toastmasters

Last year at work we had to set some personal goals....something that for some reason I can not fully explain....I hate to do. Maybe it is because I focus on how I will feel if I don't accomplish them instead of how I would feel if I did. And in a previous post I explained how much I hate to self evaluate myself because I am always afraid that I will come up lacking. Last year one of my goals was to prepare and deliver a presentation on grossing up payroll to my fellow employees. Well...needless to say....I did not accomplish this goal last year due to my overwhelming fear of standing up and talking in front of a group of people. So this year I established a goal of joining Toastmasters to help me overcome my fear. Just saying this leaves me shaking in my boots. Our young and pretty HR director was president of the club that meets in our building last year and was pushing this heavily. I held my nose and jumped right in before I let myself think about it and chicken out. I have attended maybe four meetings now. My first meeting I sat there all cynical watching these people with big smiles on their faces encouraging everyone at the meeting. But cynical gets you nowhere. So I changed my tune and joined them. Caroline, our HR director, said she was in the club for 6 months before giving her first speech. I'm easing myself into it. There are a lot of roles you can volunteer for at each meeting for the next meeting. You can give a speech, evaluate a speech, be the toastmaster, the humorist,the WAGmaster, the timer, the table topics director, the general meeting evaluator.....the list goes on and on. To ease myself into standing in front of that room and giving a five minute speech, I decided to volunteer for some of the roles first.

At my second meeting I was called upon to do one of the three small impromptu table topic speeches where you are asked a question and then have to speak off the top of your head. I didn't do terribly although I had more than 5 ahs or ums. The WAGmaster stops counting after 5. At that meeting I volunteered to be the WAGmaster at the next meeting. So the next meeting I had to stand and explain what the WAGmaster does. The WAGmaster has to come up with a Word of the day that everyone tries to incorporate into their speech or evaluation or whatever. The word should have something to do with the theme of the meeting which is chosen by the toastmaster and relayed to everyone several days before the meeting. Then they have to count the Ahs, ums, you knows, likes and other unneeded words uttered by everyone at any point in the meeting. (This reminds me of a funny story.....once when Jay was in gymnastics, we were at a meet in Syracuse. After the meet was over one of the contestants was searching for his gymnastics shirt that he had misplaced. Finally he grabbed the microphone and in a shaky hesitant voice that I hope I don't use when I give my first speech, he said "Has any one seen like a red shirt like?" This has become a phrase that we have uttered over the years whenever we are searching for a lost item.) They also have to be the Grammarian and point out any errors in grammar. This requires great focus and attention. So I pulled this off without a hitch and volunteered to be the humorist at the next meeting.

Several days before the next meeting I found out that the theme would be props....using props in your speech. The other slang usage of the word popped into my head also....givings someone their props. This certainly is a theme of every meeting of Toastmasters. Everyone is praised and encouraged and given their props. So I searched the Internet for funny stories involving using props in a speech. In all the meetings I've attended thus far the humorist has found a joke or poem on the Internet and read it verbatim. Well, I found some stories involving the use of props but they were not funny to me. I kept thinking of giving everyone a big hand and suddenly I decided I would write a limerick and that's what I did. I googled limerick first to make sure I had the form right and I found a little limerick about limericks that I used also.

So this is how it went.....

My role as humorist today is to inject a little humor into the meeting so.....
I decided to write a limerick because....
A limerick packs laughs anatomical
In a space that is quite economical
But the good ones I've seen
So seldom are clean
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

But that didn't stop me from writing a limerick so you have fair warning that the limerick that I wrote is clean.

There once was a humorist from Larkin Land
Who preferred to bury her head in the sand
But when the topic was props
she pulled out all stops
And gave everyone a big hand.

And at this point I unfurled my poster



Okay....it's corny and stupid but it was very well received (in fact it was awesome and some one else got a kick out of it) and it was my own material and it is one of the baby steps on my way to my first speech.

I went on to volunteer for a table topics question and delivered my answer with only one um and volunteered to be table topics director at the next meeting.