By Derek Wisnieski!
Crystal City Evening Toastmasters is spectacular club which will provide an amazing opportunity to all of its members. But an opportunity is not an absolute. It is one potential outcome out of many. Joining Toastmasters will provide you with an opportunity to improve your public speaking and leadership skills. The bad news is that just joining the club doesn’t guarantee you anything. The good news is that improving your public speaking and leadership skills within toastmaster is easy. All you have to do is participate.
The only way to get better at public speaking is to speak in public. This is one of those things that you can’t learn from a book. Sure you could find a good book which talks about speech organization or style. Maybe you could watch a video that demonstrates body language and vocal variety. But, until you get up there in front of a group, with sweaty palms and a stomach full of butterflies, you are never going to get any better. With practice we can learn to overcome this anxiety as well as apply the various techniques required to become a competent public speaker. The most important thing for new members to do is speak on a regular basis. This can be very challenging because preparing a speech is time consuming and difficult. Sometimes even picking a topic can be challenging. You could spend weeks or months preparing a speech and still feel like it needs improvement, but the truth is that delivering the speech is far more important than preparing it perfectly. If you are anything like me you might go on forever without actually giving a speech. One way to help with this is to establish a hard deadline. Compared to actually preparing a speech, simply signing up for a speech is incredibly easy, and it can provide that extra motivation to get a speech done and speak it in front of people. As soon as you finish a speech you can sign up for your next one. In fact you could sign up for ten speeches today if you wanted to. The most important thing you can do to improve your fear of speaking is to deliver a speech. It doesn’t matter what you have to do to make sure this happens. Promise yourself a vacation. Make a bet with a friend. Or, just realize that the benefits far outweigh any potential downside, but do whatever you have to do. Find a way to keep speaking. Consistently delivering Competent Communicator (CC) manual speeches should be your number one goal.
In addition to the manual speeches Toastmasters provides a lot of other different, but equally important opportunities by filling various roles in a meeting. In a lot of ways filling a meeting role can be both easier and more challenging than giving a prepared speech. It is easier because it usually does not require the same amount of preparation, but more challenging because you have to think on your feet and still accomplish specific goals. In a lot of ways this will more accurately reflect many situations in which we may be called on to speak in public. You never know when you will need to run a meeting, or be called on to evaluate a project or presentation. Plus you are going to be at the meeting anyways, and I guarantee you will get more out of it if you are involved in some way whether it be giving a speech, participating in table topics, or filling a meeting role. Our meetings are too few and too short to let one slip passed without getting up and speaking in some way.
The last but possibly most important thing is to never forget that we are all here to learn together. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to public speaking, but no one, whether they have been speaking for 10 years or haven’t even delivered an ice breaker, is perfect. If we were we wouldn’t be here. Take comfort in the fact that Toastmasters provides a very forgiving and encouraging opportunity to build on our strengths and work on any weaknesses. Take each opportunity you can to challenge yourself. Be proud of your accomplishments and even prouder when you come up short, because you realize that failing is more important for growth than success. Likewise always thank your evaluators for feedback, and thank the ones that point out your shortcomings twice. This is the true value that Toastmasters adds. Let’s face it. At the end of the day no one cares about how well we perform in a certain role or deliver a certain speech in Toastmasters. The point is to prepare ourselves for more important and meaningful opportunities in other areas of our lives.
I once received an incredibly simple but powerful piece of advice. “If it is worth doing, it is worth doing right.” Toastmasters is without a doubt worth doing and that is why we all joined. The challenge now is to do it right, so that we can get the most out of our experience. To be honest doing it right will probably mean something a little different for each one of us, but I guarantee that if you are honest with yourself, you will realize that doing it right requires participation
