Sri Lankaka Club Symposium - Bahrain Toastmaster Magazine Vol 07 | Página 10

Speech # 2
Project 9, from the ‘Competent Communicator’ Manual, delivered by Saman Karunaratna on 25th September 2012. Objectives of the Speech : ? Persuade listeners to adopt your viewpoint or ideas or to take some action ? Appeal to the audience’s interest ? Use logic and emotion to support your position I guess most of us have seen how parents of infants throw them up in the air. Kids love that. When they are in the air up above, they laugh profoundly, expecting more. But imagine the situation if a parent is unable to catch the falling child. Nonetheless children enjoy it as they know their parent will definitely hold them. That is Trust. Now, after listening to my speech, almost all of my fellow toastmasters will go home and set the wake up alarm and go to sleep. This is what I do too. Although life has no guarantee, we simply expect to get up on the following morning. That is Hope. One of my friends shared this small story with me. All the seniors in a village going through a severe drought gathered together to pray for the rain. However, none but a small girl turned up with an umbrella to shield her from the rain. That is Faith. All these words are beautiful and pleasing to our ears. Now if I may ask, what is the most dangerous weapon in the world? Can anyone guess? Is it the nuclear bomb? If I say ‘Words’ are the most dangerous forms of weapons, will all of you agree with me? Take one of our routine days. We go to office. The day starts with some talks with colleagues or as usual, with plenty of emails in Ínbox’’. Just think for a moment how often people will speak about others behind their backs. Sometimes situations may arise where we almost run out of topics to discuss, or rather I say, subjects to gossip about, if we can’t find a person to criticize. By now I have learned to segregate my incoming emails into a few categories. The first is ‘Action mails’, where my action will benefit someone else or myself. This is the category I finish first. The second category I call ‘Informative emails’ which I read and will help improve my knowledge which will become beneficial to me or others. The third category is ‘Entertaining mails’ which I read and have a good laugh, release my stress and continue with work. The fourth and last category is the ‘Egoistic mails’ and these are e-mails I ignore to great extent whenever possible. I ignore them simply because these mails have been generated by someone who is trying to satisfy his or her ego or show others their authority, superiority, or may be to show how much smarter they are than others. Many years ago I used to respond to such emails before all other mails as I was trying to satisfy my ego by destroying the original writer ensuring that the person will never write to me such emails in the future. But due to an after-effect of such a reply, which I sent to another colleague in my previous organization several years ago, I became a changed person. My reply to him was with so much of facts and figures where he was unable to counter any of them, which was further ridiculed by the recipients who were in the so called ‘cc’ list. Eventually he left the organization and this left a very painful memory although he has initiated and I was right on my response. From that day onwards for many successful years although sometimes it hurts when people write to me such emails with a very long ‘cc’ list I simply ignore them as by now I have learned the time will have the solution to all such situations. Contd…….
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