pedanther

It's been a busy few weeks in Toastmasters.


At the beginning of the month was the District Convention, which was held here for the first time, and was consequently the first Toastmasters District Convention I've been to. (This district covers a large geographical area and the Convention is usually in a city a long way from here. This is not always the case, because a district's boundaries are set to enclose a given number of clubs, so if they're densely packed it might be quite small in geographical extent, with multiple districts within a single city or even, so somebody told me at breakfast on the first day, within a single building.)

The convention includes speeches and workshops, four competitions, and a business meeting where the key organising people of the district can get together and decide whatever needs deciding face to face (and which, like most convention business meetings, goes for hours and is avoided by most people if they don't actually have to attend). Three of the competitions - for Humorous Speech, Table Topics (impromptu speech), and Evaluation - conclude at the district level; the winner of the fourth, the International Speech contest, goes on to compete in the World Championship of Public Speaking at the Toastmasters International Convention.

The main guest speaker at our convention was Ryan Avery, who won the World Championship in 2012 with this speech. He's the youngest person ever to win the World Championship, and what's really impressive is that he did it on his first attempt, after he'd been in Toastmasters for less than a year. One of his sessions at the Convention was about having big goals and the kind of work and focus needed to achieve them. He also did one on what he'd learned about how to structure a powerful and effective speech, and a more general one on the value of good communication. I took a lot of notes.


Since then, and partly aided by encouragement and advice received from Ryan during the convention, I've finally achieved Competent Communicator, the first level of accomplishment above beginner. This involves completing ten speech projects, each with a different emphasis: one where the goal is to polish one's body language, one where the goal is to become comfortable with visual aids, and so on. The amount of time it takes to work through all ten speeches varies from person to person, of course (and can depend on how often their club meets and things like that), but generally it's assumed a person will get one done every couple of months if not more often... after the first few, I've averaged something like one a year, taking seven and a half years in total.

The problem for me isn't making the speeches; a lot of people come to Toastmasters to tackle nervousness about getting up in front of an audience, but after all the time I've spent on the stage that was never my trouble. And even writing the speeches isn't so much a problem, and usually goes pretty smoothly one I get started. It's finding the starting point that always holds me up: finding something to talk about. Of course, the world's full of things to talk about, but it always seems very short of things about which I can convince myself I have something to say that people will be interested in hearing.

The next level of accomplishment involves ten more speech projects, or rather two sets of five; with the basic groundwork done, at this level one chooses from more specialised projects, in areas like Storytelling or Technical Presentations or Giving Interviews, depending on what will be useful for the life one leads (or aspires to). I'm contemplating the Storytelling set, which starts easy with a project that's just "retell a folk tale you already know well" and then gets into projects that involve finding stories in one's own life; it seems like that might help me tackle the problem of coming up with things to say.

1. Rehearsals for The Duchess of Coolgardie continue. We're at the point now where we've learned our parts enough to relax into them somewhat and explore the possibilities for enriching them, instead of getting stuck on worrying about whether we'll have our lines down in time for opening. Last weekend we had some workshops with a couple of professional theatre people our director knows, which inspired some of the cast to lift their game (including, let's be real, me). There will be another set of workshops this weekend, which will hopefully have a similarly improving effect.


2. The other local community theatre group's production of The Wizard of Oz opened today, and I went to the opening night. I enjoyed it a lot, and although it had some of the weak points one usually gets when community theatre attempts big-budget spectacle - particularly since they were basing it on the movie rather than a version designed for live theatre - there were some moments that were genuinely magical. (On which note, they got major points from me for the way they handled the bit where the ruby slippers disappear off the Wicked Witch's feet and appear on Dorothy's.)


3. The annual performing arts festival has been and gone. I was on the organising committee again this year, and acted as MC for most of it, although I had to skip out for part of one afternoon to go to a Duchess rehearsal. Annoyingly, the part I missed was the part with all the character vocal sections, which is always one of the highlights for me. There was plenty else to enjoy in the parts I was present for, though. It ended on a high, with the final session of the final day featuring various vocal ensembles doing impressive harmony work.

Weirdly, I had the old show-about-to-open nightmare a few days after the performing arts festival was over. Didn't bother me much, I know it too well by now, but the timing was odd.


