Tag Archives: District 59

June 21, 2011 · 10:00 am

Quantity leads to Quality in Toastmasters clubs (#TM59)

About 2 weeks ago I gave a speech at Rosemasters club about the performance of clubs and its relation with the amount of members they have. My assignment was to give a 5-7 minute fact-finding report and then handle a 2-3 minute Q&A period. You may find the video and the script of the speech below.

In this post I just wanted to share a couple of graphics I produced while preparing the speech (one of the graphics is used in the speech) which I find quite revealing for Toastmasters club and district officers.

I took the figures of Toastmasters District 59 clubs at the end of the period 2009-2010 (173 clubs) and checked goals achieved within the DCP program per club versus the members they had at the end of the period. Excluding the clubs chartered within that same year (for which it’s complex to achieve many of those goals in less than a year), I found a clear trend that the more members the club has, the more goals it achieves.

Average members in a club vs. DCP goals achieved (D59 2010).

This fact is so simple that no fact-finding was needed, but I wanted to check whether there was a real difference in membership between average clubs (those meeting 4, 5, 6 goals), good clubs (achieving 7, 8, 9) and the top ones (reaching 10). And the answer is yes. Top clubs have in average over 40 members. Good ones have around 30, while average ones have around 25.

Thus, I believe that clubs should not be content with reaching 20 (as DCP requires) or 25 members. Their goal should to reach around 40 members and ensure they have the highest quality. In that way they would also be on the safe side and resist any sudden loss in membership. Clubs having that many members may face issues of finding slots for members to take active roles in meetings, I guess that the preferable solution is to have extra meetings (meet weekly).

The other interesting graphic shows to what extent incentives shape reality. As Toastmasters officers know, clubs are distinguished when they reach 5, 7 or 9 goals out of 10. A club that achieves 6 goals gets the same recognition than a club reaching 5 (the same applies to a club reaching 8→7, or 10→9). So you can see how officers push members in order to achieve either 5, 7 or 9 goals and how most of the clubs reach exactly those numbers and just a few end up the year with an even number of goals.

Number of clubs with a given DCP performance (D59 2010).

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Video of the speech:

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Script of the speech:

What do you think this represents?

Mr TM, fellows,

I joined TM in 2007. At that time, there were 3 clubs in Madrid: Standing Ovation, Excelencia and TM Madrid, which is the club I joined. Why did I join? Because I saw a great atmosphere, listened to 3 different prepared speeches, good evaluations… I thought “this is a club I want to be part of”.

We can say that the Quality of the club was high.

In this speech I will try to show you that in Toastmasters Quantity leads to Quality. I will go through personal experience, a bit of history and some statistics.

6 months after joining the club I became an officer, I was the VP education. Then I started taking note of the number of members and guests that came to every meeting, I did this for 2 years… I can tell you that as this number grew, the meetings were getting better, etc.

Let me now tell you something about Toastmasters.

In Toastmasters there is a system for evaluating clubs. This system is called the Distinguished Club Program, the DCP. It measures several things: how many members achieve CC, AC, how many new members come into the club, etc… The DCP tries to measure the Quality of the club.

There are 10 goals in the DCP that clubs should try to achieve. If a club reaches 5 or 6, it is recognised as Distinguished Club. If a club reaches 7 or 8 goals it gets a higher recognition. If a club reaches 9 or 10 goals is awarded the maximum recognition: President Distinguished Club.

Now let’s see how Rosemasters was doing these years.

Rosemasters was founded in October 2008. That 1st  year ended with 22 members and achieved 3 DCP goals. The 2nd year it was already recognised as Distinguish Club, for having achieved 5 goals, and finished with 22 members. This year, in its 3rd year of existence, it has already achieved 7 goals and can achieve 9, with 20 members. For this it will be recognised as Select Distinguished Club or President.

What this club is doing is remarkable. Let me show you why:

I gathered statistics from all 173 clubs existing at last year end in Europe.

  • Best performing clubs, with 10 goals, had above 40 members.
  • Clubs with a result like Rosemasters this year (7, 8, 9) had on average have 30 members.
  • Clubs which achieved 4, 5 & 6 goals had ~25 members.
  • The weak clubs had ~15 members.

Let’s now look at clubs of the size of Rosemasters: between 18-22 members. They do not achieve as many goals as this club as achieved; this is why what this club has achieved is remarkable.

Why do I tell you this about Quality and Quantity of members?

As I said at the beginning: I believe that in Toastmasters Quantity leads to Quality. I believe that to make sure that this club continues to be healthy, that we continue to enjoy good meetings, we need more members.

