“BREAKING THE ICE” SOON?

Some tips on giving your Icebreaker Speech

By: Tom Corrigan, DTM

Editor, Yankee Activator

www.district53toastmasters.org

(Republished with permission)

Just joined Toastmasters recently and getting ready for your Icebreaker? Or are you working towards your third, fourth or fifth CTM and have to give yet another Icebreaker to the same club without sounding stale or unoriginal? Even veteran Toastmasters often find the Icebreaker more challenging than a 30-minute speech from an advanced manual. Here are some tips that may make your Icebreaker more memorable.

Focus on “who you are”

Most Icebreaker speeches follow the “chronological” format, telling the audience where the speaker grew up, then went to school, followed by career highlights and maybe an interesting anecdote or two. This is fine, and perhaps essential, but at a recent meeting I heard an Icebreaker that went further. After three minutes of a “chronological” speech, the speaker completely changed course and said “That’s what I do, but I’d like to tell you who I am”. He then focused on what was important in his life and why: his family, church, local civic groups he volunteered for, and other things defined him better than where he works or went to college. The audience learned much more about the speaker in the last two minutes of his speech than in the first three minutes.

Use one day or event to describe who you are

One technique for an interesting Icebreaker is to use a short time span to illustrate who you are. For example, in your speech you could place yourself in the delivery room awaiting the birth of your first child, and describe for your audience all the life memories that cam into your head. Or you could place yourself in a marathon road race, major career change, or other challenging endeavor and describe why this was important to you, and the events in your life that brought you to face this moment. A family trip could be used to tell us about who you are – and who your family members are. Using a brief time period to tell a story worked well for James Joyce in Ulysses, and it can work for you, too.

Tell them why you joined Toastmasters

Despite their varied backgrounds, all you fellow members have one thing in common: they were just like you and gave an Icebreaker once. So why not tell your audience what brought you to Toastmasters, and what you hope to get out of it.

Where are you going from here?

Some speakers bring the audience right up to the present moment, and some even go beyond that and discuss their plans for the future.

Don’t try to tell your audience everything

Condensing a life into a four to six minute speech may seem like a daunting task, but relax – no one expects you to describe everything you ever did. Rather, just go over the highlights so the audience gets to know you a little better than they did five minutes ago. Save some life experiences for your future speeches. And most importantly… have fun!