So I know, that as VP of Education, I don't HAVE TO chair every single contest our club has, but since this was my first since being elected, I chose to do it.

Here's how I managed to pull it off:

[Aside:  what's missing from the following description are a meeting I had with a veteran member of the club advising me on many things that were needed for a contest, a meeting with my fellow board members discussing certain details about the contest, and various other ways in which other members of my club helped out from things as simple as filling in the Certificates of Participation and providing me with some of the materials I needed, to straight up advice.  I do NOT recommend taking on chairing a contest by yourself!  I need to learn how to delegate better, but I managed to delegate some and, when I did, I found the relief it brought me immeasurable!]

Step 1:  Pick a date.

I gave myself about a month of lead time by targeting a week at the end of August. 

[Aside:  I THOUGHT we had to have the contest completed by the end of August, but now, I'm suspecting, that as long as it's done at least 2 weeks before the Area contest, we'd have been okay.  As it is, now that we're done, we have just over a month to wait for our winners to compete again!  Oh well, at least it's out of the way!]

Then I polled our membership.  Did they want to have the contest on an evening? ...a weekend? ...or by extending our normal meeting time from an hour to about 2 hours and have it at lunch on a normal meeting day?  I was a little worried (unnecessarily, it turns out) about participation because I did not get a lot of votes about when to hold the meeting, but those that voted suggested extending our normal meeting time. 

So now we had a date:  August 26, 2010 (yesterday, as of this writing).

In my yoga class, our instructor often has us in positions that sink the lower body and limbs and stretch the uppers. The stretch on its own is good, but when paired with the move in the other direction, now we have something better, more efficient, more effective, promoting health and fitness better than just a simple stretch. Like these yoga positions, mentoring is excellent communications and leadership development.

A good, practical, working understanding of mentoring comes gradually, through experience and, well, through mentoring. Consider how one activity, mentoring, can help two people!

Through a good mentor’s help, for example, a new Toastmaster can “sink” comfortably, efficiently and effectively into Toastmasters programs. Meanwhile, the experienced Toastmaster can “stretch” in terms of effectiveness, helping the new member to focus just on the moment’s essentials and to rest all other burdens until it is their time.

Mentoring comes in two flavors: formal and informal—would you agree?

Formal mentoring is the situation in which certain activities later become the subject of a report or evaluation. It is a starting point, like kindling for a campfire. For formal mentoring, typically, the club VP Education pairs a new Toastmaster member with another who has a bit more experience and seems a good fit personality-wise. It can be a short time, from member sign-up to the new member’s completion of three CC projects, and after this, formal mentoring of the new member can be considered finished, consumed, documented in mentor’s CL manual project #10, and “that’s all, folks.” Thus, the bit of bit of coordination and planned strategy required by formal mentoring may make it seem lifeless. A good mentor can overcome the lifeless part.

HERE IS THE TENTATIVE SCHEDULE FOR THE UPCOMING FALL CONFERENCE

(I AM LOOKING FOR VOLUNTEERS AND SPEAKERS)

PLEASE EMAIL ME - JIM ADAMS (ADAMS.TOASTMASTER@GMAIL.COM)

Here is a place where Susan will scribe her thoughts for sharing this great initiative

I serve the VPPR in Beacon TM 2010-2011.

I found a draft blog entry from after I'd done my fourth speech (toward the end of June) and realize I never finished it!  So, finally finished, albeit out of order, comes this recounting of how that went:

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Ooh!  I just did my fourth speech.  I had previously decided I was going to put some more prep into a speech, but then I turned around and did what I usually do:  picked a date to force myself to adhere to a deadline, then procrastinated to the point where my options for what to do were limited.

Because the objective of the speech was to choose your words carefully, I wrote out the whole speech first, then went back and replaced some words, added some similes, and made other word-choice-related changes.  I rehearsed it a lot... sometimes just the opening or the closing or from some random point in the middle, but frequently from the beginning.  I wish I had started earlier, however, as I would have liked to add a few more rhetorical devices.  Still, the speech ended up being pretty fun.

I ended up making a speech out of elaborating on a personal story about getting lost driving.  One of many getting-lost stories from my early days of driving.  In this one, I ended up crossing and re-crossing the Brooklyn Bridge... FOUR TIMES IN 20 MINUTES!

