I just got back from a Toastmasters meeting. This time, I took copious notes so that I can share the whole thing with you as a Toastmasters Liveblog. In case you don't know, Toastmasters is an international public speaking and leadership club. Members take turns filling speaking roles as well as leadership roles. It's an awesome way to improve your public speaking skills and leadership skills. (Public speaking is, after all, one of the most common fears people have)
During this meeting, I played the role of an evaluator. I was assigned to one of the speakers (the 2nd speaker) and I carefully evaluated him and gave him feedback during the evaluation portion of the meeting.
OPENING
The Sergeant-at-Arms opened the meeting with the pledge of allegiance.
The regular club president was absent, having suffered vertigo just before the meeting. The vice-president of education took over as acting club president. He was actually doing three roles: in addition to filling in for the club president, he was also signed up to be inspiration/jester, AND the toastmaster of the meeting. (The Toastmaster is the one who runs the meeting; as opposed to the President, which is an elected office, Toastmaster changes from meeting to meeting and is open to anyone to volunteer, even the newest members)
There were initially three guests at the meeting (a fourth would show up late). Therefore, we had the guests introduce themselves right away-- their first experience with public speaking in our club. To make it fair to them, all the regular members proceeded to introduce themselves to the guests next.
The signup sheet for the next meeting was passed around. I signed up to give a speech in a little over a month's time away-- just before my birthday (February 25th). The meeting following this one will be a speech contest, lots of fun! I'm already signed up as one of the speakers at the contest.
To give the guests some idea of what was going on, all the clubmembers with roles tonight (like timer, grammarian, and general evaluator) introduced themselves and explained the roles which they play.
INSPIRATION / JESTER
The vice-president, who also got saddled as acting president and Toastmaster at the last minute, was already signed up as inspiration/jester. The inspiration/jester of the evening opens the speech part of the meeting with either an inspirational speech or a humorous speech-- their choice. Our inspiration/jester chose to do an inspirational speech (not a huge surprise-- inspirational speeches tend to be a lot easier to pull off than humorous speeches).
The inspiration speech opened with some questions: "How many of you had a list of Christmas wishes? How many of you told your wishlist to someone else? And how many of you got the things that were on your wishlist?" The inspiration/jester proceeded then to relate the wishlists of six people who were interviewed at the local food shelter. It was interesting to hear about the wish lists of some people so much less fortunate than myself. For most of the six, their wishes included having their own apartments. One of the wishlists was: "I want to go to Las Vegas, win big, and come back and start a church." (Too bad God supposedly frowns on gambling)
WORD OF THE DAY: TRANSPARENCY
After the Inspiration / Jester gave his inspirational speech, the club grammarian announced the word of the day. The word of the day was "transparency". The way the Toastmasters word of the day works is, the grammarian (another role which anyone can take their turn at) chooses a word in advance and announced it at the meeting, without letting anyone know about it beforehand. Then, throughout the meeting, the various speakers and leaders try to incorporate the word into their speeches. It's a great way for injecting a little bit of unpreparedness into even the most prepared of speeches, and it always forces speakers to "think on their feet".
One thing I noticed was that this meeting, the grammarian forgot to give an example sentence (or example sentences) for the word. For the ESL club members, example sentences are very important for actually learning the new vocabulary, since we naturally learn words through sentences (see my article, Sentence Mining).
FIRST PREPARED SPEECH: OSTEOPATHICS
The first prepared speech was a research-speech. The goal was for the speaker to research a topic and then give a speech with lots of sources and information and that sort of stuff. The speaker spoke about Osteopathics. Wikipedia describes Osteopathy as: "an approach to healthcare that emphasizes the role of the musculoskeletal system in health and disease." He talked about some anecdotes in which people were healed with osteopathic medicine.
According to the speech, Osteopathic physicians believe that minor shocks to your body like having your breath knocked out, can cause physical problems in your body which last your whole life. One of the examples was a former boxer who suffered a lot of physical trauma earlier in his life and was totally messed up years after he threw away the boxing gloves.
One of the things the speaker emphasized was how conventional medicine just focuses on the area where the symptoms occur, without looking at the body as a whole. The speaker surprised us by announcing he had scheduled his own appointment with an osteopathic specialist the day after the Toastmasters meeting!
Between the first and second speeches, a fourth guest came late to the meeting, so we repeated the whole introduction process.
SECOND SPEECH: HOW PEOPLE EAT
The second speech was a body language speech, that is, a speech where the speaker was focusing on improving his body language. The speech title was: "How People Eat". Despite the name, it mostly focused on the history of eating utensils (forks, spoons, knives, and chopsticks).
