A Toastmasters Club Experience

What is a Toastmasters Club?

A Toastmasters club is a club whose members meet in order to improve their speaking and leadership skills. Each club must be recognized by Toastmasters International, the parent organization which creates the framework and rules by which each club operates. At the time of writing this, there are 15,400 clubs in 135 countries. For more information, please visit https://www.toastmasters.org/ .

My Experience

In my search for the nearest Toastmasters Club, I found the Chester County Toastmasters Club #946. I sent an email to the coordinator about a guest visit and found that the club was very welcoming to guests. The next meet would be a special Summer Solstice meet and was scheduled to be in a local park as opposed to their regular venue in a school. I was interested to see how the members will be able to elocute in an open environment with uncontrolled disturbances.

I reached the park a bit late due to a missed turn which landed me on the highway. However, because of the special outdoor session in the park, the members had participated in a pot luck dinner arrangement. The actual session started after a delay of about 30 minutes.

The meeting started with the presiding officer calling the meeting to order by welcoming the guests (including me) and introducing the invocator. The invocator quoted an inspirational thought of the day and handed the stage back to the presiding officer. The presiding officer made any announcements and then transferred control to the designated toastmaster. The toastmaster reviewed the agenda then invited the members who had special roles for that evening. The following are the meeting roles:

1. Word Master: The word master introduces a word of the day and uses it in a sentence. The challenge for all speaking members is to incorporate that word in any of their speaking opportunities.
2. Ah Counter: The ah counter listens specifically for unnecessary and repetitive fillers, transition words or phrases.
3. Grammarian: The grammarian makes note of any interesting phrases or vocabulary as well as grammatical errors.
4. Timer: The timer times speeches, evaluations, and table topics and provides a report at the end of the speech.
5. Videographer: The videographer, when requested, records the speech for a member.
6. General Evaluator: The general evaluator comments on the overall meeting organization and introduces individual evaluators.

This was followed by the formal speeches. For this meeting, two members had prepared formal speeches and presented. Everyone in the audience anonymously scored the speeches.
This was followed by the evaluations by individual evaluator. Each evaluator was paired with a speaker and was expected to summarize and evaluate the speech by that speaker. The audience scored the evaluations anonymously.

This led to the introduction of the table topics by the Table Topics Master. Table topics are spot topics on which participating members are expected to give a 1-2 minute speech. The table topics master gave the participant a choice of a topic he introduced or a random topic from a shuffled deck of index cards.

In the end, each role presented their reports for the evening. The guests were asked for their feedback. The VP of education made a few announcements and asked for volunteers for filling the roles for the next session. The presiding officer made further announcements and adjourned the meeting.

What Did I Gain?

I found the overall experience of being at the Toastmasters Club exhilarating. It was great to see members offer constructive criticism without being rude or disrespectful. Getting immediate and specific feedback is always beneficial to an aspiring public speaker.

I believe that a leader should be able to present confidently and concisely to an audience of any size. In order to further my leadership skills and improve my public presence, I have decided to become a member of this chapter of the Toastmasters club.