I gave this lecture on November 23, 2024.
INTRODUCTION
How old are you? In a little more than a year, I will have my sixtieth birthday! That fact is astonishing to me. But for the occasional aches and pains, I feel little more than half that. But when I begin to think about my life—the games I played as a boy, my college years, my marriage and family, my career, my ministry—I must admit that, yes, I have lived nearly six decades in the world, despite it feeling like three.
Though many of you are younger, you can probably say something similar. Years are long. We can pack a lot of activities and experiences in a year, a month, a week—even a day! So much happens every day that our brains must sort and sift through our memories and figure out what among them we will retain over the long term. If you think about it, trying to tell the story of our lives would take far longer than the time it took to live them. To make it a good story, we must do a great deal of editing, leaving many things out.
SPS The Ambassador-Spokesman Club Speech Manual assigns the new member his first speech “This Is My Life.” It is a six-minute speech. How much of your life can you fit into six minutes? For me, that would be less than one minute—counting the introduction and conclusion—for each decade I have lived! One cannot cover a well-lived life in six minutes! So, I will propose a revision of this speech in this lecture.
The Manual informs the club member that this #1 speech
is your opportunity to talk about yourself freely; to tell a little of your background, religious or otherwise; to state some of your likes and dislikes. Tell those things about yourself which would be interesting and helpful to the other men and enable them to know you better. Introduce yourself—break the ice—get in the swim!
These instructions are not terrible, but over the years, the icebreaker has devolved into a six-minute sprint to include all the high points of a member’s life. It becomes a grocery list of “I did this, I did that, I did this other thing”—no details, no life, perhaps not even any humor or pointing out the more significant events. When a speaker does this, the audience tunes out, and he has failed to let them get to know him, to clue them in on who he really is.
My modification of this #1 “This Is My Life” speech deals with this problem of a stream of events without significance. I suggest that, instead of trying to cover one’s whole life, a speaker should focus on one event, one experience—a singular consequential incident, adventure, or episode that has made him what he is. It does not have to be anything spectacular, like going to the moon or winning millions on a game show. However, it must be something that made a difference in your life despite its irrelevance to others.
Some examples (and these are by no means exhaustive):
- An eye-opening assignment in school
- The death of a loved one
- A brush with the law or with death
- Attendance at a historical event
- The help of a gifted mentor
- A chance encounter with someone influential
- Participation in a unique activity
- A travel opportunity that widened one’s perspective
The event or opportunity is not as important as the fact that it played a part in making you who you are now. Did the eye-opening assignment lead to your current job? Did the death of your loved one make you decide to walk the straight-and-narrow? Did your brush with death make you appreciate your life and turn to God? Did your attendance at the historical event cause you to see that God has a plan for you? Etc.
This #1 “This Is My Life” speech should make you do some introspection and self-evaluation so you can plot what has brought you to this point in time. And when you give it, your story should allow the club members to gain insight into what makes you tick.
Because this is the first speech, you have the option of choosing how long you will speak: You can choose four or six minutes. Its purpose is to get your feet wet in the world of public speaking, a manageable assignment that can act as a springboard to the rest of the scheduled speeches in the Manual.
CONCLUSION With these exceptions, please read and follow the instructions in the Manual thoroughly. We wish you much success in your quest to become an outstanding public speaker!