Toastmasters Has Prepared Me Well

In October, two fellow Toastmaster members, Greg Smith, Mike Gerrick and myself took part in a business symposium sponsored by our local library.

I spoke about listening and did an interview with a local news reporter. Weeks later, the article came out about the symposium. Holly, a friend of mine read the article. She is a high school librarian and conducts a class session with students regarding financial literacy and college preparation. She asked me to speak to her class about listening.

This blog entry is being called What I've Learned Through Toastmasters instead of What I learned At This Week In Toastmasters.

In Toastmasters, the right preparation can turn into a successful presentation. There's a lot of things that go into doing a presentation before you even do the presentation. So, I wanted to express some things I've learned through Toastmasters that were very helpful with my presentation to Holly’s students.

As part of my preparation, I e-mailed Holly asking about the names of the students and their ages. This gave me an idea of the audience, I was going to speak to.

My main focus was to make the presentation relatable to the high school students.  In my listening workshop, I do a exercise where I read a story and the participants tell me about parts of the story, they were listening to.  I wanted to try something different with the students, so what I did was tell a story, but I use the street names of their city.

In another exercise,  I wanted to demonstrate that sometimes a word can stop you from listening and the word “poem” stopped a lot of them from listening and tune me out as they confessed later on.The poem, I actually read was the lyrics to a very popular song called Fancy by Izzy Azalea. The class perked up and listen as I read more of the lyrics. Their listening went up as they focus on something they knew and had an interest in.

Another thing in the preparation that I did, was asking Holly, if they had a HDMI cable that I could hook up to my IPad. I asked that a lectern or podium be put in the room, too. These factors, if not taken care of could have made the presentation difficult.

On the presentation day, I arrived at the high school about a half hour before the presentation. This worked out really well because there was a little bit of a situation hooking up the HDMI cable for my IPad to the projector and that was worked out after some trial and error. But, if I had waited the last minute and came in maybe ten minutes before the presentation that may have been a problem.

Since I was there early, Holly introduced me to Brianna, a student who would be at the presentation. She was in the library with some other girls working on something.

Arriving early, you get a chance to meet people who will be in your audience.  A chance to get to know them and they get a chance to get to know you before you take the lectern. This can be a really tension reliever. During the presentation, I was able to call on Brianna by her name and she was comfortable interacting with me.

One thing I like to do as I like to walk around the environment that I'm going to be speaking in. I like to see where the audience is going to be sitting.

The lectern that is used is very important.At this presentation, I found out how important it is. The lectern that was in the room was much lower than the kind that I have used at Toastmasters. It didn't feel as natural as I had to really look down to see my notes, but since I had practiced a lot. I didn't have to look at my notes very much during the presentation.

Also, I got a chance to get the feel of the equipment that I was using and see chance to see if my IPad with all my slides were working properly and I had enough time to do all that.

Something that's very important when doing presentations and speeches is being comfortable in what you're wearing. I had some shoes on that were so comfortable that I was walking on air. A friend suggested that I should wear a suit and tie for the high school presentation. Since the speech was informal, I thought a casual look was good enough. So I wore long-sleeved gray sweater with gray dress pants and black shoes. I felt good and confident as I spoke.

What I've learned Through Toastmasters is that preparation is the key to doing a very successful presentation. The techniques I used in the preparations for the presentation were all learned by doing Toastmasters speeches. The high school presentation went very smooth as I gave good information, interacted with the students and gave them a few takeaways that they can use to make their listening better.

Art Byrd has been a member of Executive 408 Toastmasters Youngstown, since 2009.

He has achieved his Competent Communicator, Advanced Bronze, Silver and Gold. Competent Leader and Advanced Leader Bronze. He is working on his Advanced Silver.

Currently, Art is the Area Governor for Area 13 in District 10 in Ohio.