Posts Tagged ‘Toastmasters’

On Thursday, it was Leeds City Toastmasters “humorously speaking” competition. The club holds biannual competitions, one in the spring for motivational speeches and this one, for comedic ones – these then advance to the area competition and then continue moving on and up from there.

We started the evening meeting at Nawaab, an Indian restaurant on Wellington Street. It was good value at £11 for a three course meal, but my stomach certainly wasn’t too happy with what I put in it and the desserts were straight out of the freezer – packaging included and no time to thaw.

We made it to the competition just in time and I certainly didn’t fancy my chances – all three of the other speakers who had entered the contest were senior members of the club, one a former area governor who regularly speaks from the advanced manuals.

Somehow, I turned up with the victory though and now move onto the area competition in a few weeks!

Having really enjoyed Rob Lyon’s Skeptics talk on his book Panic on a Plate, I decided it would be a great topic to give a talk on at Toastmasters. Turns out it worked quite well, and I was lucky enough to pick up my second Best Speaker ribbon.

Recently, I made it down to the other “>Toastmasters group in Leeds, to see how it differed from Leeds City.

The answer is not a great deal – there were a few things that they did a little differently, but on the whole, it was the same enjoyable Toastmasters format. The biggest difference is that it is a much smaller club, with maybe around a dozen people there. This is understandable given they were only chartered in June, but is markedly different from Leeds City, the oldest club in The North, which will have around 30 people per meeting.

As they were somewhat short on roles, I was pounced upon on entering and ended up as timekeeper. It was a role I had been a bit nervous about doing, so giving it a go in a smaller club setting was perhaps a gentle introduction.

All in all, I’m not sure whether I will become a regular visitor. It would be a great chance to get round more roles and get more speeches it, but it does mean a time commitment of one evening every week.

One of the most active members of Toastmasters is my friend John Fletcher who was working towards the end of his Competent Communicator manual when I joined and has since completed it and moved onto the advanced speeches.

His 10th and final speech of the Competent Communicator was about how he was not a big fan of his job and so had finally broken free and set up on his own. It was a speech I strongly identified with, having recently done a similar thing.

John now runs Leeds Maths Tuition, offering one to one tuition for anyone looking to improve their grades.

For my second speech at Leeds City Toastmasters, the “Organize Your Speech” project, I spoke about drug decriminalisation.

It is something I have blogged about several times before because there really is no case for arguing that our current drug legislation is either helpful or sensible. I was a bit worried the talk wasn’t really coming together while preparing it, but I must have done something right as I ended up winning best speech of the meeting.

Edit: Five days after I had given this talk, the IDPC published their new report, “The War on Drugs and HIV/AIDS: How the Criminalization of Drug Use Fuels the Global Pandemic”, so if the topic interests you, you may want to have a read. There is also a good blog post about it by Richard Branson.

At the most recent Toastmasters meeting, I took on my second role as Grammarian. This involved introducing the word of the day, which I had chosen to be jubilant (after giving a short rant about how we should abolish the monarchy), as well was watching out for good uses of grammar and interesting phrases.

Reading Toastmasters International magazine is always an interesting experience. Nobody is using the world cult, but it’s so self congratulatory that as Elina points out, if you replace the word Toastmasters with the word Jesus most of the articles read as if they were specifically written to evangelise Christianity, without further modification.

Among the stories about just how brilliant a decision it was for Lenny from Texas to join his local group, was an interesting article accepting praise and comments after giving a speech.

Like I’m sure many people do, I try to be modest when receiving feedback after a speech. People often come up to you and tell you how good it is, and I always point out where I went wrong or which bits I didn’t think had really worked out.

However, the article suggests that this in fact a little impolite. After all, they are offering genuine feedback about how good they thought it was, and you’re contradicting them. It suggests a much better way to handle such comments is simply with a smile and a thank you.

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.

As many of you know, I recently joined a public speaking club and having recently taken on my first role, it came time for me to give my first formal speech – The Ice Breaker.

When you first join Toastmasters you have two programmes to work through – the Component Communicator and the Competent Leader. In the “CC” manual, there are ten speeches you have to give, each improving your speaking in one particular aspect. The first one, The Ice Breaker, is a 4-6 minute speech about yourself.

Despite having done quite a bit of public speaking at A-Soc, I was somewhat nervous before giving the talk. After all, I was speaking to a room of expert public speakers who would be picking up on every “erm” I let out (though the Ah Counter tells me I didn’t let out any, which is great) and every subconscious gesture.

I tend to do a bit too much hand clasping when nervous, so I intentionally decided to keep my hands down by my side. Unfortunately, this didn’t really get me anywhere as it just meant that my hands were hocked into my pockets instead. The ending clearly needed work as well, but as a first speech, I think I did OK and look forward to moving onto my next one.

Last month, myself and Elina headed down to the Crowne Plaza hotel for a meeting of Leeds City Toastmasters.

Toastmasters is an international organisation that organises local public speaking clubs, where people go to increase their speaking, presentation and leadership skills. It looked pretty interesting so I decided it was worth checking out, just to see what it was about.

The meeting itself was very enjoyable. People presented a number of talks to which they were given up a topic and then asked to talk on it for two minutes, without any preparation. Everything was very regimented – the agenda contains exact times of when everything should happen and there was even someone assigned to make sure we kept to those times.

It was also quite inspiring to see people who had speech impediments or were clearly very anxious about public speaking, getting up and giving fantastic talks. It’s very intimidating to be honest, especially knowing that my talks are literally riddled with “erms” and other bad habits. Never the less, it looks like a great organisation and I am planning to attend on a regular basis, starting next month.