It was interesting to hear about the history of chopsticks, since I'm into Japanese culture in general. The speaker said there were two contributing causes to the development of chopsticks in the East: first, there was a major drought in China, either 5000BC or 5000 years ago (I forget which), and it resulted in the people there eating smaller and smaller food items. For small food items, they had less need of knives and more need of chopsticks. The other factor the speaker mentioned was how dishes became hotter around the iron age when they began being made of metal. The dishes were so hot that people could no longer safely eat with their fingers all the time, so they started using bamboo twigs as primitive chopsticks.
Another interesting historical tidbit I heard in this speech: apparently when forks were first developed, the Roman Catholic Church vehemently opposed them. The idea was that since God, in His infinite wisdom, had provided us with "natural" forks (our fingers), using man-made forks was an insult to God. Wow, that sure gives us some perspective when the modern church opposes things like stem cell research. Next time someone starts preaching about stem cell research or sex before marriage, I'll point out that if they're using forks, they're going straight to Hell ;)
Since I was the evaluator for this speech, and it was a speech about body language, I was paying particular attention to the speaker's body language. The first thing I noticed was that when he wasn't making gestures with his hands, he always kept them folded together in front of his stomach. That's a subconsciously defensive posture, a sign of public speaking nervousness. When I was in the seduction community, I learned a lot about the importance of open, unguarded posture, avoiding things like folding my arms or joining my hands in front of my stomach.
The second thing I noticed was that the speaker's eye contact was mostly focusing on one side of the room. Good eye contact should hit the whole room. However, I later noticed that there were more people actually sitting on that side of the room than on the other, so maybe this observation was a mistake on my behalf.
The speaker had good gestures (besides the thing about keeping his hands cuffed in front of his belly the whole speech) and a good smile. It's hard to keep a good smile when you're up in the front of the room, since public speaking can really make a person nervous.
The speech went way over time, and it seems like the speaker gravely underestimated how long his speech would take. He spent most the time talking about the history of eating utensils and then rushed some more general remarks about how people eat after the timer indicated he was out of time.
THIRD SPEECH: GETTING THE MOST OUT OF TOASTMASTERS
The third speech was given by the club's former president. It was the persuasive speech, one of the final speeches in the competent communicator manual, the basic speaking manual that new members start with. The title was, "Getting The Most out of Toastmasters".
The basic thesis of the speech was that in order to get the most out of the Toastmasters club, a speaker shouldn't just focus on giving prepared speeches, but should focus just as much on playing all the leadership roles, like timer, grammarian, table topics master, and so on.
I felt like the speech topic wasn't all that great for a persuasive speech. It was more of an inspirational speech than a persuasive speech.
One of the things the speaker emphasized was the need for constant exposure to the public speaking environment. (It reminded me of my Golden Rule of Language Learning, which states that to learn a language, the most important thing is exposure to the language, and that as long as you have that, any other specifics about how you study, don't really matter as far as whether you'll attain fluency, only how fast you'll attain fluency.) He pointed out that if you were constantly preparing speeches for every meeting, it would be too much work, and would discourage you from coming to every meeting in the first place, thus reducing precious exposure. The speaker pointed out how the leadership roles provide a diverse sample of amounts of required preparation. Some leadership roles require virtually no preparation in advance (like timer), while others require a lot of preparation (like Toastmaster Of The Evening).
THE END OF THE SPEECH PORTION OF THE MEETING
After the three speakers spoke (usually there are four speakers, but I guess one of them had to cancel or something), the Timer gave the Timer's Report for the speakers. It turned out the second speaker had gone over time and was ineligible to receive the "Best Speaker" award for the evening.
The club then cast votes (via anonymous ballot) for best speaker, between the two eligible speakers. The vote counting and announcement of the awards waits 'til near the end of the meeting.
TABLE TOPICS
The next portion of the meeting, after the prepared speeches portion, is my favorite part, the Table Topics portion of the meeting. In Table Topics, the Table Topics Master gives meeting attendees an opportunity to give some unrehearsed speeches. Either you volunteer, or you get called up (it's at the Table Topics Master's discretion). Once you're at the front of the room, the Table Topics Master gives you a topic and then gives you control of the lectern; at which point, it's time to speak! It's a great way to get good at giving impromptu speeches and thinking fast.
This meeting, our table topics master was absent, so a replacement Table Topics Master stepped up and took the job. He was calling volunteers; I was the first to volunteer. The format this time was pretty bland (no doubt because the scheduled Table Topics Master had to miss it and the replacement had less preparation time): we were simply given questions and had to discuss our answers to the questions. Usually, the Table Topics topics are given in a more entertaining and thematic way. Anyway, he asked whether I wanted a hard or easy question and of course I asked for a hard one.