I believe that finding members is a collective effort, it cannot be just an action for the VP Membership or the VP of Publicity; we all need to bring friends, family, colleagues from the work…

We should try to have at least 30 members, and then retain them. How to do that? We can discuss I in another speech. But remember in Toastmasters Quantity leads to Quality.

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May 25, 2011 · 7:00 am

Toastmasters D59 2011 Spring Conference (#tm59)

I belong to a couple of Toastmasters clubs in Madrid and Toulouse. Within the organization, clubs are gathered in areas, areas in divisions and divisions in districts. My clubs are part of District 59 which during last weekend it held the spring conference.

District 59 comprises continental Europe. It is now composed of 190 clubs, having grown from 53 in 2001! (or ~14% compounded annual growth during the last decade) and over 5,300 members. At the event we were about 300 Toastmasters (just over 5% of the population), in which had been the largest District conference in the history of the district.

The weekend was great. I started on Friday by going for a sightseeing 10km run through Lisbon as we would not have any time out of the conference. Then, I together with another ~60 members attended a wonderful workshop by Darren LaCroix which I described in a previous post.

This was followed by which it’ll be my last DECM (or District Executive Committee Meeting, as Area Governor of H2) for a while. There it was decided that in the next District Conference there will be semi-finals to shorten the Saturday speech contest (the conference itself was moved to 25-27 November, in Basel, Switzerland). The District is performing well, now ranking #2 of ~80 districts in the World, though it won’t be recognised unless more CCs and ACs are achieved (Competent and Advance Communicator awards). Then the conference itself started.

This was a special event as Pat Johnson, Toastmasters international president, was also present. She gave two keynote speeches: one about the typical Toastmaster member (to discover there isn’t such in TM diversity) and another one on leadership (“It’s amazing how much you can get done if you don’t care about who gets the credit”, H. Truman), both very good presentations, full of insight and experiences.

Toastmasters 2.0

One important thing to note is that this has been the first conference to be widely tweeted. I had attended other Toastmasters conferences in which only some members were tweeting the event, but in this one tweeting was openly encouraged by Jack Vincent, the moderator of the District account (@Toastmasters59), and proved to be a success. Check it out searching the hash tag #tm59 for everything related to the District or #tmlx11 for that particular conference related matters.

On Sunday morning there was a panel discussion about experiences of using the web in Toastmasters. I especially liked the information shared by Marina Lussich, from her club, Barcelona TM. They got to incorporate the use of the web into the Competent Leader manual by assigning roles as “blogger of the day”, etc, which are taken into account for the CL award. Great idea!

In that session it was also raised the possibility of getting sponsors to cover the costs for the streaming of the conference in the future (privacy issues of contestants should be taken into account). It could be interesting for Basel.

Contests

Finally, the most important part of the weekend: the contests. Again we had the chance of witnessing 2 fabulous contests. The Evaluation Contest results were:

  1. John Zimmer,
  2. Olivia Schofield,
  3. Dermot Greene.

The International Speech contest results were:

  1. Olivia Schofield, who will get to represent D59 at the International Convention in Las Vegas!
  2. Peter Zinn,
  3. Gerard Penalosa.

Congratulations to all contestants!

Once again: The organization of the event was superb: The venue, the rooms, the availability of free wi-fi, meals, soundtrack of the event, characterization of the conference chair as Henry the Navigator, performance of a university Tuna group, the Gala Dinner, the helpdesk, etc… Congratulations guys! After having been in 3 conferences organized by you, you rock and keep getting better!

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May 24, 2011 · 7:00 am

Stage time, stage time, stage time

Darren LaCroix is a Toastmasters member who won the World championship of public speaking in 2001. Last Friday, I attended a workshop on public speaking that he gave in Lisbon, just before our District 59 Spring conference.

The guy is impressive. The 3-hour workshop was fantastic. The deal was truly value for money.

He explained his story more or less in his winning speech from 2001, repeated at an event of the NSA in the following video:

10 years later, he is even better… but he wasn’t always like that. During the weekend he played another video of himself in the late 80´s. He was then a disaster of a public speaker. He then went on a journey of studying the best speakers and working hard to improve until being what he is today. This sounds very much as the American dream story… but having seen the video back then and seeing the dozens of shelves filled of videos and cassettes of speeches that he went through in those 10 years, there is little doubt of the truthfulness of that story. As he said “I use the tool of Toastmasters better than most”.

