Toastmasters International
Toastmasters Benefits
- Develop skills vital to personal and business growth.
People skills.
Professional skills.
Communication skills.
Master of Ceremonies skills.
Leadership skills.
Humor skills.
- Think quickly on your feet.
Handle unexpected events.
- Become efficient with time.
- Gain confidence and develop clear thinking.
- Become an effective speaker by improving communication skills.
- Learn Parliamentary Procedures (Robert's Rules of Order).
- Become more interesting to others.
General Information
- Meet weekly with a short business meeting, followed by an educational meeting.
Commonly entire meeting is about one hour.
Meetings can be morning, noon, or evening.
- Business meetings are commonly fewer than 5 minutes.
Opportunity to practice parliamentary procedures.
Educational meetings consume the remainder of the meeting.
- Roles rotate every week.
Common roles include:
Speaker
Speech Evaluator
General Evaluator
Tabletopicsmaster
Timer
Grammarian
Wordmaster
Ah Counter
Over a period of time, every member will have the opportunity for every role.
- Not a lot of work for most members. Extra effort is common for:
Preparing a 5-7 minute speech.
Commonly every six to eight weeks.
Serving as Toastmaster for the Day (similar to serving as an MC).
Commonly every three or four months.
- Go at your own pace.
There are no requirements about how often a person speaks.
- No spectator members.
- Start on time / stop on time.
People are busy.
Members strive to stay on scheduled time.
- Choose any topic for speeches.
Easiest is give a speech on something that is already in your brain.
Hobbies
Relatives
Things I did as a kid
Opinions
Trips
Work
Fun
Surprises
Controling nervousness can be easy by pick a topic already in your brain.
There is nothing to memorize.
Tell the audience what you remember.
The organization occurs in the sequence that your brain remembers.
Plus if there were a mistake, who would know?
- Every speech focuses on a specific aspect of speaking.
The speech may be to:
Entertain
Inform
Provide opinions
Convince
Vocal variety keeps audience's attention.
Body language strengthens a speech.
Facial expressions
Hands
Arms
Head
Body
Humor helps the audience remember!
- Verbal evaluations of a speech develops people skills by listening and speaking tactfully.
Speech evaluations:
Begin with numerous positive comments.
List a maximum two constructive comments that would strenghten the speech.
End with more positive comments.
These deveop important people skills.
Verbal speech evaluations help everyone learn quickly.
- Lots of applause!
Encourages people.
Helps people feel good about their efforts.
- Lots of laughter!
Learn!
Have fun!
Look forward to the next meeting!
Risk
There is a risk in coming to a meeting.
You might have too much fun!!!