My question, inspired by the "How People Eat" speech, was: "Are you a fork and spoon person, or a chopsticks person?" I quickly launched into a story about how I was a spoon-and-fork person, until I traveled to Japan, where I trained in a secret ninja village to learn the deadly arts of chopsticks warfare. (Of course it's all fake, although I did travel to Japan) I talked about learning secret techniques of chopsticks combat, like how to catch a sword with a pair of chopsticks.
The second Table Topics Speaker got the question: "Tell us about a person who inspired you." He chose the club vice-president and acting president for the evening. Somehow from there he went off on a tangent about violins.
The third Table Topics volunteer was the Timer of the Evening (so another member took over to time him during his speech). His question: "Why is living next to a garbage dump a great thing?" (See, sometimes T.T. gives you an opportunity to talk about some really weird stuff...) The speaker pulled it off really well with a very humorous style. He gave a story about finding a hundred dollar bill in the garbage dump "which I guess someone must have thrown away". And how he used that trashy hundred dollar bill to take his girlfriend out on a nice date, and they came back and sat outside facing the garbage dump and how romantic that was. And, he talked about how, sometimes, things catch fire in the garbage dump, "and then it smells really good". He ended by pointing out that although property values are pretty bad near a garbage dump, "it's totally worth it."
The fourth Table Topics speaker was a guest. She was asked: "Tell us about a place you'd llike to visit that you've never been to before." She gave two answers, first Europe, then Hawaii. She seemed pretty self-conscious, especially about the time, afraid she'd be ineligible because of being too short. That's the thing about Table Topics, it doesn't matter really what you say, you just have to keep blabbing on about it until the Timer gives you the green light that you're within the time requirement.
The fifth Table Topics speaker was another guest. He was asked: "What would you do with a million dollars?" He focused on getting the most out of the million dollars, i.e., getting to keep the most after taxes. He had a similar problem to the "How People Eat" speaker with keeping his hands cuffed in front of him throughout the entire speech.
The sixth and last Table Topics speaker was asked: "Tell us about a great or not-so-great vacation." He talked about his great vacation to Hawaii, where he took his wife on a honeymoon. Emphasizing how they didn't do a lot of activities or sight seeing, just hanging out, relaxing, and being together (Editor's note: isn't that how a vacation should always be? Otherwise, you end up needing a vacation from your vacation!) He then talked about "his worst vacation", the time he went with me to train chopsticks combat in a secret ninja valley. How it was such a traumatic experience with all the blood and guts and fighting, and now he's definitely a fork-and-spoon man ;) I love it when the Table Topics speakers tie previous speakers' speeches into theirs, especially when the previous speaker was me.
The Timer gave us a report on the eligibility of the table topics speakers, and we cast our votes for Best Table Topics Speaker via anonymous ballot. The results would be announced near the end of the meeting.
THE EVALUATION PORTION OF THE MEETING
The next portion of the meeting was evaluation. Toastmasters is big about giving its members tons of feedback so they can grow and improve as speakers. Plus, it ties into the whole fact of how, the best way to learn is to teach other people. During the evaluation portion of the meeting, the General Evaluator (one of those rotating leadership roles) calls up the evaluators for the individual prepared speakers and the evaluators give speeches full of feedback for their associated speakers.
The first evaluation was rather dry, and it went way over time. I'm not sure whether the evaluator just didn't see the red light from the Timer, or whether he just ignored it?
The second evaluator was me evaluating my body language guy. I like to start and end with compliments, and alternate between compliments and criticisms in the middle. That way, the evaluation is encouraging, but not fluffy and useless. I complimented the guy on the great choice of topic (what lends itself better to body language than a speech about how people eat?) I pointed out his biased eye contact. I complimented his smile, I pointed out how he always cuffed his hands in front of him, and then I complimented his gestures (which were pretty good, if you discount how he kept the cuffed hands). And I finished my evaluation by talking a little bit about the values of body language in general.
I wasn't all that happy with the evaluation. I feel like my speaking skills were a little rusty (well, the last time I went to a meeting was over a month ago!) I also felt that I ended up spending too much time on the criticisms and flying through the compliments. The overall evaluation speech that I gave had too much of a critical feel to it.
The third evaluator's speech was fairly straightforward and run-of-the-mill. He congratulated the speaker because the speaker was close to finishing the competent communicator manual.
