{"id":752,"date":"2015-08-02T09:30:09","date_gmt":"2015-08-02T14:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/madstone.net\/?p=752"},"modified":"2015-11-17T12:01:57","modified_gmt":"2015-11-17T17:01:57","slug":"icebreaker-speech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?p=752","title":{"rendered":"My first Toastmasters speech: The Icebreaker"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Note: when making a speech to a Toastmasters club, you have to open and close the speech in prescribed fashion. The &#8220;icebreaker&#8221; speech is the standard first speech in the Toastmasters program, designed to get you talking in front of an audience. I procrastinated writing this speech until 10:45 on Friday morning, July 31, with the speech due at our noon meeting that day. I printed it out at 11:50 and walked over to the neighboring office building where our corporate Toastmasters club has its weekly meeting. I mention this so you know I&#8217;m not holding this up as an example of a well thought-out speech!<\/em><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h1>Jorah\u2019s Icebreaker speech, July 31, 2015<\/h1>\n<p>Mr. Toastmaster; ladies and gentlemen<\/p>\n<p>(PAUSE)<\/p>\n<p>This is my icebreaker speech\u2026 and I panicked at first, thinking that I was going to have to discuss giant Arctic working ships with highly reinforced bows and powerful engines.<\/p>\n<p>(PAUSE)<\/p>\n<p>When I realized I was only expected to talk about myself, I relaxed right away, but then had the challenge of figuring out how to restrict myself to five minutes on a topic that I actually know a lot about.<\/p>\n<p>(PAUSE)<\/p>\n<p>Since our Toastmasters club is work-related, I decided to focus on how I learned some of\u00a0the skills I use in the job I have now.<\/p>\n<h2>What a long, strange trip it\u2019s been<\/h2>\n<p>I\u2019ve had few different jobs, not all of them as swanky as the one I have now!<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I\u2019ve swept floors (I think I\u2019ve probably spent 20% of my working life sweeping floors), washed floors, waxed floors, and installed floors\u2026<\/li>\n<li>I\u2019ve built houses; torn houses apart, put roofs on houses, and even dug tunnels under houses\u2026<\/li>\n<li>I\u2019ve vacuumed parking lots, driven fork lifts, mixed sand, melted bronze\u2026<\/li>\n<li>I\u2019ve gathered chickens at night in barns where the ceiling was so low I couldn\u2019t stand up straight\u2026<\/li>\n<li>I\u2019ve gathered eggs, loaded and unloaded trucks, decorated ballrooms at fancy hotels (favorite memory; crossing a Boston sidewalk carrying what looked like a 20-foot marble column), and stocked warehouses\u2026<\/li>\n<li>I\u2019ve done inventory of parts for nuclear submarines, sewn futons at a commune in New Hampshire, given people baths, cleaned printing presses, done quality assurance, and inspected medical labels at night in a darkened room with a strobe light running for 10 hours at a time\u2026<\/li>\n<li>I\u2019ve done newspaper page layout, published a magazine, delivered newspapers, taught job skills to disabled persons, and stood guard over submarines loaded with nuclear weapons\u2026<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As you can tell, none of that sounds like background for a career managing corporate web sites.<\/p>\n<p>But no matter what job I\u2019ve had, I\u2019ve always tried to do my best. I\u2019ve always tried to learn something new at each job, I\u2019ve always tried to solve problems, and \u2014 perhaps most important \u2014 I\u2019ve always worked hard.<\/p>\n<p>Being a stock control clerk in the Navy, I learned about categories and naming conventions. It turns out that being able to work out sensible names and categories will give you a good foundation for understanding web site construction, where you have to arrange things so that people have a chance of finding them.<\/p>\n<p>By having a new job every few months, I learned <em>how to learn<\/em> new things quickly.<\/p>\n<p>Being able to walk onto a new job and learn long sequences of processes like how to transform piles of lumber, drywall, and roofing shingles into a house\u2026 can help you understand how to write process documentation for publishing web sites.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve discovered that I can look at a problem and relate it to something I learned 30 years ago\u2026 and often solve that problem.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve learned that no job is beneath me.<\/p>\n<p>I learned not to look down my nose at someone because of the job they have.<\/p>\n<p>Because\u2026<\/p>\n<p>You are not your job. Your current job doesn\u2019t have to limit where you end up. I\u2019m proof of that. If someone who knew I flunked out of high school saw me working in that chicken barn in 1995, they wouldn\u2019t have credited the idea that I\u2019d be working for a top Fortune 500 company a few years later.<\/p>\n<p>And all of this has made me grateful. I no longer have to stand on wooden platforms thirty feet in the air, with freezing water dripping down my back. I don\u2019t have to shovel manure, or work on sun baked roofs, or risk giant rolls of paper shifting and breaking my leg, nor getting burned by molten aluminum.<\/p>\n<p>(PAUSE)<\/p>\n<p>My life has taken me in some strange directions, and much to my surprise it has now brought me here, to a Toastmasters meeting in a beautiful building in Charlotte, and I\u2019m glad to be here and thank you all for welcoming me.