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 [...]
I spent most of the day yesterday on planning work, mapping out the path for growing this web site into a profitable and sustainable business. I created five 1-page documents: a business development plan, a marketing plan, a sales plan, a product development plan, and a web site development plan — all with [...]
Last week I attended a 3-day seminar from Parker Seminars here in Las Vegas. This was a chiropractic seminar (the largest in the world), but they had a whole track on personal development with some top-notch speakers, so I registered. I’m glad I did, as the seminar was excellent (even for a non-chiropractor). I heard [...]
I posted a list of values in the articles section today. This list will be referenced by a future article on how to discover your values and live congruently with them, but I thought I’d go ahead and post the list now instead of waiting until the complete article is ready.
In a couple hours [...]
Here’s a link to an issue of a PDF newsletter from 2003 World Champion of Public Speaking Jim Key. The title of this issue is Give, and it includes a simple story about the power of giving that I think you’ll find inspiring.
This past summer I saw Jim give a one-hour speech on the [...]
Yesterday I was visiting a fellow Toastmaster, and we watched a DVD called Magic Moments II. This is a video that analyzes 30 clips from the 2001-2003 International World Championship of Public Speaking Competition in order to study some of the best practices. I saw this same presentation live at the 2004 Toastmasters [...]
Last night I gave a speech called “The Value of Confidence,” which was about how to mentally put yourself into a state of confidence, feeling certain of success even when your knowledge suggests you should expect to fail. Delivering a speech like this puts an extra burden on the speaker, since it must be [...]
Yesterday I really enjoyed attending the Jackpot Speakers club meeting. This Toastmasters club runs itself very differently than my club, focusing heavily on critique and discussion and less on following the formalized structure of a typical Toastmasters meeting. Linda Bowns and Jeff Lowe, repectively the first and third place winners in the contest [...]
