Welcome to this course, seven days to become a better impromptu speaker. Now, why would we want to get better at impromptu speaking? Well, maybe you belong to Toastmasters International, and Toastmasters is a worldwide public speaking organization. And as part of Toastmasters at every meeting, there's something called table topics, which effectively is impromptu speaking. Now, it may be that you're interested in this course because you have a job interview coming up. And job interviews can be very stressful can't be and we're worried about having to answer questions.

We don't know what's going to come at us. And impromptu speaking confidence is one way of feeling more at peace with an upcoming job interview. Or it may be that at work, you have to answer questions in meetings and you will have more calls competence around that. Or perhaps you're a speaker, and you have to run q&a sessions. And quite often people get really worried about Q and A's because they don't want to be embarrassed or stranded on stage, not knowing the answer to somebody's question. Also, impromptu speaking can be super helpful in social situations, for example, at parties when people are making small talk.

And I know personally, I've found small talk difficult in the past. And it's because I'm an introvert, and I'm not necessarily a small talk kind of person. But small talk is a great way of getting to know other people, and then deciding if we want to take the conversation or the relationship any further going on a date. So dating and relationships, small talk and impromptu speaking can be very handy then, or even when we're sitting on a plane or a train and we confronted with a stranger, and we thinking, well, it might be quite handy or interesting to strike up a conversation. But there's that fear of not knowing what to say. So impromptu speaking can help with all of those situations.

It helps make us more competent. It can also increase our number of contacts. And as we all know, it's often not what you know, but who you know. So by being able to make small talk and then build into forming new relationships, impromptu speaking can be an excellent skill to have. Now, the structure of this course, what will happen is you will be given progressively longer and perhaps a little bit more challenging questions to answer. So if you're a Toastmaster and are used to doing table topics, table topics has a very defined format and sort of start and end time.

So within table topics, you're used to not answering a question beyond Two and a half minutes long. Whereas in real life, obviously, we may have to speak for five minutes, we may have to speak for 10. Maybe it's only 30 seconds that we need to speak for to get the job done and answer the question in this course, the answers that you'll be required to give will vary from just 60 seconds long at the beginning, right the way up to four minutes by the last couple of days of this program, and hopefully with the skills that you'll be learning, you'll find four minutes will be a complete breeze. Now let's go on to talk about who I am