Susan Rayner

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.

By Sina Behbhani, HOD Speakers Club, DivL Area61

I would like to talk about a shared problem we all experience but we are too polite to talk about. Then I will explain how to support members through three stages of transformation in Toastmasters International.

Toastmasters provides a mutually supportive environment, but what does it mean and how can we practice that?

Have you ever been in a situation where you have received irrelevant evaluation or advice when you have carefully crafted your speech? You may think “So, didn’t they get it or I was not clear enough?”.  In my experience, both can be right.

There is no doubt that evaluation helps speakers, tremendously, to develop their presentations and the structures of their speeches, however, a speaker needs to be aware of the extent of adapting to the evaluations offered.

The truth is, even if you deliver a perfect speech, some evaluators will analyse and criticise you, somehow, because that’s what they are good at! There is no end to this criticism and that is completely natural because not everyone has the same taste. Also, it is not practical to take all advice and ideas on board, because evaluation may take you in a different direction every time. Accepting all evaluation can kill your style and confidence in my opinion!

In fact, many individuals may think that you must become like them and convert to their style to become perfect! They will criticise you until that happens (god forbid!) so, the question is, where should we draw that line?

If you have been long enough in Toastmasters, you know that every single person has a particular style just like yourself. The real art of mutual support is to help members find their own style and support them to achieve their own objective. Some people like to attend contests, some people like to deliver long informative workshops at their workplace and some like to become motivational and inspiring. That is why we have ten fantastic pathways to choose from. So the golden rule is to offer safety and support to each other.

I think one of the biggest mistakes in Toastmasters is that we do not emphasise an individual’s organic goals/choices and unintentionally redirect their efforts towards the contests. It is really important to understand why the individual has come to a club before starting his/her journey and how the club can serve that individual to achieve the desired goal. No one has come to Toastmasters’ to do speech contests, because before they join, they didn’t know such a thing exist! Let’s always remeber the true intention of the individual and remind them about it before converting them into contestants to make the club proud.

Such an attitude allows members to develop their style and that is exactly where members start the journey of success by going through three stages of transformation.

The three stages of transformations are gaining confidence, structuring the speeches and developing spontaneous speech. 

For the first stage, members need emotional support to be able to stand in front of the audience and perform their speech. as much as praising and compliments strengthen an individual’s confidence at this stage, technical evaluation, criticising and mentioning minor mistakes can obstruct an individual’s growth or make them back-off on the first step.

In the second stage, members start to build up a well-rounded and structured speech to impact, inform, inspire and influence the audience. As much as technical evaluation can strengthen members influential skills, diverting the individual from their main objective and offering competition centred evaluation can dishearten or confuse the member.

The final stage is when the individual has learned the techniques and is ready to talk about any desirable subject spontaneously on stage in a conversational style. Spontaneous speech provides opportunities for an authentic choice of words with the appropriate audience without rigid planning in advance. This is not an ‘unprepared’ speech, but it is the ability to present and lead with confidence.

Recognising and encouraging members unique flavour of topic and style on this final phase can strengthen the individual but pushing the individual to follow a rigid club’s structure can make the member uncomfortable and eventually leave the club. This, I saw over and over.

Experiencing fantastic support from my peers, I managed to reach the third stage. I also experienced the difficulties that unsupportive or contest centred evaluation caused in my journey.

Now, even though I happily perform my speech spontaneously, still I get the same spectrum of evaluation from members who have been inspired to members who try to make me like themselves and never satisfied!

I would like to offer one and only one piece of advice: You are unique. Become comfortable in your own skin! Speaking and leadership opportunities are presented to you in your everyday life, not only in competitions.