Posts Tagged ‘roles’

Ah Counter

Saturday, May 12th, 2012 | Public Speaking

I recently joined Toastmasters, a public speaking club which isn’t a cult (lets be clear about that from the start).

The most recent meeting of the club saw me take on a role for the first time. A role basically follows the definition of the word – each week the different roles be it chair (or Toastmaster if you will), Time Keep, Grammarian, Evaluators, etc are taken on by different people so you get experience doing lots of different things.

As Ah Counter, my job was to watch out for people using crutch words – these are words such as “well” that you might add to buy time in the middle of a sentence, or “ahs”, “umms” and “erms” – none of which are needed and can be replaced by a dramatic pause.

It was fun though sometimes I found myself so consumed in focusing on my specific part that I was almost missing what else was going on around me.