A Difficult Audience at Valleys and Vale Toastmasters

This may have been my favourite speech of the whole run.

However I think a few points need explanation.

• This was a speech from the level 4 project "Managing a Difficult Audience". The idea of the project is that various members of the audience are tasked with disrupting my speech in various different ways, and as you'll see, they succeed to some extent.
• Even so I think this is quite a useful talk on Toastmasters Mentoring and I'll be recommending it as a resource to members of my own club. I think it's much better in that regard than the recent educational I did on the same topic! If you've come to this blog for that reason: guys you'll need to tune-out the game we are playing throughout where everybody else tries to derail my speech and I try to keep giving it.
• Because of the position of the microphone I notice my "yes" and "yeah" - which are me just encouraging someone to keep talking - come out so much louder than the speaker as to give the impression I'm trying to interrupt them or drown them out. I hope it didn't come over that way for real.
• Julia (the female voice in the middle of the audience) was the most effective disruptor. The instructions for the disruptors tell them to stop disrupting and stay quiet once I have engaged with them once, so I made myself a bit of a hostage-to-fortune by asking people not to do that, at the start. However as I mention in the speech, while her interruptions are designed to put me off my stride (at which they succeeded!) everything she actually says, both positive and negative, totally hits the nail on the head.
• I couldn't tell if Nigel (at the back on my right, your left) was being tongue-in-cheek with his argument - that Toastmasters Mentoring isn't the same as real mentoring. With hindsight I wish I'd stayed silent longer and let him develop it. I would probably have agreed with his second objection - which was that letting potential mentees express a preference for who their mentor should be would lead to a small number of people doing all the mentoring - except that I've tried exactly that at Cardiff and it hasn't been my experience.   
• I could not even tell if Bryan (front row on my left, your right) was intending to be a disruptor. In fact his contributions were really helpful and brought in some useful points I might not otherwise have made.
• Anyway, this was one of the high points of the speedrun for me. Thank you to Valleys and Vale for inviting me, and for playing along. I really enjoyed it.

Before we get to the video, here's the screenshot which I refer to in it:

And here's the video:

"Stultify" was the word of the day.

Turning next to the evaluation from Kay, I thought it was really good - very fair as to both the strengths and weaknesses of what I did, and containing several points I will incorporate if I do this project again. (UPDATE: this project is a non-elective on another pathway I'm following, so I will indeed have to do it again, and fairly soon.)

Before getting to the video, here are some extracts from the evaluation form, and a whole page of extra notes from Kay. If only all evaluators were this thorough!

And here's the video: 

Finally, here are the audience feedback slips. 

The last one is interesting. The point she made was that I make all my gestures with my right hand, and leave my left arm swinging, which is distracting. Indeed you can see that in the video. It is.

UPDATE JANUARY 2023:

Here are my suggestions for disrupting a speech: