The Community Toastmaster

I joined Toastmasters back in 2015 for one reason: I had recently moved to Oregon, looked around for events to go to near my home, and then recklessly pitched a talk proposal to an intriguing looking conference I found in Portland. I admittedly should have done my homework about the conference before taking that step. It's a conference focused on writing documentation, specifically for a technology audience (i.e. just about anyone these days). As such, the Write the Docs conference may just be the best-documented tech conference in the world . So there was no lack of material describing the fact that I could have 'wet my feet' as a speaker with, say, one of the five minute lightning talks. But no, I had to go pitch a full talk. And, to my trepidation, it was accepted, and then I had to decide whether or not to go ahead with it. I did go ahead with it , and I've been attending the conference ever since. I did a second talk in 2016 . In 2017 I finally did a lightning ...

This April, I had the fortune of attending the Toastmasters District 7 Spring Conference for the first time. I've been in awe of the District 7 leadership team during my tenure as an area director -- not only do they set a good example of acting as a community and team, but they have a culture of their own that somehow manages to be professional and close-knit and, at the same time, very welcoming and friendly. There are many folks I look up to and enjoy exchanging warm smiles of recognition and quick hugs. Politics and ego seem mostly at bay. There are certainly some strong characters within the district, and those tend to be handled with grace, at least as far as I can see. There was a lot to inspire at the conference, but one thing particularly stood out for me in terms of community, while the leaders were honoring those who recently achieved Distinguished Toastmaster status. Distinguished Toastmaster, or DTM , is the highest achievement that a member can earn in the educ...

When I was approached with the prospect of being our area director this year, I really didn't have a strong understanding of what that commitment meant. Previous area directors had been nearly invisible to me, except when I made it to an area contest, at which point, I knew them only as some sort of authority figure involved in putting on the contest. I had no concept of what our area encompassed, or what lay beyond that. Even though I had been in the club for a couple of years and served as a club officer for a year, the area director role wasn't one of the things that I'd been exposed to much. At the time, Distinguished Toastmaster Maureen Zappala  had recently written a helpful article in Toastmaster magazine, titled  Shine as an Area Director . We got excellent training from our district leadership team as well. And I set out to hopefully demystify the position of area director a bit for the newer members in my area, by speaking to each of the clubs about the role ...

The thing about a community is, it functions best when lots of people are sharing the burden. If you have one strong individual who's doing most of the things for the club, you aren't building a pool of leaders. People may get to work on their speaking skills, but they don't necessarily find themselves involved in leadership. Image by  kai kalhh  from  Pixabay In my opinion, the strongest scenario for a Toastmasters club is to have leaders who know how to lead by example, to delegate tasks to others, and to communicate. Communication is critical to leadership. It's easy for people who are working on a High Performance Leadership (HPL) project to quietly hand-pick a team, work on the project away from the club, and do only one speech to communicate how the project went. Anyone in the club who didn't happen to be there to catch that speech would have no idea that the HPL project happened. I'm a proponent of constant communication on these things -- let th...

My Toastmasters club, Newberg Oregon Toastmasters , meets early. In the morning. On Fridays. When I started there, I was regularly meeting with coworkers in Europe at 6 AM, so starting a meeting at 6:45 AM didn't seem like too much of a stretch to me. And what a start to a Friday! Our meetings nearly always get me going with positivity and inspiration. There's the thought and invocation to set the tone. The speeches frequently bring smiles, laughs, and occasionally tears. We learn so much about each other from the Table Topics as well as the speeches that friendships and deep ties invariably form. We may not all see eye to eye on everything but dialog is generally respectful.   And we have a strong culture of encouraging others in our club.   As with any community, joyful things happen and sad things happen. Babies are born. We have one very inspiring mama who brought her sleeping infant daughter in each week, and that daughter is now a big sister and the pa...

Image by MorningbirdPhoto from Pixabay Feedback is something that I've thought a lot about during my 4+ years in Toastmasters International. It's one of my favorite aspects of the program, and probably the one that has most motivated me to keep going and keep trying to improve. More importantly, it may be the strongest element in creating a club culture and community. And when I refer to feedback, I'm not just talking about evaluations. From our first moment stepping in the door as a guest at a Toastmasters meeting, we're receiving feedback, and the club is giving it. Hopefully club members come up to us and welcome us, and indicate that they're glad we've joined. And that is not disingenuous feedback. Toastmasters know that each new member strengthens the club and adds to the culture. New perspectives, new stories, new opportunities for growth as a club -- and maybe even new lessons in what doesn't fit well in the club -- all are to be had when we ...

A while back, a tweet that I posted with a photo collage of my favorite activities caught the eye of someone in my company's Talent Brand team. We worked together to turn that tweet into a blog post for the Life at Cisco blog. In the process, I needed a hook, or central theme for the post, and I realized that what I really enjoyed most about all of the activities was the sense of community that I got from participating in each group. That post ultimately became How Cisco’s Technology Helps to Build Communities . For this blog, I want to focus on the community-building aspect of Toastmasters. I mentioned Toastmasters in my Life at Cisco blog post, but only in passing. Yet the more time and involvement I put into Toastmasters, the more I appreciate this potentially overlooked aspect of Toastmasters. A Toastmasters club is a community. A Toastmasters area is a community. A Toastmasters district is a community. And so on. Anywhere Toastmasters gather, whether in "real life...