Regular Meeting 129: Evaluation Workshop - "Boost Your Evaluation Arsenal," Oct. 7, 2025, Online

Learning from World-class Speeches

When I was entrusted by the club's Vice President of Education to organize this meeting, I decided to put my favorite idea into practice. That is to listen to a world-class speech, analyse it, and share what we've learned from the speech.

This should help alleviate the anxiety newer members feel when they are assigned to evaluate speeches by more experienced members. They tend to think, "How can I make suggestions for someone better than me? "I can't find anything to change!"

At the beginning of the meeting, I discussed two ways to improve our speech evaluation skills that should help us deliver better speeches ourselves. First, we can try to evaluate every speech at our meetings, even when we are not assigned to do so. We can learn something from any speech. The second thing I suggested was to listen to quality speeches. World-class speeches use tips and techniques that are not commonly used in our speeches.

After my presentation, we listened to the first speech, "Pop Pop Pop" by Mr. Mas Mahathier Bin Mohamad, which discussed the importance of "smiling and keeping on going" after being rejected, taking that rejection as a step, "One 'No' closer to a 'Yes'." Mahathier opened his speech with a question and drew the audience into his speech in an instant. He shared his experience of not being able to make cold calls as a sales representative. He almost lost his job, but his boss took him out to watch a popcorn vendor smiling and keeping on going after repeatedly being rejected. He learned a lesson of perseverance and the exciting sensation of feeling getting "One 'No' closer to a 'Yes'." He used a lot of metaphors and humor to deliver his message.

The last portion of the workshop was the evaluation session with four evaluators evaluating another semifinal speech, "Like a Princess," by Mr. Mario Lewis. Four evaluators tried to use the added "evaluation arsenal."

I was happy to see members finding something to suggest to make the speech better, even though it was a far better speech than what we deliver during our regular meetings.

Author: Hideo, Founding President