Updates & Posts

By Mark Hanly, Finalist D91 Table Topics Contest 3^rd May 2019, District Table Topics Winner 2017, member of Early Bid Speakers Club

It was a thrill and an honour to participate in the D91 District Final in Table Topics for the second year running.

It was the culmination of a very enjoyable series of contests and events starting at Club level at my own club Early Bird Speakers. Club contests are great. In our club, there is great anticipation and buzz around contests. Participation is high, the audience supportively noisy and and everyone brings their A-game. Thus, while you may think you know a lot about your mates in the club, you learn a surprising amount more at the Contest. It should be illegal to unleash that amount of energy in a room before most people start work! Seriously though, whatever your level of experience in Toastmasters, I would encourage everyone to take part in their club contests. It’s a real fast track to improving your skills and fantastic fun.

Moving onto the area and division contests bring new challenges and fun. It’s delightful to get a chance to play with members from other clubs and to see what new perspectives and approaches they bring. Being less familiar with the participants in these contests than those in your own club keeps the adrenaline and the keenness flowing. It is competitive, good-natured, supportive, and again enormously enjoyable.

This was the first year in which, for totally reasonable and understandable reasons, the Table Topics District Final was held in May rather than being the culmination of a rapid series of Club through Division contests which were still held in autumn. I think for me this presented perhaps the greatest challenge adapting to the lull between the Division and District finals. I’m a great fan of go-go-go! But hey, challenges only make us grow and learn, the very ethos of Toastmasters.

Overall, the entire series of contests is a great experience. If you have never entered a contest, dive on in. The water’s warm, as the old saying goes. See y’all in September for the next round!

By Alex McKee, President of Tube Talk Toastmasters Club

Years before joining toastmasters a Google search on how to become a more confident person led me to an article which listed joining toastmasters as one of its  recommendations. At that time I had never heard of toastmasters and thereafter read only a little about it.

When the time came several years later to make the effort to become a better public speaker Toastmasters was the natural choice. At Tube Talk Toastmasters Club there was ample opportunity to get involved and to help the club members grow and develop. Soon I was Sergeant, VPE, President and while fulfilling all these roles my public speaking skills grew as did my leadership skills and interest in toastmasters.

The public speaking skills I have developed have made it easier for me to share my life experiences and to inspire others with those experiences. The toastmasters experience have made me more comfortable in front of a large crowd – especially in that moment when all eyes go on me. I can much more easily stand in front of a crowd – and deliver. What’s more in a professional capacity I can more adeptly lead meetings and engage in a more poised manner in discussions with senior stakeholders. I am a more effective leader, listening better to colleagues and more enabled to give feedback in a more skillful way. 

And so my involvement in toastmasters has indeed made me a more confident person, confident speaker, confident leader! And I am hoping it will be the same way for many others. That is why as Area Director I will be working hard to inspire clubs and influencing them to enhance their ways of working so as to build confident speakers and leaders. To enable clubs to grow in numbers and to help ensure they are committed to providing top notch education programmes for their members. This will also be an opportunity for me to apply strategic thinking and test my communication skills out. I am up for the challenge and looking forward to it all!

By Monika Swiderska, Excalibur Speakers, Div L Area9

We live in a data-driven world. In the era of social media, online collaboration and internet. The information we are surrounded with plays bigger and bigger factor on how companies and organisations operate, and individuals live their lives. And most of that information is spatial, which means it can be put on a map. When you post a fancy picture of your favourite meal, you can tag you are in the local restaurant in Twickenham. When you are visiting your relatives in the countryside, you can mention that you are in the middle of Essex. And even if you are stuck on Central Line, you can post that you are in Tottenham Court Road station.

Toastmasters is not very different in that regards. We have an enormous amount of data. Data, that is location-bound and can be put on a map. If we think about our clubs, we immediately relate them to a location. A lot of them even draw their names from a place, for example: Covent Garden Speakers, Holborn Speakers or Ludlow Toastmasters. The clubs also have addresses, so we can easily put them on a map. And then, ask some questions. Where are most of the clubs located? Are they in busy business districts like City of London? Or perhaps in a cosy neighbourhood on the border of M25? How they are doing in terms of Distinguished Club Program points and membership base? Can this data tell us a story?

Being a Geographic Information Science Specialist, I look for answers for similar questions in my day-to-day job. But I am also a keen Toastmaster and I thought that with my GIS skills, I could help District 91 understand the spatial data better.

An immediate choice was helping with district realignment. Each year District Alignment Committee is tasked with aligning existing and new clubs based on their geographic proximity in order to maintain the strength of areas and divisions. That is a long process of analysis, discussions and consultations. The final proposal is then presented to District Council and voted on. This year, for the first time, the maps used by District Alignment Committee have been created using a professional GIS software called Quantum GIS (QGIS). 

GIS is a powerful visualisation tool, but it can be so much more. It is capable of storing multiple layers of information. In case of our clubs, before the data was visualised spatially, the Distinguished Club Program points and membership bases were added to the software. This helped District Alignment Team to understand the situation of the clubs better, but it also started to paint a spatial story.

The District leaders have always known that there are locations with bigger density of clubs like London (or in particular Canary Wharf) and locations where Toastmasters International is unheard of. Furthermore, there are areas where clubs do particularly well and places where they struggle. With the use of GIS we can start to quantify that information and try to spot patterns. However, that is just a step away from a colourful visualisation or a map. GIS is a science that is not far from Data Science. Thus, the analysis of clubs’ locations, population densities of towns and wards and overlaid transport links can draw an even more robust picture of our District and help us play to the advantages of our geography. This initiative is an ongoing project called “Atlas” and it is my High Performance Leadership project. As with every innovation project, it is full of trials and errors. However, so far it has been an amazing journey, in which I could link my two passions together. I am hoping that by the time I finish, I will be able to share my passion for maps and understanding of spatial data to tell a better story of clubs and members in District 91. So that, in turn, would help the District leaders to serve their members better.