I subscribed to the Humorous Speech competition of my Toastmasters club in Toulouse, Rosemasters, before the summer break. The contest was held last Saturday. I had competed in the previous round of contests of the club back in March, when I was lucky enough to win the speech contest. You may see the speech in this post.
I say “lucky” because, even if the message of the speech might have been valuable, and the delivery was OK, I did not prepare then as I should have. I procrastinated. I wrote the speech the week of the contest, read it some times along the week, but only practiced the morning of the contest. However, my procrastination was not punished…
For the speech contest of last Saturday I procrastinated a bit more. I thought about the topic during the week of the contest: self-deprecation about my integration in France, OK. But only got to write the speech the morning of the contest. I enjoyed the delivery of the speech, but I guess it was not as good as it should have been. What is worse, even if nobody but Luca and me noticed, I forgot a whole minute of speech with a couple of good lines… this is what happens when you don’t prepare. I came in last of the 3 contestants in terms of judges’ evaluation. Deservedly. Hopefully I will learn the lesson for the next time.
The winner, Dominique, on the other hand made a wonderful speech using an ukulele, which he had purchased for the speech about a month ago, learnt to play few notes to accompany the speech, thought of tens of uses for the ukulele within a speech, put up a great structure, used lots of body language, storytelling… I loved his speech. Congratulations to Dominique!
Pierre de Coubertin said “The most important thing is not to win but to take part!”. After two years serving as Area Governor in Toastmasters, last weekend speech contest at Toulouse Rosemasters was the first time in which I could take part in speech contests again. I didn’t leave this opportunity.
Some people do not see what is in the competition for them. They tend to see it as very much American. Or they may think there is someone who is a better speaker, thus, no purpose in battling in the competition. Others may be afraid not only of public speaking but even more if there is a competition around.
I may understand those points, nevertheless I still think Toastmasters’ members should give it a try. There is always something to learn from that experience. My speech in the contest was a try to explain that.
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.
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:
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!
Yesterday I posted the speech I gave at Rosemasters club last Saturday. As I mentioned there, on Saturday we celebrated the contests of the club.
This is a special occasion every year. Actually, there are two such special occasions in the year. In the spring we celebrate the speech contest and the evaluation contest, while in the fall we celebrate the humorous speech contest and the table topics contest (this last one is about improvisation).
Normally, in weekly meetings, members do not compete. The contrary, the atmosphere is relaxed and inviting you to speak in front of a friendly audience. As the mission of the clubs reads “The mission of a Toastmasters club is to provide a mutually supportive and positive learning environment in which every individual member has the opportunity to develop oral communication and leadership skills, which in turn foster self-confidence and personal growth.”
Nevertheless, some of our members (~5% of them) like to take the opportunity to compete, to prove themselves how they can improve and enjoy facing new and bigger audiences with every upper step of the competition. The competition also puts you an extra point of stress that it’s very good to learn how to handle it.
I have taken part in such contests, and even though I haven’t won, I can tell it’s a wonderful and unique experience. You really prepare and polish your speeches, paying attention to every detail. Then, the day of the contest is for you to enjoy it.
I remember when I competed in Lisbon in April 2009. It was a big auditorium, filled with about 100 people. They offered us to use a micro. I turned down the offer. I thought: “when am I going to have the chance to try if I can project my voice to the last corner of the room? And with such a friendly audience”. When the contest finished, I went to check with a woman sitting at the very back of the room whether she could hear me well. She could. That was my victory for that day.
I wanted to share with you in this post a speech I gave last Saturday at Rosemasters club contest. I was not contesting but a speech was needed for the evaluation contest, so I volunteered.
Why do I share this speech in particular? Not because it was especially good (nor especially bad), but because it has some insights that could help some of you in case you hadn’t reflected on them or made the numbers yourself.
I titled the speech “Snowball” but a more suitable title would have been “Snowball, or the beauty of compound interest”. Please, note that the metaphor of the snowball it’s not mine, so no need to praise my originality here. I borrowed it from Alison Schroeder’s biography of Warren Buffett “Snowball”, which I reviewed in other post in this blog (I take the opportunity to recommend the book again).
Below you can watch the video uploaded in Youtube (from the second 0:42 some helping hand lifts the camera, please be patient during those first seconds). Below the video I share the script of the speech so you can actually see the formula and the charts I showed. Reflect on it; it may help you a lot a long way down the road.