<\/p>\n<p>Mr. Toastmaster\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Note: when making a speech to a Toastmasters club, you have to open and close the speech in prescribed fashion. The &#8220;icebreaker&#8221; speech is the standard first speech in the Toastmasters program, designed to get you talking in front of an audience. I procrastinated writing this speech until 10:45 on Friday morning, July 31, with &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?p=752\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;My first Toastmasters speech: The Icebreaker&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-toastmasters"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pgY3e-c8","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":771,"url":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?p=771","url_meta":{"origin":752,"position":0},"title":"My second Toastmasters speech: Heroes","author":"Jorah","date":"August 16, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Below is my second Toastmasters speech, built on the requirement that I had to organize my speech properly; with a clear beginning, middle, and end. This is still in the form of the notes I spoke to during the speech. I'm planning to re-write it to fill in the blanks,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Toastmasters&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Toastmasters","link":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?cat=62"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":794,"url":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?p=794","url_meta":{"origin":752,"position":1},"title":"My fifth Toastmasters speech: Getting physical","author":"Jorah","date":"November 16, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"The assignment for this, my fifth Toastmasters speech and with the project name \"Your Body Speaks\" was to express myself physically as I gave the speech, so I walked when I described walking, bowed when I described myself bowing, etc. My uniform is a simple pair of trousers, the legs\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Toastmasters&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Toastmasters","link":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?cat=62"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":769,"url":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?p=769","url_meta":{"origin":752,"position":2},"title":"My third Toastmasters speech: A moonlit highway long ago","author":"Jorah","date":"August 30, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Below is my third Toastmasters speech, given as my entry in a humor contest on August 28. I was made ineligible for the contest because I went over the time limit of seven minutes, but I count it as a success because people did laugh, and I did manage to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Toastmasters&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Toastmasters","link":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?cat=62"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":781,"url":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?p=781","url_meta":{"origin":752,"position":3},"title":"The good things&#8230;","author":"Jorah","date":"September 4, 2015","format":"status","excerpt":"I complain. Okay, I complain a lot. But I\u2019m not in a bad mood all the time. Today I thought I\u2019d list a few things I\u2019m happy about this week. It\u2019s been a stressful week, so it\u2019s good to look at some good things, too. First: my arms actually aren't\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Philosophizing&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Philosophizing","link":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?cat=59"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":81,"url":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?p=81","url_meta":{"origin":752,"position":4},"title":"Jabber","author":"Jorah","date":"August 25, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"What is Jabber: Jabber 1. Rapid and indistinct speech 2. To talk in a noisy, excited, or declamatory manner 3. A streaming XML technology mainly used for instant messaging Jabber is a set of streaming XML protocols and technologies that enable any two entities on the Internet to exchange messages,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Post&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Post","link":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?cat=30"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":730,"url":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?p=730","url_meta":{"origin":752,"position":5},"title":"A hard lesson to learn: trying to be a better me","author":"Jorah","date":"May 31, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"I was reading a book on Aikido recently. The author of the book mentioned how nearly everyone he met in Aikido over the years had been a decent person. I have had an interest in Aikido for over thirty years, and finally got a chance to join a dojo last\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Social commentary&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Social commentary","link":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?cat=46"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=752"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":799,"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752\/revisions\/799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}