RIYADH, 2 July 2003 — One of the rules recommended for those aspiring to become effective public speakers is to prepare a speech in writing, but for Rufino I. Jacobe Jr., the champion in this year’s Gulf toastmasters’ speech contest, scribbling just a few notes is better.
Jacobe said even if he is participating in a contest, he does not put his speech in writing. “Because if I do, during the actual delivery of my speech, I get distracted trying to remember exactly how I wrote it,” he said.
Jacobe revealed his secret in an interview with Arab News last week after he topped the prepared speech contest during the Gulf Toastmasters Annual Conference (GTAC) held in Dubai a few weeks ago.
Jacobe said that most of the time he tries to think and re-think his speeches, scribble fragmented lines, and on the final hour, he just delivers his piece from the heart.
“When I join a contest, I want to do something different that would even surprise me. I want people and myself to walk away from the performance, having experienced and discovered a new way of getting my message across,” he said.
Barely five years in the Toastmasters circle since he joined the Jardines’ Corporate Club of Toastmasters in Manila in 1998, Jacobe has earned the respect of his peers, including the president of Toastmasters International, who heard him deliver a speech and acclaimed it to be a “world class quality” piece.
In the Kingdom, Jacobe belongs to the PICPA Riyadh Toastmasters Club, composed of Filipino certified public accountants. By winning in the area and division competitions, he earned the right to represent the toastmasters clubs in Saudi Arabia. In the GTAC event, he bested the contestants from seven countries in the region.
Jacobe’s contest piece was a combination of his two previous winning speeches. The first was about his fears and the second deals with the challenges he faced and his discoveries in life.
Titled “Knots in My Lifeline,” Jacobe made use of a rope to symbolize his “lifeline” and how certain problems posed as knots. He said that as an adult surviving and learning life’s challenges, he has discovered those knots as his anchors, grip holds, and footholds as he pulled himself to higher ground.
A training specialist with Jarir Bookstore, he conducts programs everyday, “drawing out the best in people.” This, he said, helped him become a more effective toastmaster. He said he learned to be more sensitive to what other people are trying to communicate. “It made me re-examine how I communicate my ideas as well,” he added.
As a measure of how far he has reached, Jacobe had been invited in various occasions as resource speaker on public speaking, customer service, salesmanship, management and leadership, evaluating a public speaker, and a seminar on emotional intelligence applied on different disciplines with medical practitioners, engineers, and accountants.