The Timer gave the final Timer's report, listing the times for all the timed speeches (the prepared speeches, the Table Topics speeches, and the evaluations), and indicating which evaluators were eligible for Best Evaluator (based on whether or not they met the time requirements). My Table Topics speech was 1:24 and my evaluation was 3:07. The first evaluator was ineligible due to going over time. The club voted by anonymous ballot for best evaluator.
THE GRAMMARIAN'S REPORT
The grammarian's report followed. The grammarian was pretty nitpicky about some fairly silly things. He criticized one speaker's pronunciation of "because" with a "u" sound as in "luck" instead of an "au" sound as in "cause". Even though, I'm fairly sure, the former is actually the more common version, at least in the U.S. Basically, he was a prescriptivist, imposing silly rules of speech on people as if people are supposed to model grammar instead of grammar modeling people. (Read about the prescriptivist philosophy and descriptivist philosophy of linguistics at my article, Prescriptive Linguistics vs. Descriptive Linguistics.) He pointed out that he thought where one speaker said "extensive amount of facts", the speaker should've said "extensive number of facts."
GENERAL EVALUATOR
For the end of the evaluation part of the meeting, the General Evaluator gave his general evaluation of the meeting. He had arranged with all us evaluators beforehand and asked us all to make sure to point out two ways the speakers could improve (for me, that was pointing out the eye contact thing and the hand-cuff thing). He made a big deal about that, and about how useless an evaluation is if it's nothing but fluffy compliments.
One thing the General Evaluator pointed out was how there's no need to thank the audience. Many speakers, at the end of their speeches, say "Thank you" to the audience, but the fact is, it should be the audience thanking the speaker, for providing all that value to them.
The Master Evaluator also called out the third speaker, the speaker who made the persuasive speech, for doing more of an inspirational speech than a persuasive speech. I guess that's a fairly common problem with that speech. Inspiration and persuasion are closely linked and a lot of people give inspirational speeches more naturally, since inspiration tends to be a little less confrontational than persuasion.
AWARDS
The Best Table Topics award went to the guy who talked about living next to a garbage dump. His speech really was genuinely funny; the guy has studied improv comedy before.
Best Evaluator Award was a tie between myself and the third Evaluator. I guess it would've been mine exclusively, if I'd voted for myself, but I was too busy taking the notes for this writeup; anyway, I don't generally vote for roles where I was a contestant anyway, or if I do, I vote for someone else. Voting for myself just seems kind of tacky, and I really don't care that much about the awards anyway.
The Best Speech award went to the first speaker, who spoke about Osteopathics.
CLOSING THE TOASTMASTERS MEETING
The acting-president discussed the agendas for the coming meetings and made sure all the roles were filled. Interestingly, he contradicted the third speaker, the "Getting the Most out of Toastmasters" speaker. In trying to fill the Toastmaster slot for next meeting, the acting-president pointed out how "Toastmaster takes almost no preparation". Even though the third speaker had used it as an example of a role that takes lots of preparation. I guess with Toastmaster, it's as much preparation as you wanna put into it. Usually, the more preparation the Toastmaster of the Evening puts in, the more awesome the meeting will be.
The last part of the Toastmasters Meeting is feedback from guests.
The first guest said: "I really liked it [the meeting], I'll definitely come back, it's a good place to start." (Start what? Public speaking, I guess)
The second guest pointed out how little technology (like powerpoint etc.) was used in the meeting. The acting-president replied with some examples of technology some members use; it's just that we don't use it for most speeches. It was also pointed out that in our club (unlike a lot of clubs), each member is given a video tape of their first speech, and any time they want another speech taped, they can just bring in the tape and give it to the Sergeant-at-Arms, who will tape over it with their next speech.
The fourth guest (the third had to leave early) said: "A pretty good experience, a lot to learn, I'm still getting up to speed with all the rules and procedures."
Feedback from guests is good because it ensures the club will always continue to grow and mature, and we won't become blind to any of our faults. Guests are constantly coming and going and giving the club lots of good feedback. With that, the meeting was closed.
FURTHER READING
I wrote a Toastmasters Introduction with lots of information about the club, especially the various meeting roles. It also has information on how to get in Toastmasters yourself. There are clubs all over the place, and probably in your city. Toastmasters is an international club, with groups all over the world.
Public speaking is a good skill. As a matter of fact, a competent public speaker can speak about any arbitrary skill they have; that makes public speaking an example of a Metaskill. Metaskills are skills which you use on other skills. Read more about Skills and Metaskills.
Something Toastmasters is good at training is Self Responsibility. Self-responsibility is taking power of your own life and acknowledging that you're the only one who can ultimately control your life.