4. Another thing that's been and gone is the annual Toastmasters Humorous Speech Contest and Table Topics Contest. I usually take part in the Table Topics contest, but this year it was another victim of being scheduled against a Duchess rehearsal.


5. I did go to see Guardians of the Galaxy before the local run finished. I enjoyed it overall, but there was room for improvement in several areas: most blatantly, a number of skeevy jokes that I think it could have done perfectly well without.

It's been a Toastmasters-heavy few weeks, actually.

The usual schedule is that we have two meetings a month, or one meeting every two weeks, which is not always the same thing; in some months the weekday in question occurs five times, and then we have to decide whether we're going to have a third meeting that month.

July was just such a month, and we decided to have the third meeting, with the result that the last meeting of July was followed only a week later by the first meeting of August. And then that was rapidly followed by one of the two annual contest days.

I was the rostered MC for the last meeting in July, which I wrote about last time.

I ended up being the MC for the first meeting in August as well, because the rostered person had to cancel at short notice and I was the most available person to fill in. Weirdly, it was much less stressful, despite having only an hour to prepare. Having all the procedures and things fresh from last week helped a great deal, of course. (And perhaps having only an hour to prepare was as much a help as a hindrance; there was no time to panic, and there was the thought that if the organisation hadn't been done properly before the thing came into my hands, it couldn't be my fault this time.)

The meeting itself went quite well, although it was a bit odd in its own way. I've mentioned before a meeting where a lot of people were away and the members were almost outnumbered by the guests; at this meeting, though I didn't count, I'm pretty sure the guests actually did outnumber the members present. (There have been some outreach efforts going on, so we had a bunch of people showing up to see what Toastmasters was like, and they happened to do it at what would otherwise have been a small, quiet meeting. I have hopes that some of them will come back in a few weeks to see what a fully-stocked meeting looks like.)

As you may recall, Toastmaster contests come in pairs, and yesterday it was the Humorous Speech (5-7 minutes, prepared in advance) and the Table Topics (1-2 minutes, ex tempore). As usual, I entered the Table Topics contest and failed to place, but did better than last year. This year my strengths were body language and use of stage space, as well as finding an idiosyncratic twist on the topic; my major weakness, as usual, was failure to develop the speech with supporting details and just sort of trailing off at the end instead of finding a solid conclusion. I feel I should acknowledge the contest organizer, who set a topic question that included two or three sentences of scene-setting; the time it took to announce (and, in accordance with the rules, it was announced twice through in its entirety) was extremely valuable thinking time.

The Humorous Speech contest was also memorable. There were two competitors, one of whom had stepped up less than 24 hours before the contest started. She's also one of our newer members, so what with one thing and the other she was feeling quite nervous before the contest. And then she won. (The other speech was more polished, but less laugh-out-loud funny.)

In the end, I think everybody had a good time, which is arguably the important thing.

I didn't mention it when it happened, but the final performance of Cabaret has been and gone.

Gone, too, is the beard -- I decided I needed an appropriate ceremony to mark the end of the production, so when I changed out of my costume for the last time, I shaved the beard off. Reactions were mixed: some people took a few minutes to notice the beard was gone, and some people took a few minutes to figure out who this beardless stranger was that was suddenly about the place. (I don't blame them. There were times, for the next few days, when I looked in the mirror and wasn't sure I recognised me.)

I got to keep the coat, though.

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Another thing that's been and gone without me mentioning it is the first half of the annual Toastmasters speech contest. That is, as you may recall, the Table Topic (1-2 minute extempore speech on a given topic) and the Humorous Speech (5-7 minutes, prepared in advance) competitions.

As always, I entered the Table Topic competition, on the grounds that the only way to get better at extempore speaking is to keep trying. I came second out of a field of two, but the important thing is that I bettered my own performance from last year. I had to keep padding the first half of the speech until I could think of something to say for the second half, but I did actually manage it, unlike last year, when the second half of the speech didn't come to me until five minutes after I sat down.

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Coincidentally, this post makes an interesting matching set with the last "Things I forgot to mention when they happened" post I did.

Toastmasters meeting yesterday.

( The project speeches were somewhat unusual. )
( And what was I doing? )