Orbit Activity 1

Many members of your club may be relatively new, and you may have been around for a long time. The purpose of this exercise is to tell members who haven’t heard about you, a little more about you. And also to tell members who’ve been around for a while, information they may not know.

Activity 1 – Advanced About Me

Duration: 4-5 mins
Pre-requisites: Completion of Launchpad Program

Aim

To challenge an experienced speaker to deliver content about themselves. Something their fellow members do not know.

Objectives

To do this, you will need to keep the following objectives in mind:

Challenge an experience speaker
Present information about yourself at a deeper level
Provide information club members don’t already know

The Why…

The How

Specific guidelines on how to tackle this activity.

Delve into your memory bank to find incidents, activities, things you’ve done which are a bit unusual. The more unusual, the more interesting. If you’re a bit stuck, ask others what they find interesting about you. They may come up with something you’ve completely forgotten.

Remember that the aim of the activity is to challenge yourself. The task is to really think about this and develop a presentation that is well structured. Not just a chronological presentation, but also make it engaging and interesting.

Structuring the presentation - Consider:

The context or backstory: What do listeners need to know about where, when and how this story took place, for it to make sense?
Other characters: Who are the characters that are involved in the story, and how much do we need to know about them for the story to really land?
Moral, lesson, resolution or punchline: Where are you going with the story? When will you outline, hint at or fully reveal the moral, lesson, resolution or punchline? You could start with it as a bold statement which might shock, surprise or delight your audience. Or perhaps slowly build towards it for a big reveal at the end.

Tips and traps

Tip: Ask your family members and friends what’s interesting or unusual about you, or about a time or activity they remember sharing with you. Think through the highs and lows you’ve been through, your
achievements or lessons learnt, challenges you’ve worked hard to overcome, or events which happened overseas or while on holiday that are in stark contrast to the everyday life you lead in Australia.

Trap: Don’t give a chronological list of something you did. Instead build a story around your activity. That’s why this is an advanced ‘About Me’ exercise, not just the basic level ‘About me’ exercise.

Tip: Use the structure guidelines above to brainstorm the various angles you can come from when telling this story. Then decide what order your key elements should be delivered to have the most impact. Play around with it a little bit and try delivering it in different orders to see how you can segue between your main points.

Tip: Try to find the moral behind what you learned from the experience(s) that you’re going to talk about. If there isn’t a moral, is there a lesson to be learned that could benefit the listeners?

Guidelines for Program Director:

Roster this for experienced speakers about once a year. Of course, when they’re first going through (that is, leaving Launchpad and going into Orbit) then roster this as the first activity of the Orbit Program. For other experienced speakers roster it about once a year. This way experienced speakers can go back and tell the newer members things they don’t know about them.

Secondly, for newer members who are doing Orbit for the first time, make this about a 4 minute exercise. For experienced speakers, make it about a 5 minute exercise. The timing can be varied according to the needs of your club.

Program Directors should focus on this as a challenge for the really experienced members. And also as a stepping stone for the newer members who are entering Orbit for the first time.