Home Newsletter

How Well Can You Communicate?
Brian Lin

How well can you communicate? Do your clients, your boss, your colleagues, your spouses, your children, and your friends know exactly what you mean when you speak? Do you thoroughly understand what they have tried to convey to you? Do you need to do presentations to a full room of strangers? Do you need to negotiate a contract with another company, or the human resources department of your company? To add more challenge, if these communication scenarios have to be done in English, can you handle them well? Most Americans cannot, even though English is their native language.

From 1924, Toastmasters International has trained more than a million people to communicate better, to lead better, and to live better. When you are empowered with the ability to understand and to be understood well, you can achieve many things in life with less effort and more result. What will you learn from the program? From our Communication and Leadership Manual, the following are the No. 1 to No. 5 project speeches you will practice in your first few months as a member.

Project 1: The Icebreaker Objectives: To begin speaking before an audience. To help you understand what areas require particular emphasis in your speaking development. To introduce yourself to your club members.

Project 2: Speak with Sincerity Objectives: To convince the audience of your earnestness, sincerity, and conviction on a subject you thoroughly understand. To confront and control any nervousness you may have.

Project 3: Organize Your Speech Objectives: To organize your thoughts into a logical sequence that leads the audience to a clearly defined goal. To build a speech outline that includes an opening, body, and conclusion.

Project 4: Show What You Mean Objectives: To learn the value of gestures and body movements as part of a speech. To explore the different ways of using body language. To develop a sense of timing and natural, smooth body movement.

Project 5: Vocal Variety Objectives: To explore the use of voice volume, pitch, rate, and quality as assets to your speaking. To achieve a pleasing, natural voice quality when speaking.
For every manual speech project, your club will assign an experienced member to give you both written and verbal evaluations. In Toastmasters, evaluation is not criticism. It is a support system of feedback. From the feedback, you will know what you have already done right, and what you will need to improve upon. Some people were not comfortable to know about their weakness at first. Over time, they start to see a dramatic improvement through this practice-feedback-practice loop.
Toastmasters is a mutually supportive learning environment. There is no teacher vs. student. Members will help each other grow as a team. There are people from many nationalities who achieve excellent result from Toastmasters. In Toastmasters, it does not matter how good your speaking is right now. It matters how high you set your goal to become. Toastmasters do bring out the best of you and me.

I have known a retired teacher who wondered in the past why so many students fell asleep during her lecture. After trained in Toastmasters, she corrected her habit of looking up the ceiling instead of students’ eyes. She learned to properly use overhead projectors and other teaching aids. She learned how to organize her thoughts. She now speaks with a vivid voice, with excellent gesture and facial expression to keep the audience interested. She went out to start her new teaching career. Now she is teaching the teachers, and her ‘students’ love to hear her talking all night. She said “Five years ago, my students respect me. Now, my students love me.”

Toastmaster trainings are conducted mainly within Chapters. There are more than 300 clubs/chapters in the tri-state area. You can always find a club that has a meeting time and place to suit your needs. Beyond the clubs, the Toastmasters offers various conferences for members to participate in workshops, to network with each other and to exchange ideas. This is a great way to meet more great people. Toastmaster credits are transferable. You can join a club in New Jersey, and carry your credits over to another club in Kuwait, Paris, Shanghai, Tokyo, Taipei, or Antarctica when you move.

Toastmaster is a very cost effective program. With less than 100 dollars a year, you will acquire some of the most important survival skills for the real world. Many companies and government agencies pay the membership dues for their employees because Toastmasters has been proven a wise investment for money and time. Many people like me joined Toastmasters with a poor English and a good attitude. Now we become happy people with good English and excellent attitude. If this works for me, it will work for you. Go to http://www.toastmasters.org today, and start changing your life for better!

Brian Lin is ACPA Co-President. He may be reached at inspire@optonline.net.