for the audience.
Preparing The Room
I arrived early. Vital. Even so, I was so busy setting up my props that I committed the dreadful speaker's first sin, rejecting conversation with the welcoming host or first person to arrive in favour of busying myself unpacking props, looking for the easel, moving the easel. However, the first arrival obligingly helped me so we had a conversation, although entirely practical, consisting of discussing the room layout.
Talking to people before starting the speech is a chance to develop rapport, so the audience is ready to listen, already listening, you as speaker feel confident speaking to them, as you are already speaking to one of them, just have to keep looking at the others to be sure they feel included.
The speech starting time was undefined because the person due to introduce me was delayed on the train. So I began by saying who I was, the speaker, an author - spread my books on the table in front of me, one book raised vertically on a display stand.
Hats and Opening Lines
I wore a witches hat, which was to identify me as the performing speaker. My hat also remind me of my opening line, When Shall We Three Meet again (cue to aside on the weather) in thunder lightning or in rain. On previous occasions I'd worn a hat or carried a prop and the audience had been distracted and puzzled the whole speech waiting for me to use or explain the hats, which on one occasion I never used.
However, the witch's hat led to confusion, because one lady thought my entire talk would be about witches and she did free association and started a discussion about witches and everything she knew on the subject. I tried to remind her, then the others, that my talk was on quotations, so I would have a quotation on witches. Since I was wearing the hat, I'd have been better off with two or three quotations on witches, otherwise by revealing the Three Witches, I'd given away my opening line.
As late as the day before or morning before I decided that as we were meeting in Harrow, even though the audience might not all be from Harrow I could pick characters from Harrow.
Harrow Characters and Quotations
As your train passes through Harrow you see the spire of the church where Byron used to sit reading and writing, and where his daughter is buried.
If you go to Harrow school you will see the statue of Queen Elizabeth on the wall. She is the lady who assured everybody, 'I have a bath once a year, whether I need it or not.'
I'd previously talked about and written about characters from Harrow:
Harrow School pupil, Winston Churchill (Harrow School) - lots of quotations from Churchill:
"If you are doing the quiz and don't get all the answers right on first reading, remember Churchill's words:
Never, never, never give up.
He told his wartime audiences:
I have nothing to bring you but blood, sweat and tears.
Fortunately we are now enjoying peacetime, and I have for your entertainment, information and amusement.
This is not the beginning of the end. (I could place this is appropriately.)
Byron (must ensure I remember which are Byron which are Shelley. Need card index cards. Or a mind map - but mind maps on an A4 sheet are small for quotations.
Roger Bannister - I have a quotation, but it's long.
***
I like to keep my agenda/speech on a small red clipboard. The clipboard looks official and stops the flimsy paper shaking in nervous hands or floating or tumbling to the floor.
A simple sheet can easily get lost under a pile of papers. A coloured clipboard is easier to notice and keep on the top of the pile.
Let's travel around England and up to Scotland
If you rainbow colour the sections with highlighter it's easier to find where you are on the page. For example, I might have a black outline in felt tip around the witches hat quotation, a yellow highlighter around or through the Wandered Lonely as a cloud daffodil quotation. Or blue around the line on the cloud, yellow around the line on daffodils. Wordsworth lived in the Lake District. a remote area. Before the age of cars, trains brought tourists and carried letters.
Night Mail
WH Auden was commissioned to write about the Night Mail which took trains overnight anywhere in the country, to deliver first class post the next day.
Link - black as night - the night mail. This is the night mail crossing the boarder, bringing the cheque and the postal order ... If I were sitting in a circle with a group, and had no clipboard, I would pass the poem to somebody in the audience to read. That involves the audience, gets a variety of people speaking and gives me a break to think about my next quotation r reach for my next prop.
Coming back to this area, who has heard of Anne Frank? (Everybody raised hands.) And how many of you know of her connections with this area? 9To my surprise nobody. They don't live in the area so they don't read the local papers.
Anne Frank has connections with Edgware, where I lived as a child. I didn't know, but when I was living in post-war Edgware in the Fifties and Sixties, reading The Diary of Anne Frank, her father was living with his second wife somewhere in Edgware. His name and location wee a secret. He had good reasons for wanting to stay hidden, having spent months in hiding in Amsterdam and having lost his wife and both daughters int he war.
He married a lady who had lost her husband in the war in similar circumstances. When I first read about this I thought it was a coincidence. It wasn't. I later learned that for several days, week, months, after the war ended, people would go to the offices of the Red Cross looking at lists of names of people who had returned and those who were confirmed to have died. So the people who went looking for their families would go there every month, or every week, or every day, and see the same people, and when another person got good news, would be delighted for them, and when they got bad news, would sympathise. So Mr Frank had known this lady for a long time when they eventually decided to marry.
The second Anne Frank connection is that Mr Frank's wife had a daughter, giving him a replacement wife and daughter, and after her stepfather, Mr Frank died, at the end of her life, this lady, Eva Floss has written a book about her life and her mother and stepfather.
Finally we come to the quotation from Anne Frank, which is on the wall of the council Chamber in Harrow Civic Centre.
How wonderful it is that we need not wait a single moment to change the world.
I took a picture of this to show you when I was invited to tour the Civic Centre, by the mayor, who came to present prizes at Harrovians' Speakers' Club.
Whenever I think about the Civic Centre or drive past it (sometimes over a pothole), (Laughter) I think of Anne Frank's saying and hope the Council are working at improving our world. (Laughter)
Labels: Dale Carnegie
