Live Your Legend Challenge #5 – The Elevator Pitch

Doesn’t everyone love a good story? As a writer, an artist and a budding public speaker, I am constantly thinking of the next story to tell. I write from the heart and I find that personal stories resonate with others. I enjoy writing for others too, like today’s post on the NFED blog. My best speaking […]

A Tale of Two Squirrels

It’s been a while since I’ve shared a Toastmaster speech. Last night I gave speech #3 from the Advanced Communicator Series – Storytelling. The project was to tell a story with a moral. The examples they gave were The Tortoise and the Hare and another one about mice and a cat. I struggled to think […]

Toastmaster Speech #10 – Go Play Outside

Last night I gave my 10th and final speech in the Toastmaster Competent Communicator book. It was an inspirational speech and had to be between 8-10 minutes long. I really struggled with this one. I think I felt intimidated by the idea of speaking for 8 minutes straight without notes. The previous speeches were all […]

Toastmaster Speech – Minimalism – Paring Down to Get More Out of Life

This is the text of the minimalism speech I gave at a Toastmasters meeting in April. I got a lot of good feedback, mostly of people who agreed that they wanted to part with a lot of their crap. A couple of guys insisted that as Connecticut Yankees, they could not part with their stuff […]

Toastmaster Speech #4

Last night I gave my fourth speech at Toastmasters. As usual, I waited until the last possible moment to write the speech (guess how I spent my 4th of July?) I was editing it up until an hour before I had to go live. I even had to use my notes because I was afraid I […]