Name: TM Divya

Ice breaker speech

Title: No Defining Moment - Just a Defining Journey

Time: 4 - 6 Minutes

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Good Afternoon Fellow Toastmasters & Guests,

“when the going gets tough, the tough get going”

I am a person made up from my past experiences and I am here today because I am hopeful that this particular experience will make me a better person tomorrow.

After brainstorming and going through all the memories and moments of my life,  realized that

There is no set moment in my life that will define me. Every moment in my life either changed me to better or worse.

I was born and raised in the small town of Gudiyatham in the Vellore district. I 'm a single child, my mother used to say to me, "You are the one we got after 15 years of arduous prayer,

Now you know why I am late in giving icebreaker speech .".Also that  phrase slowly started to change as the years pass "Is that you whom we got after 15yrs of long prayers" .

Being a single child I always lack social skills and it wasn’t something I cared much for growing up.I spend much of my time in my room drawing,painting and rarely go out with friends. . I lost my father when I was at 7th grade.My father being good at mathematics, he had aspirations of becoming a maths teacher but was unable to do so for some reasons. When I was younger, his only worry about me was that I wasn't good at maths, so even if I did well in other subjects, he wouldn't be pleased. I was an average student in maths throughout my childhood

Being raised by a single mother as a child, I often received advice from family members. One such piece of advice was to avoid becoming distracted or falling in love. Unfortunately, poor people were unaware that I was a college nerd.

I've witnessed friends fall in love often , as if gravity is to blame.However, I appeared to be floating among them, as if I were an astronaut living in zero gravity.. 

I finished my engineering degree as a day scholar in Vellore, and my final-year placement at VIT off campus changed my life. Only five students from my college were chosen out of the roughly 10 colleges that attended the event, and I was one of them. After I graduated, my mother and I moved to Chennai. This wasn't just a move; it improved our standard of living.

Life was good for few years ,This is the phase of life where I felt like started living my life, I could able to affort the things I longed for and also come across the feelings that I hadn't experienced before. Then when I realized Life doesn't spare any , one will experience every kind of emotions in the world in their life time.

I don't miss my father because of the upbringing I had from my mother. However, I was assigned to a project in the finance area where my technical job involved mathematics linear equation with more of a calculation.My supervisors appreciated my work for demonstrating that I am competent at maths and that I could troubleshoot the challenging problem and efficiently solve it. I was really aback to hear it because I've always thought my maths skills are around average. For the first time in my life, I thought that my father would have been present to see this.

I had the impression that we have control over everything. The moment we believe it, every thing in life start to fall apart. It seems to me as if God sent Raghu and Sani Bhagavan as a team to teach me life lesson that i don't want to learn. I became sick all of a sudden due to a hereditary issue. My wedding was annulled. After everything is done and dusted, and fast forward to the present day, where I am married with a 3-year-old child.

 Given my current role and the fact that I work in a competitive and fast moving industry, doing “just enough” is simply not enough. I never want to settle for less than the best I can .I want to have better communication skills; I want to take more challenges and see myself grow from them; I want to make sure I’m persistent and focused.

Since I believe Humor can make others view us in a more positive manner. Additionally, humour helps with memory, when something is perceived as humorous, people are more likely to remember it for a longer period of time.

Hence I have choosen the path of Engaging Humor .I hope that with your support and advice, I might one day become a humorous speaker.

Thank you!!