During this meeting, I played the role of an evaluator. I was assigned to one of the speakers (the 2nd speaker) and I carefully evaluated him and gave him feedback during the evaluation portion of the meeting.
OPENING
The Sergeant-at-Arms opened the meeting with the pledge of allegiance.
The regular club president was absent, having suffered vertigo just before the meeting. The vice-president of education took over as acting club president. He was actually doing three roles: in addition to filling in for the club president, he was also signed up to be inspiration/jester, AND the toastmaster of the meeting. (The Toastmaster is the one who runs the meeting; as opposed to the President, which is an elected office, Toastmaster changes from meeting to meeting and is open to anyone to volunteer, even the newest members)
There were initially three guests at the meeting (a fourth would show up late). Therefore, we had the guests introduce themselves right away-- their first experience with public speaking in our club. To make it fair to them, all the regular members proceeded to introduce themselves to the guests next.
The signup sheet for the next meeting was passed around. I signed up to give a speech in a little over a month's time away-- just before my birthday (February 25th). The meeting following this one will be a speech contest, lots of fun! I'm already signed up as one of the speakers at the contest.
To give the guests some idea of what was going on, all the clubmembers with roles tonight (like timer, grammarian, and general evaluator) introduced themselves and explained the roles which they play.
INSPIRATION / JESTER
The vice-president, who also got saddled as acting president and Toastmaster at the last minute, was already signed up as inspiration/jester. The inspiration/jester of the evening opens the speech part of the meeting with either an inspirational speech or a humorous speech-- their choice. Our inspiration/jester chose to do an inspirational speech (not a huge surprise-- inspirational speeches tend to be a lot easier to pull off than humorous speeches).
The inspiration speech opened with some questions: "How many of you had a list of Christmas wishes? How many of you told your wishlist to someone else? And how many of you got the things that were on your wishlist?" The inspiration/jester proceeded then to relate the wishlists of six people who were interviewed at the local food shelter. It was interesting to hear about the wish lists of some people so much less fortunate than myself. For most of the six, their wishes included having their own apartments. One of the wishlists was: "I want to go to Las Vegas, win big, and come back and start a church." (Too bad God supposedly frowns on gambling)
WORD OF THE DAY: TRANSPARENCY
After the Inspiration / Jester gave his inspirational speech, the club grammarian announced the word of the day. The word of the day was "transparency". The way the Toastmasters word of the day works is, the grammarian (another role which anyone can take their turn at) chooses a word in advance and announced it at the meeting, without letting anyone know about it beforehand. Then, throughout the meeting, the various speakers and leaders try to incorporate the word into their speeches. It's a great way for injecting a little bit of unpreparedness into even the most prepared of speeches, and it always forces speakers to "think on their feet".
One thing I noticed was that this meeting, the grammarian forgot to give an example sentence (or example sentences) for the word. For the ESL club members, example sentences are very important for actually learning the new vocabulary, since we naturally learn words through sentences (see my article, Sentence Mining).
FIRST PREPARED SPEECH: OSTEOPATHICS
The first prepared speech was a research-speech. The goal was for the speaker to research a topic and then give a speech with lots of sources and information and that sort of stuff. The speaker spoke about Osteopathics. Wikipedia describes Osteopathy as: "an approach to healthcare that emphasizes the role of the musculoskeletal system in health and disease." He talked about some anecdotes in which people were healed with osteopathic medicine.
According to the speech, Osteopathic physicians believe that minor shocks to your body like having your breath knocked out, can cause physical problems in your body which last your whole life. One of the examples was a former boxer who suffered a lot of physical trauma earlier in his life and was totally messed up years after he threw away the boxing gloves.
One of the things the speaker emphasized was how conventional medicine just focuses on the area where the symptoms occur, without looking at the body as a whole. The speaker surprised us by announcing he had scheduled his own appointment with an osteopathic specialist the day after the Toastmasters meeting!
Between the first and second speeches, a fourth guest came late to the meeting, so we repeated the whole introduction process.
SECOND SPEECH: HOW PEOPLE EAT
The second speech was a body language speech, that is, a speech where the speaker was focusing on improving his body language. The speech title was: "How People Eat". Despite the name, it mostly focused on the history of eating utensils (forks, spoons, knives, and chopsticks).
It was interesting to hear about the history of chopsticks, since I'm into Japanese culture in general. The speaker said there were two contributing causes to the development of chopsticks in the East: first, there was a major drought in China, either 5000BC or 5000 years ago (I forget which), and it resulted in the people there eating smaller and smaller food items. For small food items, they had less need of knives and more need of chopsticks. The other factor the speaker mentioned was how dishes became hotter around the iron age when they began being made of metal. The dishes were so hot that people could no longer safely eat with their fingers all the time, so they started using bamboo twigs as primitive chopsticks.
