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.
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Tags: leeds, public speaking, Toastmasters
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 1st, 2012 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Public Speaking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.