In August 2019, I was one of ten finalists competing at the World Championship of Public Speaking in Denver. It took me five attempts to even reach the final stage, and I learned some tough lessons that day as a speaker. (But that’s a story for another day.)
After all the speeches were delivered, none of us competitors knew for sure who would walk out with the first-place trophy. But when Aaron Beverly told the story of guarding the groom’s shoes at an Indian wedding and made the entire room laugh and cheer in unison, I had a pretty good idea.
Being part of the contest for that year’s World Championship of Public Speaking changes how you watch a speech.
You stop noticing the polish and start noticing the patterns. The pause before the punchline. The prop that ties the theme together. The single repeated phrase that lodges in your brain for weeks.
Over the past 14 years, I have competed in the Toastmasters International Speech Contest seven times, won my district seven times, and that World Championship final stage once. I have also watched (and re-watched) every winning speech from the past decade more times than I can count. The truth is that these speeches are not magic. They are pattern-rich, and the patterns are learnable.
In this article, we will look at every winner of the World Championship of Public Speaking from 2015 to 2025, the one technique that made each speech win, and what you can take from it into your own talk this week.
Why study World Champions of Public Speaking?
The World Championship of Public Speaking is the closest thing the speaking world has to an Olympics. Tens of thousands of speakers enter at the club level. Six rounds of contest later, ten finalists step on a stage in front of a packed convention hall, and one of them walks off as champion.
That brutal funnel serves a useful purpose for the rest of us. It surfaces the techniques that actually move audiences. Not the ones that sound smart in a book. The ones that work, in seven-and-a-half minutes, on a huge crowd, under stage lights.
In this article, I want to break down the last eleven years and the patterns that crowned eleven world champions. Let’s look at each of them in detail:
11 World Championship of Public Speaking winners (2015 to 2025)
2015) Mohammed Qahtani – “The Power of Words”
Qahtani walked on stage and pulled out a cigarette. The entire room tensed. Then he reeled off statistics about smoking, paused, and admitted he had made every single one of them up. That single move set up a speech about how easily words can manipulate, mend, or destroy.
The technique: a prop opening that subverts what the audience expects. The cigarette was not a gimmick. It was a setup for the entire thesis of the speech. The audience watched him do something they thought they understood, then he flipped the meaning.
For your next talk, find one physical object that contradicts what people expect you to say, and use it in your first 30 seconds. The contrast wakes the room up faster than any opening line.
2016) Darren Tay Wen Jie – “Outsmart; Outlast”
Tay walked on, said nothing, and pulled a pair of Calvin Klein underwear over his suit pants. He held the silence for what felt like an eternity. Then he started telling the story of the bullies who had made his school years miserable, and the aunt who taught him that the answer was to outsmart and outlast them rather than run.
The technique: silence as the opening, before a single word is spoken. Most speakers feel the urge to fill the air the moment they reach the lectern. Tay did the opposite, and the audience was leaning in before he had even introduced himself.
Try this in your next talk: walk to your spot, plant your feet, and count to four in your head before you speak. The first time you do it, it will feel awkward. The audience will love it.
2017) Manoj Vasudevan – “Pull Less, Bend More”
Vasudevan opened with the story of his marriage falling apart and his mother offering a metaphor that saved it. “The more the string pulls back, the more the bow bends. Pull less and bend more.” He took that single image and applied it to friendships, colleagues, races, and nations.
The technique: one central metaphor, hammered repeatedly. Cupid’s bow is the whole speech. Every story, every line, every callback ties back to the bow and the string. There is no second metaphor competing for the audience’s attention.
When you write your next talk, pick one image, one metaphor, one comparison and refuse to add a second. If you have three good metaphors, kill the two weaker ones. Pick the one that carries everything.
2018) Ramona J. Smith – “Still Standing”
Smith opened in a boxing stance. Fists up, feet apart, gloves implied. She framed life’s challenges as “punches, jabs, and hooks” and her response as “still standing” after each round. The phrase repeated four times, once per autobiographical round, and by the end of seven minutes the audience was saying it with her.
The technique: a catchphrase refrain the audience hears so many times it becomes theirs. “Still standing” was the title, the structural backbone, and the emotional payoff all at once. Smith won, and that night women took all three podium places for the first time in the contest’s history.
Pick three or four words that capture your core message and repeat them at the end of every story or section in your talk. The audience does not get bored of repetition. They get more attached to it.
2019) Aaron Beverly – “An Unbelievable Story”
Beverly told one story. Not three. One. He attended a friend’s Indian-American wedding, was tasked with guarding the groom’s shoes (a traditional game), and lost the comedic battle that followed. The reveal came at the end: as the only Black man in the room, he had been welcomed like family. In a divisive era, that acceptance felt unbelievable.
The technique: a single story, told with comedic patience and earned callbacks. While the rest of us crammed two or three stories into seven minutes, Beverly slowed down, set up jokes that paid off three minutes later, and trusted one story to do all the work.
If your current talk has three stories in it, try cutting two. Take the strongest one and let it breathe. Add the time you save back into pause, callback, and detail.
2020) Mike Carr – “The Librarian & Mrs. Montgomery”
2020 was the first all-virtual World Championship. No stage, no audience, no roar. Mike Carr told the story of dismantling and failing to reassemble his school’s film projector in sixth grade, and the teacher (Mrs. Montgomery) who defended him with the line “the victory is not in the result, the victory is in the try.” The COVID timing landed hard.
