“Alastair’s speech was a big one, made to a bigger than usual audience, and evaluated by our Division E Director Gael Price, with guests of outgoing E9 Director Rob Barton-Howes and incoming E4 Director Shagen Ganason. Hence the bigger the usual applause to Alastair, for again winning the Toastmasters of The Day award.
Last week Alastair won for Table Topics, this week it is for the emotions, persuasion, and completion of his 10th Speech which is the final speech in the Competent Communicator book.
There is nothing stronger when connecting to an audience in a speech than emotions. Alastair’s speech started with genuine heart-tugging emotions, and our audience hearts did go out to him in support as he related his feelings of shock, sadness, and self-reproach for not being stronger on his 1st visit to his sister Heather in the hospital with Kidney failure. He painted us vividly the dilapidated walls and condition of the hospital before making a powerful relation of that shameful state to the even worse and perilous position of his sister. The dramatic process of dialysis added further complications, and the loss of any form of normal life forever for Heather, unless a donor could be found. Alastair volunteer himself as did her mother and father. Heather was lucky, having willing loving family around, but many others do not.
The nightmare problems of body organ failure, with the lifesaving selfless act of donor giving, was the opening. From where Alastair took the body of his speech through the problems of a lack of donors in New Zealand and the life after death solution of offering donor organs available on our driving license, which is the simple action Alastair urges us all to take, to be able save others in the event of a tragedy.
