Latest Toastmasters Speech: Joy of Having Dogs

I finally settled on talking about our dogs Buddy and Zoe, two Yorky Maltese hounds that we rescued and the last type of dogs that I ever thought I that I would own. I opened my speech by asking if anyone in the “capacity” crowd had a dog just to get an idea how interested people might be. There were quite a few dog owners.

And so, that was that, just talking about my hounds but the experience is helping me to feel more comfortable getting up in front of people and speaking.

Now, I must admit, I went into this speech without any notes because I didn’t know what I was going to talk about until Ann and I were driving to our meeting last Monday. I(100) knew I’d volunteered to be one of the speakers at our last meeting a couple weeks earlier, but, like an ignorant or disinterested student, I never thought of something to talk about… until the last minute and as we drove to the meeting, I settled on our dogs as the speech subject.

As I spoke, I emphasized how important the dogs were to my everyday life because they gave me a reason to get out and be active, walking them many times day after day. I also talked about the strength of the pet/owner relationship with ours being super(200) with both dogs, especially mine because I’m with them all the time. I told those in attendance how I just thought of a dog as the perfect pet because when they are properly taught things, they can be a mostly reliable sidekick/friend that you can rely on to be good most of the time.

I also found during this speech that I may have told a story or two about the dogs that I had growing up: Sparky and Toby. When I say this, I mean a short reference to these two and of how they were bigger dogs.