General Evaluator at HNTM, Toastmaster at SRTM. What a challenge to be the chair and only have the agenda about 25% before the meeting… and to convince people to take a number of roles for the first time

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!

Over the next couple of months, I will be creating the new web site for High Noon Toastmasters, Cambridge. Originally, our group went with a free site to cut costs, but I proposed a voluntary custom designed/programmed site that would:

1. Serve as a recruitment tool to be a point of reference/SEO
2. Contain functionality written specifically for the needs of our club
3. Bring the personality of our group into an online offering

Being the programmer/designer of the application allows for unlimited freedom and creativity. Ideas that I have, which will be presented to the group next Monday:

• High Noon: Old West style theme
• CMS backend with full content management abilities (Testimonials, Links, Resources, Articles)
• Area for weekly minutes to be posted
• Speech Evaluation, General Evaluation, Timers and Ah Counter forms to be printed
• Executive officer profiles / photos / e-mail addresses
• Each member has the option for an online profile
• Assign and confirm roles with e-mail notification
• Generate agendas online for printing
• Create and send newsletter/e-mail blasts to the group
• A blog

• http://sixminutes.dlugan.com/public-speaking-blogs/
• http://www.greatpublicspeaking.blogspot.com/
• http://blog.ericfeng.com/
• http://www.publicspeakingforgeeks.com/
• http://coachlisab.blogspot.com/
• http://fripp.blogs.com/

My most recent trip to Iceland was fraught with food poisoning, over-priced cocktails and salads, a trip to the hospital, and a fraud charge on my Visa. (It was also ruggedly beautiful.) A perfect personal story!

Objectives:

• To learn the elements of a good story
• To create and tell an original story based on a personal experience

Assignment

For this project, create, rehearse, and tell a story based on your own personal experience. Use vivid descriptions and dialogue to bring life to the story. You should tell the story without a script or notes. The setting for your story telling should be informal and the atmosphere relaxed and intimate. Ask your listeners to sit in a semicircle facing you. Don’t stand behind a lectern or other obstacle. You don’t want any barriers between your listeners and you.

With one speech left to do to finish my CC (Competent Communicator) manual – and I’ll be presenting this speech next week, I’ve going to start focusing on my CL (Competent Leadership) manual. Completing 10 speeches in a year for my CC was fairly easy, but the CL designation is going to be quite a challenge. There are a great deal of projects – some I want to do, some I have no interest in doing, and others that I downright loathe the idea of doing, simply because they look rather time consuming. Being a PM, I recognize that some projects just may take longer than the original scope given to them, and that sometimes the plan just needs to be adjusted a bit and communicated effectively to the client. In this world, both the plan maker and the client is myself

I need to become more of a “yes” person! When I found out that today’s Toastmasters meeting would be a speech-a-thon and I had not volunteered to participate, my initial thought was that I’d just skip the meeting altogether and save myself 2 hours. However, when the call went out for volunteer evaluators, I decided to step up to the plate and say “yes”. Mind you, I will not be the Jim Carey in Yes Man and arbitrarily agree to anything for the sake of saying “yes”, but I am going to step up to the plate more when I can.

As of late, I seem to be having a bit of lethargy toward attending my weekly Toastmasters meetings. For months, I sincerely enjoyed and relished attending them, but now it’s starting to feel like a chore. I believe this is something that needs exploring.