The technique: spatial storytelling that worked in a webcam frame. Mike placed his characters in specific spots inside the camera frame and turned his head to address each one. He used the box he was given rather than fight it, and the audience felt the classroom even though they were watching on a laptop.
If you ever speak on Zoom or to a camera (and you do), block out where each character in your story stands inside your frame, and turn to face them when they speak. It instantly looks more cinematic.
2021) Verity Price – “A Great Read”
Verity Price opened with the kind of brutal honesty most speakers avoid. Forty years old, unmarried, no kids, hiding in her sister’s spare room. Then she found a letter her late father had written: “Verity, your life is a book and if you’re not enjoying the read, write a different story.” The letter became the engine of the entire speech.
The technique: a delayed reveal that recontextualises everything that came before it. Verity set up her low point in painful detail, then revealed the letter halfway through, and suddenly every previous sentence carried more weight on the rewatch.
In your next talk, hold one piece of information back. The fact that flips the meaning of your story. Reveal it two-thirds of the way through, not in the opening, and watch the audience lean forward.
2022) Cyril Junior Dim – “Ndini”
Dim taught the audience a Shona word. Ndini. “This is me.” He grew up ashamed of his long Nigerian middle name, mocked by classmates, and later ended up in Poland as the conspicuous outsider. A Congolese friend modelled radical self-acceptance, and by the end of the speech Dim reclaimed his full birth name on stage.
The technique: give the audience one word in another language and ask them to say it back. The audience repeating “Ndini” with him turned a speech into a shared moment. They were no longer watching. They were participating.
Find one word, phrase, or short line in your talk that the audience can repeat with you (out loud or under their breath), and invite them to do it twice. Once early, once at the close. They will remember the speech for the participation, not just the content.
2023) Jocelyn Tyson – “Have You Been There?”
Tyson took the audience inside her head during her first triathlon at a milestone birthday. Two voices argued the entire way. Her “inner go-getter” pushing her on, her “inner critic” cataloguing every reason to quit. When a lifeguard offered her a way out of the water, the go-getter won. The repeated question, “Have you been there?” pulled the audience into their own version of the moment.
The technique: a dual-character internal dialogue you act out on stage. Most speakers describe their inner conflict. Tyson performed it. She switched stance, voice, and tone to play each character, and the audience saw the war happening in real time.
Take the next argument you have with yourself before a hard decision and write it as a two-character scene. Then perform it in your talk with a slight body shift between the two voices.
2024) Luisa Montalvo – “37 Strangers”
Montalvo opened mid-emergency. “Clear! Female unresponsive, no pulse.” The audience landed in the back of an ambulance before they knew her name. She walked them through a near-fatal accident, a humorous detour through a hypothetical heaven, and the 37 strangers (medical staff and rehab patients) who showed her that her life had value when she could not see it herself.
The technique: in medias res. Open in the middle of the action, not at the setup. Most speakers waste their first 30 seconds on context the audience does not need yet. Montalvo skipped all of it and dropped the audience straight into the moment of highest stakes.
Look at your next talk’s opening line and ask: am I starting at the most dramatic moment of the story, or am I throat-clearing? If you are setting up, cut the setup and start with the line your character said when everything changed.
2025) Sabyasachi Sengupta – “Just Nod”
Sengupta wore a red suit, opened with the joke that his Indian father had given him three career options (“doctor, engineer, or be a disappointment”), and traced his arc from buried performer to corporate finance professional and back to the stage. His mantra, “just nod,” was the instruction he gave himself before every moment of nerve, and by the end he was inviting the audience to use it too.
The technique: a repeatable instruction the audience can use tomorrow morning. “Just nod” is not a metaphor. It is not a quote. It is a behaviour the audience can perform the next time they walk into a room. That makes the speech portable in a way most are not.
Replace your closing inspirational phrase with a one-action instruction the audience could perform within 24 hours. Two words is even better than three.
The patterns you’ll notice across a decade
When you watch all 11 of these speeches back to back (and I have, more than once), the same handful of moves keep showing up. Personal story as the vehicle, never abstract advice. A repeated phrase or word the audience can hold onto. One central image instead of three competing ones. Vulnerability that earns trust before any lesson is offered. A close that hands something back to the audience.
The reality is that these are not secrets. They are visible in every winning talk. What separates the champions from the rest of the finalists (and yes, I am including myself in that group) is how ruthlessly they cut everything else away. Seven minutes is short. The winners trust one story, one image, one phrase, and one ask.
How to use these lessons in your own speaking
Pick one champion from the list above whose technique you have never tried. Just one. Watch their winning speech twice this week (the videos are all on YouTube). The first time, watch as an audience member. The second time, watch as a student, with a notepad, and write down every single thing they do with their body, their voice, and their pacing.
Finally, steal the technique. Not the speech or the topic; just the technique. Use a prop opening like Mohammed. Use a four-second silence like Darren. Use one central metaphor like Manoj. Use a delayed reveal like Verity. Use a two-action instruction like Sabyasachi.
The good news is that none of these moves requires you to be a World Champion to use them. They only require you to commit to one of them, this week, in your next talk (whether that is a wedding toast, a sales pitch, or a conference keynote). The audience will not know the technique came from a contest stage. They will only know your speech is sharper than the last one.
Welcome to the uncomfortable club. Let’s get better together.
Speaker Skills is dedicated to real-world public speaking skills to grow your influence and impact. Everything we share on this site is tested and used on stage by us.
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