My Journey from breaking ice to Competent Communicator (9/3/10-22/2/11)

My journey began well before giving my first speech, my first step was not to prepare for the ice breaker but to decide to come out of my comfort zone and join the Toastmasters, attend all the meetings and participate whenever &wherever possible, I feel making up your mind is more important than executing your plans but at the same time it doesn't make this execution less important. I would like to thank the entire Money Mastery KL TM team; who always assisted me, inspired me, motivated me and made me capable of achieving this milestone.

I still very well remember my first planned speech. It was a very different feeling; I was nervous and confident at the same time. My hands were ice cold, I could hear my tummy making weird sounds (that happens when I m scared), I was allowed to use notes but still to avoid that I was memorizing my speech, the table topic session started but I was too busy to concentrate, I had a much bigger job, I had to remember my lines, my flow and yeah a strong ending with a strong quotation. I was so focused on the preparation of my speech that even a terrorist attack would not have distracted me. But that was wrong on my part, which I realized later. At toastmasters we give equal importance to listening as well and I was not completely listening to any speaker, I was just hearing what they were saying.

The moment came- we moved to planned speeches, my evaluator Paul Tan was asked to read out my speech objectives, then Lakhmichand (commonly known as Lucky) the GE was asked to read out Note to the Evaluator and then- “Can we call upon TM Jitin Girdhar for his first speech- “My life in my own words”- Jitin” (repeated twice). Well well well a complete darkness in front of me- my legs were paralyzed, with a firm handshake, I took control of the podium and started with my childhood, my parent and my family and I don’t know how the time passed and when the timer showed me the orange light which means it was the time for me to recollect the quotations I memorized. And it ended well in time 5 minutes 59 seconds. My hands were colder than before, fumbling and shaking I reached my seat. I was not sure what had I done and how good it was but when I received the best speech of the day award, I told myself- it was worth all these efforts, everybody liked that speech- well it was my own life and who else cud have narrated it better than me. The feelings were crystal clear and the knowledge of subject made me little confident, the efforts were well paid when Lucky (GE) in his concluding remarks said that this is the best example of the ice breaker speech and that we should use this as a sample for the new comers, and Gean Lau (then VPPR) asked me to frame the speech and publish in our newsletter (later which brought me into the editing team).

These awards were much bigger than the first prize in the international speech contest, I was so happy that immediately I decided that I am giving my next speech in the next meeting and then every meeting I kept learning and cruised along to my last speech. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Paul Tan for giving me such a wonderful and a positive feedback which really encouraged me and inspired me to give speeches regularly.

I wanted to finish my last speech at the same venue so I had to rush with my last couple of speeches and yeah the day arrived- the last speech before getting CC. The situation was totally different, my confidence was really high; no sign of nervousness, no memorizing of the speech- just remembered the bullet points and the flow. The actual speech started much before when I had to select the speech title- it had to be the best, after all I had to Inspire the Audience (yeah the speech topic) - so what could have been better than the topic of peace, love and humanity after all it touches everybody’s heart so I decided on “Live and let live” and this time my evaluator was none other than the General Evaluator himself- Distinguished Toastmaster Rohijas. This time I was well prepared with the statistics, and had all the material to substantiate my thoughts, I touched the topic of mother nature- the global warming and I was sure I’ll be able to gather everybody’s attention, this confidence was the outcome of my long journey of 11 months and the efforts put in by myself and my entire team in MM KL TMC. And the milestone was achieved with grabbing another best speech award for that day. I was very satisfied with my performance; I could easily see the difference between my first and my last speech of CC.

I would once again like to thank each and everyone who has directly or indirectly participated in making me a better communicator. I would never be able to repay you for this but would promise each one of you that I will give my level best to bring a communicator out of every Toastmaster. My journey does not end here, it is just the end of the beginning, and I will come back even stronger and will reach the pinnacle in style, with confidence.

Signing off

Jitin Girdhar, a proud CC and a member of Money Mastery KL TMC