Last week, we had trouble filling all our roles for our meeting.  The meeting ended up being well-attended, but somehow we just had trouble getting people to go to the Duty Roster and selecting roles.  This is actually not a new phenomenon and MAY have been compounded by the fact that we had made everyone an Administrator on the site recently, which changed the way most people are used to signing up for roles.  Either way, it was time to do something drastic.

I told the club that if we filled the remaining roles within the next 30 minutes, that I would serve as Toastmaster and that I would wear a funny hat doing it.

Well, that did it.  The roles were quickly filled.  So, I brought two ladies' hats with me to the meeting and alternately switched from one to the other as I Toastmastered the meeting.  I also made sure ot use as many hat-related phrases in the meeting ("throw your hat in the ring," "hat in hand," "here's your hat, what's your hurry," "hat's off," "wearing two hats," etc.).  It got groans, but it was a good time.  One speech evaluator and the General Evaluator even borrowed the hats when they had the floor.  It was fun how it caught on!  Hey, whatever works! 

In other news, the elections have come and gone and I, indeed, won Vice President Education after running unopposed.  The first meeting after we had our swearing in ceremony, I was on vacation.  That was the first meeting I missed since joining in February.  Apparently, I missed a really good guest speaker (Mike Davis), but am looking forward to the work ahead as I begin to look at what the role entails more seriously.  I just put the word out for volunteers to join an Education Committee, so hopefully I'll get a little help in doing it all.

Greeting Toastmaster friends, thanks for accepting my friend request... some have sent me emails asking the fair question "Have we met"... the answer is probably "not yet" but as the Fall Conference Chair for the District 40 Fall conference in Lexington Ky, I'm reaching out to all of my fellow Toastmasters.

Tomorrow is Election Day for our club.  I'm running for Vice President/Education.  I think most every position has a single nominee for it right now, so I guess I'm not too nervous about the outcome.  In truth, I feel like I would be surprised if I didn't win, but not disappointed.  My plan is to do what I can to improve our club over the next year and I will do that, whether I'm in an elected position or not.

 I hadn't believed I could achieve this role so quickly (having only been a member since February), but I believe it makes sense for me at this time.  I am very enthusiastic about achieving my own goals and I would truly love to help others meet theirs.  My hopes are that I will strike up relationships with everyone in our club, individually, and learn what their goals are with Toastmasters and what they perceive as their obstacles to those goals.

I am also very interested in boosting attendance at the meetings by the people who've joined, but don't come regularly.  I have a feeling they stay away because they feel like it's been too long since they've been there and will be regarded as a stranger if they return.  I want to bridge that gap and encourage these people to show up, remind us of who they are, and get involved once again.  The more attendance, the more participation.  The more participation, the stronger the club.  The stronger the club, the better it is for everyone.  The better it is for everyone, the more everyone will come.

Wish me luck!

The Death of Abraham Lincoln

Well, speech #3 has come and gone.  It went much better than speech #2.  I prepared much more and it went quite smoothly.  Truth be told, I would have liked to prepare even MORE and incorporate some more props, but it went well enough.

The date of the speech was April 15 which happens to be the anniversary of two things:  the day of my birth and the day of Abraham Lincoln's death.  I wanted to do something about Abraham Lincoln and I finally decided on researching the debate over retiring the penny (what would be ANOTHER death for Lincoln).  The objective of the speech was "Get To The Point."  I had a long, intentionally misleading introduction, so it actually took me a little while to get to the point, but the speech definitely had a general point (to be informative) and a specific point (to provide information on the two sides of the debate and the status as of the issue today).  Long story short:  legislation has thrice been brought before Congress to retire the penny and it has failed all three times.  President Obama's 2011 budget would allow the U.S. Treasury to change the composition of coins at their leisure (without Congressional approval).  Granted that power, the Treasury would likely find a way to make the penny out of cheaper materials.  Zinc prices have gone up over the past few years and the penny now costs about 1.7 cents to make.  If it were made of steel (with the traditional copper coating, of course), the cost would again come down and a major argument for retiring the penny would go away.  So if Obama's budget passes with this provision in place, it is likely the penny is here to stay for a while longer.