Tell stories and use humour - "Pathos" emotion connects us to our audience

Lots of good ideas from this article by Andrew Dlugan, between them:

"# Tell Stories
Stories are often the quickest path to the greatest emotional connection with your audience.
Carefully crafted stories allow you to evoke any of a wide range of emotions. Stories are often the most memorable components of a speech.

# Use Humour
Humor is closely related to storytelling, because you usually arrive at humor through stories.
Humour in a presentation evokes emotions such as joy and surprise, and often triggers secondary emotions such as calmness and friendship. If your audience is laughing, if they are having fun, they are happy to be listening to you and they are attentive. As an added boost, humor makes your audience like you, and that boosts your ethos too.

Julie : Humour opens our audiences heart and soul to us, as much as a story connects to them deep.

Judy Carter recommends 3 key stories to tell:

The story of your credibility, with past (mess to success) - the old "Ethos"
The story of your company, (mess to success) - the old "Logos"
The story of your heart - very personal story of your mess to success - old "Pathos"

Julie: I do believe, we can adapt these ideas to every situation.

I was just named Ambassador of the REP for area 59 of Toastmasters - and as thus will visit the five clubs of the area many time a year, year after year. Discuss, speak, reflect about Toastmasters Renewed Education Program.

It would be good to create three stories, instead of showing / telling of facts only.
Depending on the time and club and audience, I can tell them shorter or longer.

1. My long experience with Toastmasters, from 1977 1980 then using it in my company and outside, then 2009 - 2015 so far could be the story of credibility. It is a humorous but inspiring story I can tell very short or a lot longer. From the first TM meeting (humorous) to now as Ambassador.

2. Toastmasters International journey, from the firsts clubs created by Ralph Smedley to some main changes through the last 100 years while retaining the fundamental principles, can also be told by ups and downs like an exciting story leading the the 2010 decision to modernise the education program. And then to the throughout Learning Masters and testings. Why and then discovering, slowly how.

3. The third story, can be very personal, but should be inspiring too. Perhaps, how what happened to me when I was 18 years old got me started on lifelong learning. How computers and online become important to me early on; and how much Toastmasters community helped me to get confidence to get to telling stories to paid public and to Standup comedy. Perhaps finishing, why and how going to visit clubs as Ambassador gives me new enthusiasm in my life as 81 year old.

And I just realised that 18 and 81 are related !