In our Santa Cruz Downtown Toastmasters
meetings (and those of many other TM clubs), we ask one of our members
to give a 1 minute speech towards the beginning of each meeting on a topic related to "how to be a better toastmaster" or "how we can have a better club". This blog will focus on the same questions. I invite all of our members to participate. Why blog it? Why not wait to say it in front of the club? Maybe you think its worth writing down and sharing it with those who didn't attend the meeting. Maybe its a controversial topic, and you'd like to invite more discussion. Maybe you've got something to get off your chest and you aren't scheduled to be the ONE soon enough. How to blog here?If you'd like to post to this blog, ask me (Bill Fitler) and I'll help make it happen. I'll even walk you through the steps. (Why? because that's what I do.) What makes a good post?Write a post the way you would write a 1-2 minute speech. Get to the point, you don't have much time/space. Hook the reader in the 1st sentence like you would in a speech opening. and wrap it up at the end. I could go on and on, but I'll follow my own advice: Tell us how we can be better Toastmasters and make our club better! Learn how to blog - it might come in handy someday! Come on out and play! \bill (Club President 2010) |
posted Jan 13, 2011 4:45 PM by bill fitler
Last week we had a 3-way tie: I say, if we're going to vote for a winner, let there be one winner. And it's the vote counter who gets to break the tie. Here's how: when you are the vote counter, record your vote - then put it aside and don't count it (unless you need to in order to break a tie.) Here's why: - meetings run more efficiently when we don't have to stop and pull some more ribbons from the suitcase
- contests require a single winner (who advances to the next level)
- in a 3 way contest with a tie for 1st and 2nd, then 3rd place is last place. As good as it feels to win, it can be really discouraging to completely lose.
Nobody said the job was easy. When you're the vote counter, you're also the tie breaking judge. |
posted Sep 26, 2010 11:39 AM by bill fitler
[
updated Sep 26, 2010 11:46 AM
]
"Toastmasters is for
public speaking. It disturbs me that club members are doing too much
online texting and not enough in-club speaking about issues like club
business." I heard this from one of our more experienced members recently. He raises a good point. Here's every Toastmasters club official mission statement:
The
mission of a Toastmasters club is to provide a mutually supportive and
positive learning environment in which every individual member has the
opportunity to develop oral communication [my emphasis] and leadership skills, which in turn foster self-confidence and personal growth. While
I concede the point that oral communication is a primary focus of what
we do, I respectfully disagree with the implication that the online
world isn't critical to Toastmasters in general and our club in
particular. In our modern world, any educational communication
program which fails to include the online component is obsolete.
Furthermore, we make our clubs less relevant particularly to younger
members and those who communicate many times a day using email, texting
and social media. I think its vital that we change to meet the
needs of modern culture. I suggest that we apply things we learn in our
oral communication development in the club and bring them with us
online, including: - Efficiency - getting to the point
- Effective - getting the job done
- Experiential - ground our communication in stories
- Etiquette - the art of polite communication
I
advocate an online component to our club - and to Toastmasters - that
emphasizes the leadership and organizational aspects of online
communication. While there are many aspects to online communication,
some are particularly relevant to working with organizations and
leadership. \bill (Club President 2010) |
posted Sep 26, 2010 11:27 AM by bill fitler
To: all
Subject: can someone please fill in for me this week?I'm a big fan of email, but it's rarely the Best Tool For The Job when it comes to finding your replacement for a meeting role. Granted,
it appears to be an efficient use of your time: it takes less than a
minute to spam the entire club with such a message. And if you want to
avoid spamming all of us and you only send it to those without roles,
maybe it will take 3 minutes to scan the schedule and address your
message individually. But it fails in several important ways: - Getting these messages wastes time for those who have already have roles.
- You
still need to follow through. If nobody responds to your spam, you're
still on the hook to make the calls you need to find a replacement. If
somebody does respond, you still need to say thanks and ideally
negotiate trading roles.
- Its a lost opportunity to talk to
club members. Calling someone on the phone allows me to exchange
pleasantries and maybe get to know someone a bit better - even if
they're not available to replace me.
The next time you need
to find someone to replace you in a meeting, pick up the phone and
start calling people who don't already have a role. It may take you a
few more minutes, but you might get something you didn't expect: a nice
chat or maybe even a new friend. \bill (Club President 2010) |
posted Sep 26, 2010 11:24 AM by bill fitler
"That speech was perfect - I can't think of a thing to make it better."
Uh-oh. That's wasting time: yours, the speaker's, and the audience's.
Even
when you're evaluating one of our club's best speakers giving his or
her best speech, you can almost always find something that you noticed
for some reason that may not have contributed to what the speaker wanted
to accomplish. Point it out!
Remember, an effective evaluation
is never a judgment ("you/your speech was good/bad"). Good evaluation
includes personal observation of how the speech affected you. Effective
evaluation uses your personal observations to reflect to the speaker -
and everyone else in the audience - what you noticed that worked well
(i.e. to the speaker's goals) as well as what may have distracted from
those goals.
A while back I was in a club where the General Evaluator
occasionally gave out a "Whitewash Award" - an ugly stiff old paint
brush - to someone who only sang the praises of a speech. It was a bit
of a joke, but one with a point: the club expected real content in our
evaluations.
And it was pretty effective: I didn't win the award a second time.
\bill (Club President 2010) |
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