Start With Challenge & Support

What goes on convention stays on convention?

Nah! Where is the fun in that?

For instance right at the moment you're missing a fantastic display of Malay drumming and dance. Drum solos are a bit naff but 7 person drumming is an art :)

A pretty good means of communicating too :-D

My first event at the convention was with a pretty good communicator too: Lance Miller, World Champion of Public Speaking. Apparently he is also an Awesome VPE as well.

He had an excellent, open, and honest talk about real life Toastmasters executive. He talked about the problems with aiming to be a top ten club and the benefits to the members. Impressively he expressed dissatisfaction with the DCP and encouraged executives to move beyond it.

His experience with raising a club to 95 members (he was a little embarrassed by that) while aiming for every member to complete a communication level every year was incredible. As in literally unbelievable. Fortunately he explained that the club organised 6 speeches a meeting, multiple meeting times, speechathons, and special events to ensure that members could achieve their goals.

There was practical advise about subtle and blatant ways to encourage members to complete the goal. His rationale also made this epic attitude reasonable. The analogy was with going to the gym: if you only go once every 6 month you feel pain every time and gain any benefit. Similarly speeches and their lessons fade with time and only by repeated hard work can we build big speaking skills that will last.

The bug message was not "build a big club" but "challenge your members and work together" and the big club will just happen.

I'm looking forward to taking these ideas back to Hutt City Toastmasters.