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 four 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 evaluation purpose:
Encourage
Encourage
Encourage
Speech evaluations:
Begin with many positive comments.
Mention one constructive comments that would strenghten the speech.
End with more positive comments.
This motivates the Speaker to present another Speech soon!
Verbal speech evaluations help everyone learn quickly.
These develop important people skills.
- 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!!!