Introductions

August was the "calm before the storm" of this project. Everything started in July with a mad frenzy of communication with Toastmasters all over the world to get sufficient speeches scheduled to do the speedrun. September - if my past experience of Toastmasters is anything to go by - can be expected to be a mad rush of reconfirming, reorganising and troubleshooting, followed by the speedrun itself, which I've scheduled to be fairly intensive. On the plus side, I have booked time off work during the run, so I can devote my time to it solely. That also had the advantage that I could accept offers of speaking slots at any time, day or night.

So, August was a period of contemplation - an opportunity to ensure I had concepts for every speech, had written the PowerPoints for those that needed slides, to buy or otherwise organise any costumes and props that I needed and to make sure any computer files were done. I've put together an audio playlist of anything that needs to be memorised and started listening to it regularly on my commute. I've prepared any blogs that can be prepared in advance (handouts for posting just before meetings, for example, or quiz answers to post afterwards) and put them in draft on Blogger.

Anyway, the point of this particular post is that I thought it might be wise to get onto all of the different versions of EasySpeak today, to find every one of my speeches that had already been scheduled, and to write its introduction, so that I was ahead of the game in that respect. It turns out there are ten of them, although two are the same as one another (i.e. both versions of "Macbeth on Screen").

So, here they are: screenshots of my nine current introductions, in no particular order:

Here's an update on 11th September: One more has been scheduled, and here's its introduction, including trigger warnings:

Here's an update on 23rd September. One of the meetings on my schedule got cancelled so I removed one of the electives (the one about a blog) from the speedrun in oder to reschedule "Introduction to Leadership Styles", which isn't an elective. Here is its introduction: