Personal goals for the year ahead

by

Club Growth Director – Helena Boden-Brewer

The new Toastmasters year provides all members with the opportunity to review their personal goals for the year ahead. Already there is interest in establishing new Toastmasters clubs across the District. With many members seeking to complete their Distinguished Toastmasters Award by June 2020, there is support for club sponsors, mentors and coaches and running speech craft, speaker to trainer and youth leadership workshops for High Performance Leadership (HPL) awards.  

A busy year ahead beckons.

To support all the activity, it’s all about teamwork. With the backing of the District Director, Florian Bay and Program Quality Director, Arnaud Sartre, this year, I will be assisted by Club Extension Chair, Bob Bowes and Member Retention Chair, Seema Menon. With the addition of each Division providing a nominated representative to service on the Club Extension Committee.

With this experienced team, members wishing to set up demonstration meeting to set up new clubs, help is available. Each division has expressed a projected level of new club activity, there may well be an opportunity to be involved, right on your doorstep. There are plenty of occasions for members to volunteer to serve to support and learn more about themselves along the way. Help is at hand. The District will provide you with a demonstration box to assist you in running the meeting. Along with volunteers to assist with the running of the meeting too.

Many clubs organise membership drives, during the year. Interest in hosting an Open House Meeting for this year has already began. You may find members wishing to manage this event as their HPL project. The District will support your club when you undertake this activity. There is an open house box of goodies too.

For your events, you are not alone. Established members are often seeking openings both inside and outside their own clubs. Their experience is invaluable; from running advanced club meetings, organising club, area and division events, Toastmaster specific training sessions and to cutting-edge and forward-thinking workshops on speech and leadership. The great gift of being a member of Toastmasters, is when you ask for help, it will be there. If you are hosting an event and seeking support, ask for help.

Member retention will be a key focus this year. Our District is ahead of the curve in putting in place provision for membership numbers, before this becomes an aspect of the Distinguished Club Program. To encourage our clubs this year, there is a new incentive is year of 10+. This award will be given to clubs that grow from their membership base number as of 1 July 2019, to 10+ members by 30 June 2020. The 10+ is in addition to the member retention element to the pizza challenge.

Helen Boden-Brewer – D91 Club Growth Director

I am looking forward to serving all our members and driving the Club Extension Committee. It’s going to be a fantastic year ahead.

Excellence in Action

by

Florian Bay District Director

I am genuinely excited to see what the 2019/20 Toastmasters will bring to all of you in District 91. So far, the year started with a bang with numerous excellent Club Officer Training (COT) sessions and our first-ever District 91 filming day. The videos you’ve seen in our latest newsletter are some of the many that were filmed that day. All of this is part of our ambitious plans to inspire more members like yourself, with the possibilities that Toastmasters has to offer.

A lot of you know my passion for achieving excellence at all levels of our organisation. But excellence doesn’t mean achieving goals and milestones. Excellence is far more than that! 

Excellence is when you’re encouraging a new member to step-up and do a role for the first time.

Excellence is when you’re pushing your club to do better than last year on any metric or aspect.

Excellence is when somebody delivers a quality evaluation that builds members up, and inspires to come back for more!

If you are a club leader this year, I would like to invite you to plan ahead to make your club the best it can be. Make full use of the Club Success Plan template that Toastmasters provides. Note that you can also create your own document like Canary Wharf Communicators or London Victorians did. The only limits on what you can include in this document are those of your imagination.

Excellence is also about stretching your comfort zone. What inspires me so much about Toastmasters, is that it’s a never-ending learning journey of personal growth. Whether you joined Toastmasters last month or 20 years ago, there’s still something new to learn and more confidence to be gained. Personally, the confidence I gained at Toastmasters carried through in all areas for my life. Whether you joined Toastmasters recently or a while ago, don’t hesitate to push yourself and to expand your boundaries. A good way to do so is by visiting clubs through our Club Ambassadors Programme.

Reflections on Pathways

by

By Bob Bowes DTM, Club President, Canary Wharf Communicators and Area K31 Director

Change is not easy. It’s frequently met with resistance and uncertainty. Nevertheless, change is inevitable.

Having completed 2 DTM’s and 14 of the 15 Advanced manuals in the traditional programme, you could ask me ‘anything’ about the old system. As incoming club president at Canary Wharf, the executive and I set an ambitious education target as part of the Club Success Plan. Subsequently, I attended a Pathways presentation (it wasn’t as enlightening as I’d hoped!) and off we went.

I completed my ‘Choose A Path’ questionnaire and enrolled in the Dynamic Leadership path but I soon discovered that learning the Pathways program is very much like driving a new car. Just as many drivers never explore all the feature on their display dashboard, many Toastmasters never visit the Toastmasters website or establish an online profile. In my club visits, I now stress how important it is to log into the website before starting Pathways, read the FAQ’s and carefully navigate the program.

Whilst working my way through Level 1 (Mastering the fundamentals), I had to make several phone-calls to Pathways experts to help guide me from one step to the next. How, for example, do you move from one project to the next within a path? Where is the printed evaluation sheet? When completed, where is it stored? What does the circle with the percentages mean?

Bob Bowes

By the time you progress to Level 2 (Learning your style), Pathways starts to get more interesting and different from the old programme. Prior to each project you receive guided information about your next project speech via short videos, learning notes and quick ‘tests’. The value in the Pathways learning program begins to emerge. At the completion of level 2, you are presented with an optional concurrentpath, the ‘Pathways Mentor Program’. I encourage all my club members to adopt this path too, as it now forms the competence and ‘backbone’ behind the club’s mentorship programme.

By Christmas, I noted that some club members were on speech 6 or 7 but had not submitted a level for completion! This didn’t make sense to me, as the level 1 requires just 4 speeches. It quickly became apparent that this was a consequence of members selecting a path and then never going to the ‘dashboard’ again or navigating the path as they needed to. By this point, because I was working through the programme myself, I could coach others through the process and clear the ‘log jam’.

This month I completed my Level 5 (Demonstrating Expertise), where one of my projects was a 360 evaluation with my club executive, and subsequently completed my whole Dynamic Leadership path. I’m now a strong advocate for Pathways. It may not be as simple to follow as the traditional programme, but it is a much more focussed, valuable and appropriate programme in today’s world. Participate in it, talk it up and your new members will quickly embrace it.

To date, 10 members of Canary Wharf have completed at least one level (16 levels completed in all), with another 17 members within one of two speeches of completing their level 1 as well.

Change is inevitable, but as a club officer, leading by example coupled with knowledge and enthusiasm makes all the difference. Pathways is here and it’s our new members future!

 I have of course signed up to my next path already.  ‘Engaging Humor’.

I want the naughty kids, and the quiet kids!

by

By Sam Warner, Ludlow Speakers, Area J11 Director

The teacher was a little perplexed when I asked her for the naughty kids and the quiet kids to be invited to be participants in the Youth Leadership Program (YLP).  She felt that this special after-school club should be a reward for good behaviour to the children that were already achieving good grades. I explained that in Telford especially, (a factory and mining town) aspirations were not high and some children were destined to follow in their parent’s footsteps into benefits and crime without positive intervention.

Sam with the kids from YLP

YLP changes young lives forever, by giving a voice to young people who find it hard to express themselves in a constructive way, or at all!  Most children have been told to sit down, shut up, and do as they are told.  I ask them to stand up, speak up and tell me about something there are interested in. 

I’m just about to start my 7thYLP with 15 x fifteen year olds.  I have modified the program to better suit English culture and schooling whilst maintaining the structure and teachings of Toastmasters. We do three rounds of speeches, culminating in a showcase in front of teachers, parents and friends.  I conduct group evaluations after each speech and table topic and I have added the grammarian role to help the class learn about grammatical devices, new words and filler words.  Each session has a lesson and the participants all get to take turns at the committee roles. 

The teachers are always so grateful and so impressed with the both the quantity and the quality of the lessons.  The children evolve before your eyes.  They surprise you, delight you and impress you.  I have yet to encounter any actual naughty behaviour.  Most schools ask me to return once they have experienced the program and words gets round – I am very much in demand in Shropshire and Staffordshire. 

We do need more Toastmasters delivering more YLPs in schools.  The teachers want it, the kids need it, and it’s a great development opportunity for any member who wish to enhance their own skills.  I’m happy to advise and guide any Toastmaster that would like to give it a go.  I have met adults that received the YLP training at school  who have gone on to become Toastmasters and they say it changed their lives forever for the better.

If you want to know more, Sam has templates for all the agendas if you want to replicate her delivery of the YLP. You can email her

The Year in Review

by

These are my last few words as Club Growth Director. So let’s review the year … 

At the time of writing this article, we have chartered 14 Clubs, and have just welcomed HCL UK Toastmasters Club in J21. Between now and the end of June, we may even have 1 additional Club, fingers crossed!

We also had to say goodbye to 6 Clubs throughout the year. This is never the outcome we wish for the members of these Clubs, but this is part of the lifecycle. 

We have an incredible pipeline of new Clubs coming up in the next few months, from Southern Wales to the South East and London. 

We have celebrated 2 rounds of the Pizza Challenge, and I can’t wait to see the launch of the new and improved award later on in the summer.

We had 3 membership campaigns and rewarded:

  • 18 Clubs with the Smedley Award
  • 35 Clubs with the Talk Up Toastmasters Award (if you haven’t yet received the pack of Pathways ribbons as promised, it will be with you soon)
  • And we are on course for 40+ Clubs being awarded the Beat The Clock Award!

We also recognised many members at conference for sponsoring and bringing new members to their Clubs with the Athena Award. 

Many success stories of Clubs going back to Charter strength after having a membership drop below 12, all recipient of the Phoenix Award (Barings Speaking Club, Ofgem Speakers Club and Connected Speakers Bromley)

Club Support

We have a multitude of new Club leads at various stages, and I am actively looking for sponsors/mentors willing to support a new Club break ground and thrive. If you are a trailblazer, get in touch! Mentors need to be able to commit to 6 months supporting a new Club from Charter. 

The reward is immense, and a successful applicant will also receive Club Building credit towards the Advanced Leader Silver on the Traditional Program. Fancy a different challenge? Becoming a Club Coach may just be the right opportunity. Clubs at or below 12 members qualify for a Coach. Successful Coaches will transform a Club with low membership back to charter strength and for a limited period also gain both Club Building credit andDistrict Officer credit (until 30 Jun 2020 only). This is a fantastic opportunity to make a difference and gain valuable skills. Interested? Get in touch!