Posts Tagged ‘Toastmasters’

Turns out, I’m the new Vice President of Education for White Rose Speakers.

White Rose is a Toastmasters group, that meets on the 2nd and 4th Wednesday of each month, at the Jury’s Inn Hotel in the city centre. If you’re interested in improving your communication and leadership skills – why not come down to our Open Meeting on Wednesday 27th February? Or indeed any of our meetings, as guests are always welcome!

In a few months, the Public Speaking World Championship qualifiers begin. Last year’s winner, Ryan Avery won with a talk entitled “Trust is a Must.” The talk combines superb use of language, a strong moral message, gestures, humour and many other techniques to form a phenomenal competition speech.

The sixth project in your Competent Communicator module is all about vocal variety. So I decided to do a retelling of an old classic, the one about the man who prays to god to save him from the flood, then goes on to ignore all the help god sends, expecting a miracle instead.

This worked well for the project as it allowed me to use a quiet slow voice when the man is praying, and a fast loud voice when his would-be rescuers are trying to convincing him to come to safety.

While I personally thought I was well beaten by one of our Distinguished Toastmasters, who gave a brilliant speech about how he was trying to play the blues harp (also known as a harmonica to those outside the trade, so I’m told), the voting went my way and I ended up adding another Best Speaker ribbon to my collection.

For some reason, Miah’s Kitchen had a limo. Bryce wanted a picture next to it, but I couldn’t fit the whole car in lol.

With our most recent meeting being the last of the year, I had organised a meal at Miah’s Kitchen after the meeting, so we could celebrate the festival season at Leeds City.

Having finished chairing the Leeds Skeptics meeting, I sped up to North Leeds on Wednesday to join the end of White Rose Speakers’ final meeting before Christmas, which, for a holiday celebration, was being held at one of the member’s houses (who happens to have a large house).

The reason I was so keen to get there was that the group had very kindly agreed to do a collection and raffle to raise money for the Humanist Action Groups 2012 Holiday Food Drive for local homeless shelters.

Once there, they sprung a table topic on me, the song title “Merry Christmas Everyone”, to which I talked about how you can’t call an event this time of year a Christmas event as people get upset, so you have to end up calling it about a dozen different things in the title to keep everyone happy.

We came away with bags of stuff, and plenty of money from the raffle too! Thanks to everyone donated, your support is very much appreciated!

Last Thursday, I took on the role of Toastmaster for the first time.

As well as speakers, each Toastmasters meeting is run by a series of roles, including the Ah Counter and Grammarian, but arguably the toughest role is that of Toastmaster – the host who begins by introducing the club and what we’re about, and goes on to introduce everyone else as well. It provides more stage time than any other role as you’re constantly up and down throughout the meeting.

I was reasonably satisfied with how it went. It certainly wasn’t without issue – we had to move to a different hotel just hours before the meeting, which meant we weren’t totally prepared with voting slips, and that threw me a little.

Also, despite my system of crossing everything off on the agenda as we went, I still forgot to include one of the feedback sessions until someone reminded me. But overall, it went reasonably smoothly, and I seemed like a nice way to round off my Toastmasters anniversary.

For my fifth project in the Toastmaster’s Competent Communicator series, I presented a talk entitled “A Humanist Soup Kitchen?”

This referenced my open letter to David Cameron, inviting him to come and see the Humanist Action Group doing its thing, after he had suggested that no such humanist enterprises existed.

Despite the talk creeping up on me somewhat (mainly due to being ill all the previous weekend), I managed to get everything in shape and took home another Best Speaker ribbon. Good times.

The Division E competition took place at Donington Park racing circuit, which wasn’t a very good venue as it was difficult to find (we got sent to the wrong part of the circuit) and very cold inside their buildings slash sheds, but on the plus side we did get to look round the Formula One museum section.

Having previously won the club competition and area competition, I travelled down to Donington to take part in the Division E humorously speaking competition. Division E covers an area from Royal Leamington Spa and above – the North of England and Scotland.

I got flattened at the competition, I didn’t even place. This was disappointing as while I thought I was well beaten for first place, I thought I might have done enough to get in the top three. But live and learn, the next competition starts in March, and that one ends in the World Championship of Public Speaking.