Toastmaster International is a leadership and communication development organization that provides an opportunity for people to improve their leading skills, public speaking, communication, and interpersonal skills. It is also a non-profit organization that operates club globally in order to build up the confidence level of club members especially in delivering speeches and leading people. Normally, for those people who like to deliver speeches or want to improve English communication skills, they will join the club as members and follow the pathway to build up their confidence level in the certain field that they are not confident of. Due to my workplace has this club, I have this great opportunity to join the club as members in order to improve my English communication skills and leading skills.
Normally, my club has two meetings biweekly for a month. During the meeting, they have word-of-the-day, table topics, and project speeches for the guests and the members to improve themselves in public speaking and communication skills. Meanwhile, it also depends on the title of the day to determine which table topics to prepare for the people as well. Table topics are the topics prepared by the toastmaster of the day to the members or the guest to pick the title randomly and present in front of the audience in order to improve their impromptu speech. For those who well present the table topic, he or she will earn a Best Table Topics Title during the meeting. While for the project speeches, it is for the members that who want to present his own speeches in front of the audience to complete their own pathway to earn a certificate or title in Toastmaster club. Simply to say, it is a great platform for people that want to improve their own public speaking skills and raise confidence level while speaking in front of people.
About the formation of meeting, it consists of toastmaster of the day (help to manage the meeting), general evaluator (provide feedback of the meeting), timer (record the meeting time), grammarian (detect grammar mistakes), Ah counter (help to detect ah,okay, and double clutch from speaker), table topic evaluator (provide feedback for the presenter after presenting the table topic), and project speech evaluator （provide feedback for the presenter). All of this members are responsible to provide feedback for their own parts to improve the flow of the meeting and presenter in each speech presented by them.
Besides that, if you are member of the club, you can access their website to select which pathways and projects that you wish to complete to improve your leading, public speaking, communication, researching, thinking and different type of skills by answering questionnaires in the website. The pathways fixed by the organization are as follow:
- Dynamic Leadership
- Effective Coaching
- Innovative Planning
- Leadership Development
- Motivational Strategies
- Persuasive Influence
- Presentation Mastery
- Strategic Relationships
- Team Collaboration
- Visionary Communication
Advantages of joining toastmaster club
Through joining toastmaster club, you can learn the ways of delivering speeches persuasively and clearly toward the audience. This is because every speech delivered by you to the audiences during meeting, there will be an evaluator evaluates your gestures, tone, and structure of the speech and then provide feedback to you about the ways of improving the your skills in the future. Therefore, with the feedback provided by the evaluator, you can identify which strength and weakness need to correct and improve so that you can deliver a powerful and persuasive speech to the audiences in the next speech title provided.
Build up your confidence level
Nervous, anxiety, worrying, and fear always are the main factors that limit a person to perform speech in front of the audiences. In toastmaster club, it can help to build up your confidence level effectively and efficiently through frequent delivering speech in front of the audiences. Meanwhile, because of facing audiences during the meeting frequently, it can help you to adapt the fear of delivering speech quickly as well. You can express your view in a structured way by controlling your breath and tone.
A good place to connect new people
Toastmaster club is a good place to connect new people from different states or countries. Moreover, you can know more people who has same interest with you in public speaking and share experiences and skills between each other while delivering speeches in the meeting. With this advantage, you can learn the ways of starting a topic with others in a conversation and improve your self introduction as well to leave a good impression to the other people especially you are seldom joining group conversation.
Manage time effectively and efficiently
Lack of time always is one of the main reasons for people quit or not joining toastmaster club. Nevertheless, joining toastmaster club actually can help you to manage your time wisely in managing job and learning new things between working and learning. This is because if you want to deliver speech for the next meeting, you need to find a way to save time to prepare the speech and use the most effective ways to complete your works and spend time to practice your speech. In the long run, it can help you to manage your own time effectively and efficiently by prioritizing your tasks in daily life.
Improve your communication skills
Through toastmaster club, it can help you to improve your communication skills through doing research and delivering speeches. If you are member of toastmaster club, you need to select one of the pathways and complete each project speeches as shown in the pathway. For example, if you select Dynamic Leadership as your pathway, then you have to complete the speeches based on the the title provided in the website. Due to certain speech titles are about communication skills, you can improve it during searching the information about communication topic while preparing the speech for the next toastmaster meeting.
Cultivate your leadership style
If you are the member of toastmaster club, it is one of the good start to cultivate your leadership style in your life. This is because through this club, it can help you identify which leadership style suitable for yourself through answering questionnaires and then develop it by delivering speeches toward the audiences. Not only delivering speech, it can help you well understand about the importance of leading yourself and team members toward a success goal.
Disadvantage of joining toastmaster club
Time consuming
Although joining toastmaster club can improve different type of skills in the workplace, but it is time consuming for you if you are not interest about public speaking and huge workload in your daily life. This is because you have to deliver speeches in toastmaster meeting. You have to finding internet resources, practice and prepare speech before or after working hours. Meanwhile, if the pathway contain subtopic of the project speech, you have to spend extra time to prepare it and deliver your result findings during toastmaster meeting.If you are member of this club, you have to attend meeting occasionally to discuss any matters which are related to the club. Hence, it is important that your intention of joining this club because you may need to spend extra time to prepare your speeches and manage any task of the club.
Joining toastmaster club is a good start for you to improve your confidence level of delivering speeches in front of the audiences by gaining experiences and feedback from the members. Nevertheless, it is important that your intention of joining this club because you have to spend cost (need to pay member fees RM 200-300 every 6 months), time and effort to complete the pathways especially you are working in a company. Therefore, think wisely before you are going to join this club.
If you want to know more about Toastmaster International, click Here
No comments:
Post a Comment