Some takeaways of the workshop

I will leave below some of the notes I took during the workshop, to share them with you and to have them properly stored for myself (still, if you get the chance of attending one of his workshops, do yourself the favour and book a place in it). Many of them are quotes either from him or from his coaches, sometimes I didn’t get right the source.

The most important part of a presentation: “The thought process in the audience’s mind”.

He introduced the concept of “salting” a presentation: getting your audience to want to hear your message before you deliver it (building up curiosity, tension).

The 4 most important habits to create:

  1. Never turn down stage time (he even subscribed to 4 different club to “quadruple his failure rate”).
  2. Record yourself every time (“yeah, it’s hard to listen to yourself… but guess who we have to listen to!”).
  3. Be confident enough to be humble.
  4. You must crave feedback.

“Habits are like train tracks: take a long time to put in place but once there they’ll take you anywhere”, Patricia Fripp.

On nervousness before an audience: “Did anyone come here to watch me fail?”

“Skill set without mindset will get your audience upset”.

Sometimes emphasizing is de-emphasizing (from the lyrics of some U2 song).

“Clarity and simplicity”, for the audience. Use the stage with a purpose.

“Don’t add humour, uncover humour”. Not especially in favour of adding others’ jokes, if you do that you have to say so.

If you are inauthentic and the audience senses that, they won’t follow you.

“Connect before you can educate, entertain and persuade” (he had greeted 90% of the audience individually before starting the workshop). As a curiosity he mentioned the movie “Avatar”, in which the creatures are connected through hair and ponytails, e.g. “the horse chooses the rider”, in the same way the goal of the speaker is to get the audience to like him.

For professional speakers the pay has to be a side effect.

We are not taught how to incorporate feedback.

“Toastmasters slogan should be: `The best place to make mistakes´”.

“The difference between good and great speakers is 100 speeches”, Dale Carnegie. An average Toastmaster member gives 3-4 speeches per year (it’d take 25 years to give 100). Take every opportunity you have to give speeches. He delivered his winning speech 22 times in the 3.5 months previous to the competition. “What is your stage time rate?”; join more clubs.

“Speaking as a dialogue, not a monologue”. Use pauses to give people time to reflect, especially when speaking to people of different cultures and when you ask rhetorical questions. Since pauses are uncomfortable for the speaker, give yourself something to do mentally, e.g. counting “1001, 1002, 1003…” (Internal dialogue)

Use stories

“Jesus did not use Power Point… he used parables”. Tell one to make a point; then another one to make another point. Use very clear transitions between stories. Be careful of narrating the story: not good to step in and out of the story. “Take us, don’t tell us”. A story goes directly into the subconscious.

“What can you do to tell the story without words?”. The emotion is in the eyes (“eye-motion”). Reaction tells the story.

In a story: at least one of the characters has to change the emotion from the beginning to the end. Focus on telling better stories. The audience needs to know who is speaking: the best way to achieve it is by using the name of the recipient of the message in the dialogue (no need to change position, just a heel-turn).

V.A.K.S. = Visual Auditory Kinesthetic Smell (strongest one is describing smell)

Invite the audience into the scene (use “you”). “I / you ratio”: Even when telling a personal story, use more times the pronoun “you”.

“Tap and transport”: ask a question about a personal memory of the audience and then bring them into your story (they’ll relate what you say with their story, it’ll be their story). Once telling the story is better to use present tense. Do not ask “How many of you…?”, use instead “Have you…?”, the test is that you would never ask to a friend in a 1-to-1 conversation “How many of you?”.

“It doesn’t matter what you see, it matters what the audience see when you say it”, Patricia Fripp.

Not in favour of memorizing a speech (internalize it). Never give a speech in front of a mirror. Do not memorize gestures (inauthentic).

What do you want the audience to do / think / feel after hearing your speech? You must be able to phrase that message in 10 words or less.

On the use of simple vocabulary/grammar: “the audience wants you present, not perfect”.

Hold the silence before starting the speech (shows confidence): the “Ed Tate scan”. How stable you are in the first 30 seconds tells the audience how stable the message is.

Let it go. The true story is not so important. You may have to twist some details or cut some parts.

Opening: CSI beginning, i.e. directly into the crime scene.

Do not preach. Don’t tell people what to do (“you should”), instead tell what you did, what “we” could do, etc…

Recordings of Toastmasters finals speeches can be found at: Bill Stephens Productions. Darren found out that the champions:

  • Had a coach.
  • Paused.
  • Used Word to write the speeches (counting words).
  • Had a sparkle in the eye (they owned the stage).

If there is anything we should take home from the workshop, it is: “Stage time, stage time, stage time”.

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