George Alexandrov's TM Blog

The Advice of the 2005 Toastmasters' World Champion

george@galleriasofia.com — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 06:00:00 GMT

See what Lance Miller, the 2005 World Champion has to tell you about giving a great speech or presentaion.

A Few Tips on Using Handouts with Slides

george@galleriasofia.com — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 06:00:00 GMT

I gave my third speech yesterday. It was speech #8 form the Toastmasters Manual, which was about using visual aids and props. What I had was a printout with some slides. The presentation was about using the members-only tools on our very own web portal and I had prepared a detailed handout for my visual aid. The handout had some screenshots of the site itself. Here are some of the useful tips I learned from the positive and negative comments about the slide as well as my own observations. Here are my tips for you when using handouts that present a number of slides:

One slide per page. Do not try try cram two or more. Otherwise it gets hard for your audience to find the information you are talking about.
Print only on one side of the page. The audience will not have to flip through the papers and create distraction. This also allow them to type notes on the reverse side.
Have the slide number with big letters in the same location on every page. This makes it very easy for people to locate the slide that you are talking about.
Use a color printer. Everyone loves color and the information is easier to comprehend.
Use the same orientation on the page. If one slide has portrait orientation, and the next landscape and so on, the audience will find it inconvenient and will create a lot of noise turning the slides as you go form one to the next.
Guide the audience. Make sure to announce which slide number you are talking about and give the audience enough time to locate it. Monitor the audience.

And the winner advice is: do not use slides printed on handouts if you can get a hold of a projector and a laser pointer!!! This way there is no chance for people to start flipping through papers, getting lost and not knowing what you are talking about, unless of course your topic is boring and you put them to sleep. If your speech has to be boring, I would advise to put a striking image at the beginning and the end of the speech to wake them up a little. Of course be careful about the "striking" part to avoid the audience striking you out of the podium :-)

A cool car inside and out

george@galleriasofia.com — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 07:00:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I wrote on my personal blog about the Bugatti Veyron - I thought that was cool. Well, I found something that is even cooler (and a lot less expensive). Don't ge me wrong, the Veyron is a slick and beautiful car. What disgusts me that I didn't mention before is it's engine. It's the same old gasoline engine. Why keep building these dinosaur gasoline engines, which are so inefficient and need so much fuel to get the power you want them to give? Why not build an alternative energy (not fuel. energy.) engine that would be more efficient and give even better results? To me keeping the old ways is like building a super hot looking sports car with a turbo super charged steam engine. Sounds stupid right? That's how I feel about continuing to improve on gasoline engines. It's stupid. We can get less and less benefit from that type of engine for every research and improvement dollar spent. How many plastic operations can you do on a 100 year old person?

I will stop complaining, and tell you what I found so cool. It's the Tesla Motors new car. It's a two seater, sexy looking roadster. Powered entirely by electricity. Yes, I will repeat - it's a sports car!!! Here are the numbers: 0 to 60 in 4 seconds, almost constant torque from 0 to 13,000 RPM, 250 miles per charge, charges in 2 hours if the battery is dead, the equivalent of 135 miles per gallon or only 1c per mile. Now isn't that awesome?

Let's not forget that it is not only the fuel efficiency that matters. Since this is an electric engine all there are tons of parts of the classic gas engine that are missing. This frees quite some room in the car by leaving the gas tank out for example, but it also makes the car a lot more reliable as you there are a lot fewer parts to break. No transmission, no clutch, no cylinders, no pistons, no fuel injectors, no tank, no exhaust system, no intake system, no fuel pump, and the list goes on. Maintenance should be a child's play.

I have dreamed about this happening all my life. Pure electrical (or other non-burning energy source) with similar parameters. And it's a smart move - come out with a beautiful looking sports car rather than some quirky looking vehicle like we've seen so far. If people are shown that a sports car with these parameters can run (not just move) more than well on electricity, then they will be more convinced that a regular car with this technology should run even better and they will be less afraid to buy such a vehicle. I am sure that as soon as the Tesla Motors gains some more popularity, they will probably roll out a sedan.

I want to thank the people at Tesla Motors for making this vehicle come true. I do appreciate all your hard work and ability to bring this coolness to life, and I am looking forward for more.

To see the Tesla Motors car visit their web site at: http://www.teslamotors.com.
Photos of the car can be found here: http://www.teslamotors.com/styling/body.php.

Fear and Imagination

george@galleriasofia.com — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 06:00:00 GMT

I was listenting to an audiobook called "100 Ways to Motivate Yourself" recently. I could directly connect two thoughts about fear and imagination from there to the public speaking experience for the beginner.

Fear - a lot of people go to Toastmasters to overcome their fear of public speaking. And they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do - facing their fear. This is the only way to overcome it. But I wonder how many other people there are out there in the world whose fear is so great that it even prevents them from joining a club like Toastmasters? To them I will reword what I learned from the book:

Fear is worse than death. It kills us many times, slowly and painfully. Death, kills us only once and we usually don't even know it when it. So face your fear and eradicate it from your system.

Imagination - every human being has an amazing potential power of imagination. Our right brain hemisphere can do miracles when it comes to ideas and visions. When we were kids we were very creative and using our imagination on an every day basis. I am sure everone of us can think of what games were played and how we thought then when we didn't have problems. Exactly these problems that we as grownups make have put our imagination into deep sleep. All we use it for is imagine all kinds of situations that may or may not happen.

Most adults use their imagination in only one way - to worry.

To bring this to the light of Toastmasters - we can use our imagination to write our speech. We can use it to interact with people; we can use it so much, so that we don't leave it any time to create worries and finally unlearn to worry.

What is a blog and why are we doing it?

george@galleriasofia.com — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 07:00:00 GMT

In this article I am explaining what a blog is, the phenomena of blogging, and the benefits for Toastmasters of Lincoln Park and its members, when they blog.

Break that Ice!

george@galleriasofia.com — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 07:00:00 GMT

I’ve been at our Toastmasters club for about half a year until I dared go in front of everyone and give my Icebreaker. I was scared, so scared! If you haven’t given an Icebreaker yet, you are probably scared too. “What from?” I was asking myself?