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Script:
“How many of you used to play with snow when you were a child?
Do you remember what the process you followed to build snowballs was? You started by making a small ball with your hands, like this. Then, you left it on the ground and let it roll over itself, so it was gaining more snowflakes and thus getting a bit bigger with every roll… for you it was a small effort, and after some time of rolling and rolling over, you easily could end up with big snowball like this.
It shows what is the future value (FV) of an investment’s present value (PV) that gains a fixed interest rate (i) for n periods.
To put it simple, it means that the interest that we earn over the investment in the first year, will enter the calculation in the second year. In a very similar way that small snowflakes are making the snowball bigger.
The importance of compound interest for our future.
Who is the younger member of the audience today? I will ask you one question, let me see if I get the answer I want.
Are you saving and investing with your retirement in mind? Do you have pension plan or fund?
An extremely important factor in this discussion is that time in the formula appears in the exponent. This means the longer the time period, the better. Or put it in another way, the sooner we start investing or saving, the better.
I made two quick calculations to show you. Imagine a 25 year old person who just started working. If he or she is able to save 250 euros per month, that is 3,000 euros per year, and puts it in a conservative fund which earns 3% a year… by the time he is 65 he will have around 230.000€. His yearly contribution would have been 123.000€. So another 110.000€ will have come from the interest. He will practically have doubled his money.
On the other hand, take a 50 year old person who never saved any money beforehand. He will have to save it in only the last 15 years of his working life. To make the comparison, I supposed that he contributed the same 123.000€ in those 15 years, for this he has to save 8.200 per year or 680€ per month… when he is 65 he will have 150.000€, having earned about 30.000€ from the interests, 4 times less!
Effect of a 3% compound interest over 40 years.
If the young person would invest in more volatile asset, for example the stock market, which historically earns about 8% every year, the new figures would be these ones.
840.000 – earning 720.000 from interests
222.000 – earning 100.000 from interests / 7 times less.
Effect of a 8% compound interest over 40 years.
Finally, with this discussion I wanted to explain little bit the compound interest, how it is making your savings grow, and even though at the beginning the growth seems very slow this is because the growth with time is exponential and we human beings are not very patient, thus it is important to start early saving small amounts, as snowflakes… in the end you will have a big snowball.
Start saving and see you at the retirement age.”
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Final comment: as you may have noticed there several passages when what I say differs from the script. I didn’t learn it by heart. During my first speeches in Toastmasters I tried to do so. Now I am departing from that approach. However, I do write the speech to give it a clear structure, to polish some parts, spot words I may have difficulty in pronouncing (so I can replace them for others) and count the amount of words so I am sure it fits in 5 to 7 minutes (often 7’30”… never more or fellow Toastmasters will start clapping).
Some days ago, I attended for the first time a meeting of Rosemasters club in Toulouse. We were about 20 people attending. During the introduction round we discovered that there were 5 Airbus employees among us, which was 25% of us (plus 2 former employees). This could be expected given the importance of Airbus in the city of Toulouse… but, how important is it really?
I had read in some studies about the impact of air transport and aerospace industries in the economy of a given region; taking into account direct employment, indirect and induced. You may take a look at the report “The National Economic Impact of Civil Aviation” [PDF, 1.5MB] prepared by DRI•WEFA, to see some multipliers (Table 1 in page 8).
In the study, we can see that in the case of the USA, for every aerospace job there are 1.9 indirect jobs created and 1.5 induced jobs; thus one aerospace job creates 3.4 jobs.
If we use the same figures for the case of Toulouse:
Airbus and EADS employ over 21,000 people here;
there would be another 41,000 indirect (employment generated in the businesses that supply goods and services to the aerospace sector) and
32,000 induced jobs (employment in other sectors generated thanks to the income spent by direct and indirect aerospace-related employees) thanks to the activity of EADS in the region, in total ~73,000 extra jobs.
These together with the 21,000 jobs from EADS make up for a total of ~94,000 jobs.
Toulouse is a city of ~440,000 inhabitants, with 1.1 million living in the metropolitan area: ~9% of the population of the metropolitan area has a job created directly or indirectly thanks to EADS activity… if we talk about families, between 25-30% of the families depend on a job created directly or indirectly thanks to EADS activity.
No doubt, aerospace is a strategic sector for the region.
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