Another interesting historical tidbit I heard in this speech: apparently when forks were first developed, the Roman Catholic Church vehemently opposed them. The idea was that since God, in His infinite wisdom, had provided us with "natural" forks (our fingers), using man-made forks was an insult to God. Wow, that sure gives us some perspective when the modern church opposes things like stem cell research. Next time someone starts preaching about stem cell research or sex before marriage, I'll point out that if they're using forks, they're going straight to Hell ;)
Since I was the evaluator for this speech, and it was a speech about body language, I was paying particular attention to the speaker's body language. The first thing I noticed was that when he wasn't making gestures with his hands, he always kept them folded together in front of his stomach. That's a subconsciously defensive posture, a sign of public speaking nervousness. When I was in the seduction community, I learned a lot about the importance of open, unguarded posture, avoiding things like folding my arms or joining my hands in front of my stomach.
The second thing I noticed was that the speaker's eye contact was mostly focusing on one side of the room. Good eye contact should hit the whole room. However, I later noticed that there were more people actually sitting on that side of the room than on the other, so maybe this observation was a mistake on my behalf.
The speaker had good gestures (besides the thing about keeping his hands cuffed in front of his belly the whole speech) and a good smile. It's hard to keep a good smile when you're up in the front of the room, since public speaking can really make a person nervous.
The speech went way over time, and it seems like the speaker gravely underestimated how long his speech would take. He spent most the time talking about the history of eating utensils and then rushed some more general remarks about how people eat after the timer indicated he was out of time.
THIRD SPEECH: GETTING THE MOST OUT OF TOASTMASTERS
The third speech was given by the club's former president. It was the persuasive speech, one of the final speeches in the competent communicator manual, the basic speaking manual that new members start with. The title was, "Getting The Most out of Toastmasters".
The basic thesis of the speech was that in order to get the most out of the Toastmasters club, a speaker shouldn't just focus on giving prepared speeches, but should focus just as much on playing all the leadership roles, like timer, grammarian, table topics master, and so on.
I felt like the speech topic wasn't all that great for a persuasive speech. It was more of an inspirational speech than a persuasive speech.
One of the things the speaker emphasized was the need for constant exposure to the public speaking environment. (It reminded me of my Golden Rule of Language Learning, which states that to learn a language, the most important thing is exposure to the language, and that as long as you have that, any other specifics about how you study, don't really matter as far as whether you'll attain fluency, only how fast you'll attain fluency.) He pointed out that if you were constantly preparing speeches for every meeting, it would be too much work, and would discourage you from coming to every meeting in the first place, thus reducing precious exposure. The speaker pointed out how the leadership roles provide a diverse sample of amounts of required preparation. Some leadership roles require virtually no preparation in advance (like timer), while others require a lot of preparation (like Toastmaster Of The Evening).
THE END OF THE SPEECH PORTION OF THE MEETING
After the three speakers spoke (usually there are four speakers, but I guess one of them had to cancel or something), the Timer gave the Timer's Report for the speakers. It turned out the second speaker had gone over time and was ineligible to receive the "Best Speaker" award for the evening.
The club then cast votes (via anonymous ballot) for best speaker, between the two eligible speakers. The vote counting and announcement of the awards waits 'til near the end of the meeting.
TABLE TOPICS
The next portion of the meeting, after the prepared speeches portion, is my favorite part, the Table Topics portion of the meeting. In Table Topics, the Table Topics Master gives meeting attendees an opportunity to give some unrehearsed speeches. Either you volunteer, or you get called up (it's at the Table Topics Master's discretion). Once you're at the front of the room, the Table Topics Master gives you a topic and then gives you control of the lectern; at which point, it's time to speak! It's a great way to get good at giving impromptu speeches and thinking fast.
This meeting, our table topics master was absent, so a replacement Table Topics Master stepped up and took the job. He was calling volunteers; I was the first to volunteer. The format this time was pretty bland (no doubt because the scheduled Table Topics Master had to miss it and the replacement had less preparation time): we were simply given questions and had to discuss our answers to the questions. Usually, the Table Topics topics are given in a more entertaining and thematic way. Anyway, he asked whether I wanted a hard or easy question and of course I asked for a hard one.
