Go well in your Toastmasters journey and great to hear that you’re learning from the blog.

Olivia

Thanks for your well-written advices. I joined the Toastmaster for about 5 months now. Your advices will definitely help me to get the most out of Toastmaster, Enjoying reading your blog which is very informative and useful for me to laern to become a better speaker.

The first is why we all join: Toastmasters can help you to learn to speak effectively in public.

The next is that Toastmaster can teach you how to run a meeting. That Toastmaster who is running a meeting needs to be a jack of all trades, think on his / her feet and stay on time. If only all business meetings were run that way.

Finally, each club has officers and this can server as a great management training ground. If you screw up you won’t be fired. The same can’t be said about your real world job.

Toastmasters – what’s not to love?

- Dr. Jim Anderson
The Accidental Communicator Blog
“Learn How To Calm Your Fears, Wow Your Audience, And Get Your Point Across”

I enjoyed this post. Thank you very much for writing it.
I joined Toastmasters in March 2002 and up to February of this year I was a very active member. I am still a member but have decided that the time has come to be less active. I have been club president, Area Governor, Division Governor and helped organize a District conference. I can wholeheartedly attest to the benefits of the Toastmasters program. I support your comments on Evaluations; my experience is that evaluations are very subjective and should be taken with some equanimity. Being able to receive feedback is as important as giving feedback. There is a tendency to take Toastmasters too seriously almost to a religious level. I have always taken the view that Toastmasters is a safe-lab environment where you can discover or develop skills in order to become a more effective communicator in the ”real” world.

Kind Regards
Myles

Although I disagree with your points in evaluation. There are good and not-so-good evaluators. The evaluator is just there to give personal impressions on the speaker. The approach to giving and taking evaluations is simply to be honest. Take the good and the bad and ignore the misses. I have always appreciated evaluations that are right on target, whether it’s good or bad. Ultimately, it is the speaker who evaluates himself or herself. Besides, there is always a General Evaluator to tackle the misses made by the evaluator.

One thing you missed out are the opportunities for leadership in Toastmasters. I was part of a struggling club and when it was my turn to lead. I turned around the club and it has become a stable club ever since. I took on a second club to see if I could do it again.

As CJ Guest put it, Toastmasters is a laboratory. I experimented on marketing, on getting new members, and not just on presentations. Very few Toastmasters have heard of Presentation Zen and ever since a Toastmaster gifted me with a copy, I bring my projector to almost every meeting whether it is for my own use or others’ use. I have also shifted my club to a bilingual club. Having traveled around the region and I see the ability to deliver in Chinese Mandarin would be a big plus. Yes, innovating and blazing the way for others is really a lot of fun.