Toastmasters Club - Learnings

The world champion of public speaking 2020 Mike Carr, came all the way from Texas to Chennai, to enlighten us on the nuances of public speaking. However, the biggest lesson he taught us was to be humble and be a good listener, to be a good speaker. He curiously listened to each of our stories and was friendly to all of us through out the conference. His session left us with loads of learnings. Let me try to summarise them here. 1.  He started off with the famous quote of Marcus Aurelius, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” The biggest impediment for Toastmasters during 2020 was that we had to move to Zoom. But Mike saw that as a pathway and became a champion in the same year. When asked about how he pulled it off, he simply said, 'I had been loosing for 19 years and won on the 20th year!' Perseverance!!! 2. A leader should be a good listener and should always listen to his team. He gave examples of a few CEOs to demonstrate thi...

An inspiring Tamil orator and a writer, Ms Bharathi Baskar left us with several take aways on the last day of our District 120 Conference - Discover 2023. Since knowledge is meant for sharing, here we go with the summary. 1. She was all praises for the Toastmasters fraternity for not only developing great speakers, but also great listeners. She firmly believes that listening equally requires intense training like speaking. As the Internation Speech Contest was in progress, she had to wait for the speaker to conclude, to enter the hall, as per the contest rules. She was fascinated and explained the importance of how a speaker should be treated like a teacher on stage and how it is seldom followed. According to her, chief guests entering the hall while the speaker speaks, might be an intended distraction caused that will demotivate the speaker. 2. She believes that, 'Communication is a path to victory, not only on stage but also in life'. She recalled the incident, where she d...

How it Started In 2015 I enrolled myself in my organization’s Corporate Toastmasters club. A corporate club is limited to the employees of a particular organization. So, I always wanted to be a part of a community club to network with people from various backgrounds. That is when I got to know about Madras Toastmasters Club, where people from various age groups and professions meet during Sunday mornings to improve their communication and leadership skills. My husband became a member and had good feedback to share about the club. Little did I know that, this club was going to be a second home for me in the next few years and was going to bring about a big change in my timid and introverted personality. My Home Club During the 2015 floods in Chennai, when it was raining heavily and the streets were water-logged, my husband started on a Sunday morning to attend the Toastmasters meeting. I was pretty sure that the meeting was not going to happen and most probably the building migh...