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People interested in improving their public speaking skills should really consider joining their local Toastmasters club. Becoming a good public speaker takes
by YZF 13y ago
People interested in improving their public speaking skills should really consider joining their local Toastmasters club. Becoming a good public speaker takes a lot of learning, practice and good feedback..
Editing to expand on this: Toastmasters is a non-profit organization. In Toastmasters you follow a structured program to improve your public speaking skills, initially working through some canned speaking assignments to focus on specific skills, and over time working on more complex projects. As an example, you may work on structure in one project and something like vocal variety in another.
A big part of Toastmasters is feedback so you will get good feedback on how you're doing and where you can improve and you will also learn how to give others feedback.
Since the local clubs are run by the members there are also many general leadership training opportunities in a Toastmasters club. Someone will be in charge of doing PR (VP PR) or taking care of many other things that are required to have a healthy club (which is not unlike running a mini-business).
There is a minor "cultish" feel to it and a few semi-weird customs (e.g. clapping at the end of a speech) but all in all it's good fun and a great way to improve many skills a lot of us don't get to practice in our day to day engineering life...
- taybin 13y agoClapping at the end of a speech doesn't sound weird at all.
- YZF 13y agoThis may be cultural and context dependent but we had a company club and we had our meetings in this open seminar area. I know people looking on us from the outside considered the clapping to be a little weird. It works well though as positive feedback to speakers...
- saraid216 13y agoThe applause is important because you need to congratulate the speaker for getting up there and talking no matter the quality of the talk itself. Because that's what Toastmasters is about. You get to call it cultish when they hide that stuff. :P
- wallflower 13y ago+1 on Toastmasters As a CTM, TM will do the following: 0. Depending on the club, give you recorded video of your speeches along with your assigned evaluator evaluating. 1. Eliminate your verbal (umm, yeah, know) tics and minimize your non-verbal tics (swaying, pacing w/o intent, arms crossed) 2. Assuming it is hosted outside your normal workplace, provide a safe supportive environment for failing and learning 3. Learn how to mentor. Once you get going, you will pass on what you have learned by teaching it one on one 4. Not a benefit directly - but provide an outlet to channel energy towards non-coding goals (getting the CTM designation - which requires 10 speeches is a function of initial speech velocity and consistent effort) 5. Teach you impromptu speaking by forcing you to talk 1-2 min on random topics