John Richardson of Success Begins Today made an excellent observation about how the “You Have the Right to Be Wrong” concept applies to Toastmasters.
I was at a Toastmasters meeting on Monday, and since we had five guests that evening, we all did a round of introductions. One of our members introduced himself by saying [...]
Several readers have informed me they’re experiencing tremendous difficulty with the issue of selfishness vs. selflessness. Deep down they want to live a live of greater service to others (STO), but they note that their current lives are designed almost entirely around service to self (STS). This in turn often leads to feelings [...]
A well-known shortcut to goal achievement is to enlist the help of a mentor — someone who’s already been down a path similar to yours who can help guide you.
One of the problems I faced when endeavoring to become a professional speaker was that I knew very little about the business side of speaking. [...]
One way to overcome fear of public speaking is to be afraid and speak anyway. As stupid as this seems, it’s possibly the most reliable way to gain confidence in speaking. Be afraid, be nervous, be hesitant, but do it anyway.
You won’t be very good at it the first few times, but don’t [...]
Some of you have asked that I post a copy of one of the speeches I’ve given over the past year, so I figured I’d go ahead and post one. This was a 7-minute speech I gave to a Toastmasters audience a few months ago called “A Cup of Tea With the Grim Reaper.”
The [...]
A great way to overcome fear is to educate your fear into oblivion.
Consider most people’s greatest fear — public speaking. Public speaking has a lot of variables — writing and organizing the speech, delivering it with confidence, vocal variety, voice volume and pitch, gestures, body language, eye contact, visual aids, achieving the speech objectives, [...]
Last night I competed in my Toastmasters division speech contest. I took third place. While I was certainly aiming for first, I feel good that I did my best and ran up against my limits again. The first place winner was George Gilbert, a professional speaker/comedian who’s been speaking and performing about [...]
Ron Lewison, a very experienced fellow Toastmaster, noted that a valuable career lesson he learned was to join groups or organizations where you just barely qualify for membership. They’ll pull you up to a whole new level.
This is outstanding advice.
On one hand it’s uncomfortable being in the bottom 10% of any group. But [...]
Yesterday I competed in the 2005 Toastmasters International Speech Contest for my area (my area consists of 5 individual clubs). The contest was held at the Luxor Hotel here in Vegas. The pyramid-shaped Luxor has a giant Sphinx in front of it, and the contest was held in a room in the Sphinx’s [...]
The 2005 Toastmasters International speech contest season is underway. In the fall I really enjoyed competing in the humorous speech contest, so I was eager to go for it again. Last night I won first place in my club contest (by default since I was the only competitor), so on March 5 I’ll [...]
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