My question, inspired by the "How People Eat" speech, was: "Are you a fork and spoon person, or a chopsticks person?" I quickly launched into a story about how I was a spoon-and-fork person, until I traveled to Japan, where I trained in a secret ninja village to learn the deadly arts of chopsticks warfare. (Of course it's all fake, although I did travel to Japan) I talked about learning secret techniques of chopsticks combat, like how to catch a sword with a pair of chopsticks.
The second Table Topics Speaker got the question: "Tell us about a person who inspired you." He chose the club vice-president and acting president for the evening. Somehow from there he went off on a tangent about violins.
The third Table Topics volunteer was the Timer of the Evening (so another member took over to time him during his speech). His question: "Why is living next to a garbage dump a great thing?" (See, sometimes T.T. gives you an opportunity to talk about some really weird stuff...) The speaker pulled it off really well with a very humorous style. He gave a story about finding a hundred dollar bill in the garbage dump "which I guess someone must have thrown away". And how he used that trashy hundred dollar bill to take his girlfriend out on a nice date, and they came back and sat outside facing the garbage dump and how romantic that was. And, he talked about how, sometimes, things catch fire in the garbage dump, "and then it smells really good". He ended by pointing out that although property values are pretty bad near a garbage dump, "it's totally worth it."
The fourth Table Topics speaker was a guest. She was asked: "Tell us about a place you'd llike to visit that you've never been to before." She gave two answers, first Europe, then Hawaii. She seemed pretty self-conscious, especially about the time, afraid she'd be ineligible because of being too short. That's the thing about Table Topics, it doesn't matter really what you say, you just have to keep blabbing on about it until the Timer gives you the green light that you're within the time requirement.
The fifth Table Topics speaker was another guest. He was asked: "What would you do with a million dollars?" He focused on getting the most out of the million dollars, i.e., getting to keep the most after taxes. He had a similar problem to the "How People Eat" speaker with keeping his hands cuffed in front of him throughout the entire speech.
The sixth and last Table Topics speaker was asked: "Tell us about a great or not-so-great vacation." He talked about his great vacation to Hawaii, where he took his wife on a honeymoon. Emphasizing how they didn't do a lot of activities or sight seeing, just hanging out, relaxing, and being together (Editor's note: isn't that how a vacation should always be? Otherwise, you end up needing a vacation from your vacation!) He then talked about "his worst vacation", the time he went with me to train chopsticks combat in a secret ninja valley. How it was such a traumatic experience with all the blood and guts and fighting, and now he's definitely a fork-and-spoon man ;) I love it when the Table Topics speakers tie previous speakers' speeches into theirs, especially when the previous speaker was me.
The Timer gave us a report on the eligibility of the table topics speakers, and we cast our votes for Best Table Topics Speaker via anonymous ballot. The results would be announced near the end of the meeting.
THE EVALUATION PORTION OF THE MEETING
The next portion of the meeting was evaluation. Toastmasters is big about giving its members tons of feedback so they can grow and improve as speakers. Plus, it ties into the whole fact of how, the best way to learn is to teach other people. During the evaluation portion of the meeting, the General Evaluator (one of those rotating leadership roles) calls up the evaluators for the individual prepared speakers and the evaluators give speeches full of feedback for their associated speakers.
The first evaluation was rather dry, and it went way over time. I'm not sure whether the evaluator just didn't see the red light from the Timer, or whether he just ignored it?
The second evaluator was me evaluating my body language guy. I like to start and end with compliments, and alternate between compliments and criticisms in the middle. That way, the evaluation is encouraging, but not fluffy and useless. I complimented the guy on the great choice of topic (what lends itself better to body language than a speech about how people eat?) I pointed out his biased eye contact. I complimented his smile, I pointed out how he always cuffed his hands in front of him, and then I complimented his gestures (which were pretty good, if you discount how he kept the cuffed hands). And I finished my evaluation by talking a little bit about the values of body language in general.
I wasn't all that happy with the evaluation. I feel like my speaking skills were a little rusty (well, the last time I went to a meeting was over a month ago!) I also felt that I ended up spending too much time on the criticisms and flying through the compliments. The overall evaluation speech that I gave had too much of a critical feel to it.
The third evaluator's speech was fairly straightforward and run-of-the-mill. He congratulated the speaker because the speaker was close to finishing the competent communicator manual.
The Timer gave the final Timer's report, listing the times for all the timed speeches (the prepared speeches, the Table Topics speeches, and the evaluations), and indicating which evaluators were eligible for Best Evaluator (based on whether or not they met the time requirements). My Table Topics speech was 1:24 and my evaluation was 3:07. The first evaluator was ineligible due to going over time. The club voted by anonymous ballot for best evaluator.
