Don’t Sweat the Speech Contest

Sometimes I have to make decisions in a split second just to keep my energy flow going. I call this a burst of courage triggered by impulse. Such snap decisions are sometimes irrational. Deciding to enter the 2024 International Speech Contest while I was in a sauna room on a cold January day was one such irrational decision.

My head might have been overheated from the sizzling hot rocks to have such a crazy idea, but I quickly grabbed my phone and emailed Amy Hernandez, who at the time was the Club President of the Priority Speakers Club in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As soon as I hit the “Send” button, I wished I could recall the message.

To make matters worse, Amy replied within five minutes. “Great, you are in!” There was no way I could eat my own words. There is a Chinese saying that means “Jumping on a tiger is easy, but getting off is something else.”

It took guts for this shy, non-native English speaker to join Toastmasters. (Taiwanese is my first language and Mandarin Chinese is my second language.) It took even more guts to enter the speech contest. All things considered, the stakes were high.

I would no longer be shielded by the kind comments of my club members and mentors. Instead, I would be judged critically as a speech contestant. This automatically produced stress. But the process could also help me develop a tough skin.

It’s appropriate that I was in a sauna room when I decided to enter the contest. Sauna and stage share a common theme for me. For one thing, they raise my heart rate and induce sweats. The sauna is also a place where people share icebreakers—not the formal kind we deliver in Toastmasters, but the ones where we reveal our most private thoughts to other people about different life situations.

I’ve made many friends in the sauna room, and many of my speeches were born in the sauna and later delivered on the stage.

I joined Toastmasters in 2010 to learn public speaking after an embarrassing presentation at work—one that I totally bombed. When I joined, my goal was just to not shiver when standing in front of a group of people.

Do you suffer from stage fright? If you are in the mood for a growth spurt, enter a Toastmasters speech contest. I learned so much in my contest journey. I practiced my speech over and over again, including at other clubs that I visited. This helped me improve my writing and speaking skills. I took notes on the speeches of other contestants, and I learned from them.

I placed first at the Area and Division levels of the International Speech Contest in District 13 (Northeastern United States). The taste of those wins pumped up my confidence to stand on the District stage. I didn’t win there, as I was not as good as I thought. But I won my own race. My skin grew thicker than ever. I gained more confidence and courage as a non-native English speaker.

I love the English language with all my heart, but it hasn't always love me back. I got easily confused with grammar and made mistakes all the time. Practicing for the speech contest forced me to use the right verb tense consistently and enunciate words clearly, so my spoken words could be music to the judges’ ears.

Participating in a speech contest was like a dose of medicine for me, and it worked like a remedy, curing 80% of my stage fright like magic. The other 20% will always stay with me as a tiny butterfly in my stomach that never goes away—and I can live with that.

The speech contest gave me the push I needed to become a better speaker on a larger stage. The most important lesson I learned was to break through my own ceiling with a surge of confidence.

Becoming a Toastmaster has turned out to be a triple win for me. I’ve learned to speak and write American English, overcome my fear of public speaking, and even deliver a speech in Chinese at a moment’s notice.

I also have another brave story to tell. I ended up succeeding Amy and became the President of the Priority Speakers Club for the 2024–2025 program year.

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