Discovering Toastmasters

A couple of weeks ago I went to my first Toastsmasters meeting. For those of you who don't know Toastmasters, it's a American Association designed to help people  improve their public speaking skills. I'd been considering going for a while but only decided to give it a try when my good friend Matt asked me if I would be keen to go along with him. I really enjoyed the experience so I thought I would put a note on  my blog, for people who don't know about Toastmasters.



The club we went to in Lausanne, Switzerland is gathering twice a month at a local restaurant and follows a strict schedule that is common to all the Toastmasters clubs.  There is the president of the club who first introduces the meeting, the guests, etc.. There is also the Toastmaster, who is kind of the master of ceremony. He's there doing transitions between each presentation, each exercise that takes place and it's a really nice role to have. There are a few other roles, like the time keeper, the reviewers, the Ah counter (more on this leater), etc.. And there are guests, people like Matt and me, who want to see for themselves what it's all about before deciding to become a member. We were 11 guests that night and that was quite amazing, we got a lot of energy from this group.

And so we started with the first presentation which was given by a lady doing her very first speech. She was telling a story about her childhood in Malaysia and that was a very nicely  put together story. I have to say, for her first speech it was quite impressive. She was using very nice vocabulary, a good speech structure, nice gestures and even a little bit of humor. She was doing quite well, and the speech lasted I think 7 minutes, which is quite a long time actually when you're alone in front of a crowd (even if it's just 20 people), talking when everyone is looking at you or even evaluating your performance.

There might be 2 or 3 people giving a speech, and then you have different sorts of exercises. A really nice exercise that we did was the "Table Topics". Basically for 10 minutes one person asks some questions and randomly chooses people in the assembly to stand up in front of everyone and talk for at least one minute to answer the question. For example he asked me, "Christelle this weekend we are changing time, we are loosing Daylight saving, so we'll get an extra hour. What are you going to do with this extra hour?"

So here I go, I have to getup in front of every one, and start talking for one minute about what I'm going to do with this extra hour. And I actually could have answered in 3 seconds: sleep. But you have to build up and continue talking for more than one minute which is not that easy. I'm not too scared of public speaking, I do it for my job from time to time and I'm quite naturally enthused to speak with other people, but still I could feel my heart pounding in my chest, and that was quite amazing!  When I went  back to my seat, after exactly one minute and three seconds, I thought to myself: "AH! It feels good".

My friend had a silly question too, he was asked "what's your idea of the perfect ring tone?". He managed to pull it out as well in one minute and 2 seconds.

Then towards the end of the evening there is the evaluation part.  Basically people evaluate your speech. There are some designated evaluators for each speech, and they look at different parts of the evaluation: the grammar, the way you move, the way you construct your speech, etc. And then you have this person, the Ah counter, who counts all the Ah, Hums and silly mistakes that you make.

In my 1 minute speech I said 6 "hums", which is not too bad for a first time apparently. But for the record, the lady who gave her speech only had one "Ah" in 6 minutes..

So what did I think of that evening?

I had a lot of fun and I'll definitely go back. You learn a lot of things during these meetings: how to control yourself, how to control your fear, how to speak better, how to articulate your ideas and how to become conscious about all the "Ahs" and "Hums" that you say. But it's also about leadership, because as you progress as a toastmaster member and come more and more often to the meetings, you take different roles:

• You can become the reviewer: it's quite hard to review someone's speech, it's actually a speech in itself.


• You can become to toastmaster: you have to lead the group, there can be any impromptu situation, new guests, you have to manage the time.

I would recommend anyone to consider attending a Toastmaster meeting, even if you don't work in Communications or if you don't plan to become a professional public speaker. It can only bring you good things, like for example how to present a project to your boss, to your spouse, how to speak better with your family or generally how to improve your posture and presence in life.

Question: Have you ever given a public speech? How did you feel about it?

photo credit: Julie70 via photopin cc