THE GRAMMARIAN'S REPORT
The grammarian's report followed. The grammarian was pretty nitpicky about some fairly silly things. He criticized one speaker's pronunciation of "because" with a "u" sound as in "luck" instead of an "au" sound as in "cause". Even though, I'm fairly sure, the former is actually the more common version, at least in the U.S. Basically, he was a prescriptivist, imposing silly rules of speech on people as if people are supposed to model grammar instead of grammar modeling people. (Read about the prescriptivist philosophy and descriptivist philosophy of linguistics at my article, Prescriptive Linguistics vs. Descriptive Linguistics.) He pointed out that he thought where one speaker said "extensive amount of facts", the speaker should've said "extensive number of facts."
GENERAL EVALUATOR
For the end of the evaluation part of the meeting, the General Evaluator gave his general evaluation of the meeting. He had arranged with all us evaluators beforehand and asked us all to make sure to point out two ways the speakers could improve (for me, that was pointing out the eye contact thing and the hand-cuff thing). He made a big deal about that, and about how useless an evaluation is if it's nothing but fluffy compliments.
One thing the General Evaluator pointed out was how there's no need to thank the audience. Many speakers, at the end of their speeches, say "Thank you" to the audience, but the fact is, it should be the audience thanking the speaker, for providing all that value to them.
The Master Evaluator also called out the third speaker, the speaker who made the persuasive speech, for doing more of an inspirational speech than a persuasive speech. I guess that's a fairly common problem with that speech. Inspiration and persuasion are closely linked and a lot of people give inspirational speeches more naturally, since inspiration tends to be a little less confrontational than persuasion.
AWARDS
The Best Table Topics award went to the guy who talked about living next to a garbage dump. His speech really was genuinely funny; the guy has studied improv comedy before.
Best Evaluator Award was a tie between myself and the third Evaluator. I guess it would've been mine exclusively, if I'd voted for myself, but I was too busy taking the notes for this writeup; anyway, I don't generally vote for roles where I was a contestant anyway, or if I do, I vote for someone else. Voting for myself just seems kind of tacky, and I really don't care that much about the awards anyway.
The Best Speech award went to the first speaker, who spoke about Osteopathics.
CLOSING THE TOASTMASTERS MEETING
The acting-president discussed the agendas for the coming meetings and made sure all the roles were filled. Interestingly, he contradicted the third speaker, the "Getting the Most out of Toastmasters" speaker. In trying to fill the Toastmaster slot for next meeting, the acting-president pointed out how "Toastmaster takes almost no preparation". Even though the third speaker had used it as an example of a role that takes lots of preparation. I guess with Toastmaster, it's as much preparation as you wanna put into it. Usually, the more preparation the Toastmaster of the Evening puts in, the more awesome the meeting will be.
The last part of the Toastmasters Meeting is feedback from guests.
The first guest said: "I really liked it [the meeting], I'll definitely come back, it's a good place to start." (Start what? Public speaking, I guess)
The second guest pointed out how little technology (like powerpoint etc.) was used in the meeting. The acting-president replied with some examples of technology some members use; it's just that we don't use it for most speeches. It was also pointed out that in our club (unlike a lot of clubs), each member is given a video tape of their first speech, and any time they want another speech taped, they can just bring in the tape and give it to the Sergeant-at-Arms, who will tape over it with their next speech.
The fourth guest (the third had to leave early) said: "A pretty good experience, a lot to learn, I'm still getting up to speed with all the rules and procedures."
Feedback from guests is good because it ensures the club will always continue to grow and mature, and we won't become blind to any of our faults. Guests are constantly coming and going and giving the club lots of good feedback. With that, the meeting was closed.
FURTHER READING
I wrote a Toastmasters Introduction with lots of information about the club, especially the various meeting roles. It also has information on how to get in Toastmasters yourself. There are clubs all over the place, and probably in your city. Toastmasters is an international club, with groups all over the world.
Public speaking is a good skill. As a matter of fact, a competent public speaker can speak about any arbitrary skill they have; that makes public speaking an example of a Metaskill. Metaskills are skills which you use on other skills. Read more about Skills and Metaskills.
Something Toastmasters is good at training is Self Responsibility. Self-responsibility is taking power of your own life and acknowledging that you're the only one who can ultimately control your life.
Posts
1 comments:
He wasn't necessarily a prescriptivist. Grammar books these days often are descriptivist, however they must somehow decide what is the most common way people say things. The most common way people say things becomes grammar, and those not adhering to these rules should surely be told that they are incorrect.
If anyone can say anything they like, then it would be much harder to understand everyone. Until some weird phrase becomes used by the majority, surely it is in a sense incorrect.
Post a Comment