Speaking and Listening: Toastmasters Experience

 Last weekend, District 24 Toastmasters held our annual conference, and I was the chair of the event!  The theme was "Growing Together."  I had helped plan conferences for Toastmasters before, but this was my first time as the "chair", the person who was in charge overall.  It required a lot of delegation and a team of 14 to pull it off, but it was great.  Here are some things I learned/re-learned in the process: Delegate to others clearly.  Assign one person to be primarily responsible for a task (even if they draw on the help of others) and set expectations for when the task will be completed.  I occasionally got nervous about things not happening as quickly as I wanted, and realized it was because I a) tried to assign more than one person to the same task, causing confusion, b) did not share my expectations of a deadline, or c) both! Show gratitude.  I sent both digital and physical thank you notes to my team.  I tried to show appreciate i...

Speeches are made better by stories.  This past week, I combined both real-world and made-up stories into a well-received speech. I opened my speech in the style of a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book.  "You creep in to the dark and dank cavern..."  The upshot of the opening is that I am introducing the audience to the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, a game in which players pretend to be characters in a (usually) fantasy world. This wasn't just a speech about fantasy, though.  I proceeded to talk about how players of the game must each make a different character, and each character should have a different skillset for the players to succeed in the game.  I then related this fantasy to the real world where we must form diverse teams if we want to succeed. To make my point, I told a real world story of forming a team to organize our annual District 24 Toastmasters Conference to be held April 22-23.  I have a wonderful team with diverse backgrounds, sk...