Report about my Toastmasters Meeting
Introduction
Toastmaster meetings are meetings whose main areas of focus are leadership skills, public speaking, and interpersonal communication. The meetings are good because they enable people to develop good leadership and communication skills. Therefore, individuals are encouraged to attend such meetings. Toastmasters International has member clubs around the world. The main aim of the Toastmasters is to help the members of the clubs to learn and improve on skills, such as listening, thinking, and speaking.
Body
Just like any other meeting, my club members, and I were ushered in on our arrival at the venue of the meeting. Drinks and snacks were served at the entrance, but we had to pay for them. We were each handed a piece of paper containing information about the day’s schedule. After that, we were escorted to our seats where there were notebooks and pens for everybody’s use.
The venue was more than three quarter full of people. There were people from different ages, races, and backgrounds. It was such a diversity of people. There were people of all ages but more than two thirds of them were more or less my age.
There is a person who stays at the centre of the meeting. The person performs the role of a master of ceremony. He or she is called the toastmaster. The role of the toastmaster is to decide before the meeting what the theme of discussion will be. The toastmaster is also responsible for assigning roles to club members. This is necessary for the full coverage of the topics of discussion for the meeting.
Several topics were discussed in the meeting, all of which were spoken about by different featured speakers: Speaker #1 Safety equipment on the job; Speaker #2 Ice breaker Speaker; #3 The fear of change: who ate my cheese; Speaker #4 new Infiltration system designed from the skeptic system; and Speaker #5 campaign speech.
The meeting started with some level of participation by the audience. The Table Topic Master chose people at random from the audience to speak about the topics he had prepared before the meeting. The members of the audience had to come forward, introduce themselves to the rest of the audience, and start with an icebreaker before continuing with the speech.
Thereafter, a chance was given to four featured speakers who talked about the topics mentioned above (in paragraph seven). The speakers had been given speech manuals, and they were required to talk for five to ten minutes. The speech manuals gave them the areas to focus on, for example, gestures. Towards the end of the event, each of the featured speakers was evaluated.
Conclusions
I found out that the random selection of members of the audience to give impromptu speeches was a very good idea as it puts someone in a forced situation, and therefore helps the person overcome his or her fear of public speaking, and as a result discover his or her strengths. One weakness, however, was that the featured speakers may not have been very familiar or well informed about their topics, and the fact that the evaluators paid attentions to particular aspects like body language (which was not revealed to the audience) makes getting the intended lesson hard. Toastmaster meeting is a great place to improve an individual’s skills.