Mastering Toast 101

When I sat down after being Table Topics Master, I was flustered and irritated at how it went.  I was focused on how horribly I thought I had done.  While I was picking apart my performance, the rest of the group was talking about the next week's meeting.  The last part of every Toastmasters meeting is filling the next week's roles.  So, when someone asked if I would fill the ToastMaster role for the next week, I jumped at the chance to 'redeem' myself.

The ToastMaster is the role I expected to be the most difficult.  And while it was difficult, it was not nearly as hard for me as being the Table Topics Master had been.  I knew what theme I wanted, I had an idea I wanted to share with the group... I was excited.  I also knew it would give a second chance at the transitioning that I was so focused on from the week before.

The theme I picked was Music.  As ToastMaster I was required to give a brief intro to the theme and why I picked it, which was cake.  The speakers that signed up to give speeches are seasoned Toastmasters, and knew what they were doing.  My Table Topics master is an officer for our charter, and a friend, so I was comfortable going to him with questions on procedure and when the best time to present my idea would be and such.

It was a lot of work.  To hunt everyone down on email and IM and verify their speech numbers and titles and I worried a bit if I was being overly anal, but overall I was pleased to be The Organizer.  I'm a Virgo.  I organize, it's what I do, without even thinking about it most of the time.  And it can get on people's nerves, so when I am ASKED to organize, I do a little happy dance inside every time.

So my idea was to have a potluck for our last meeting of the year.  I love Potlucks.  When I was still in Support here at work we had potlucks all the time, but since moving to Engineering - I haven't had one, and I miss them.  With Thanksgiving right around the corner (this was, again, a couple weeks ago) big, happy meals were on my mind - but I was pretty sure the next meeting (the Wednesday before Thanksgiving) would have a pretty sparse attendance, and one week isn't really a fair amount of time to prepare for a potluck - so I spoke with a couple officers and we agreed on the last meeting of the year, December 15th.  And they said the best time to present it would be toward the end of the meeting.  Since we also needed to take a vote/discuss whether to have a meeting the Wednesday before Thanksgiving as well, I needed to make an announcement anyway before we started filling out the next weeks roles.

So the day came, and I mastered people's toast.  And I worked on transitions, completely forgot about working up a short 'announcement' for each speaker, and shook hands a bazillion times trading ownership of the podium.  Oh, and I said "Um" eight times and used bad grammer once.  :(  The bad grammer usage was called out by our WAG, whose first language isn't English.  It's funny the things you say without realizing it's bad grammer, but someone who had to learn grammer hears it.  The sentence was "If you dug in my ipod right now you would find...{insert eclectic music list here.}"  The WAG pointed out it should have been "If you dig."  And she was right.  I have spent a lot of time thinking about that.  And I wonder if "if you were to dig" would be even better...  /shrug

And then it came time to talk about the next meeting, and discuss with the group what we wanted to do.  We settled on a casual, table topics only, meeting and then moved on to my idea.

I said that there was an idea to do a Potluck, but I didn't want to say it was absolutely happening because I was Toastmaster and I said so... so we would be voting... and then asked "Does anyone NOT want to have a Potluck."

That was my second *headdesk* moment.  As someone laughingly pointed out, it was like asking "WHO HERE DOESN'T LIKE CHRISTMAS?!?!?" with my eyes all squinty and searching for someone to shake my finger at.

I'm not sure how it happened that way.  I had an entirely different presentation of the idea and vote scripted and written down on paper in front of me.  It was cool and casual and I was proud of it... but in the moment I spaced and got self-conscious about presenting my idea to the group... so I babbled and blurted whatever came to mind first.

I like to think that I covered it well by laughing and saying that we had already gone over the fact that I was an evil genius...but I. Was. Mortified.  I had done precisely what I was most scared of - given an impression with my words that was opposite of what I was trying to convey.

...and then I realized that noone cared.  That noone was judging me.  That they understood exactly what had just happened, and it was okay.  Or maybe they bought that I was trying to be funny.  Either way, I took a deep breath and on the exhale felt much lighter. 

...But it didn't stop me from being supremely grateful that the next meeting was only Table Topics and was being run by someone else.

And, even though I can see now that I was actually 'worse' (on paper) at being the ToastMaster, it is still the Table Topics Master roll that I am stuck on.  That I think will affect the most change in my life and communication skills...    It is what I have a driving need to do again and again and again until I get it right.  Maybe it's because I am stuck on this transition thing.  Because I think that is what I need to work on the most right now, and being the TTM is a focused study in JUST that.  No other bells or whistles or responsibilities to detract from the lesson I am convinced I need to learn right now...

At this point I have done all but two of the roles in a meeting.  I will fill one of those next week as the Time Keeper.  The other is the one that scares me the most...and I'm not sure if I will go ahead and face that fear or wait until I am more comfortable with Table Topics and ToastMaster'ing before I sign up to be an Evaluator.

Burning Table Topics

So I'm a bit behind.  It's been a few weeks since I gave my speech.  Since then I have been both the Table Topics Master and the ToastMaster.  This means there will most likely be multiple posts over the next couple of days.  :)

What I am learning is that this is much harder than I thought it would be.  Everytime I do something new and think it's the hardest thing ever, I do something else the next week that's even harder for me.

Everyone handles being self-conscious in different ways.  Toastmasters makes you confront your self-consciousness head on in a zillion different ways, so that you are constantly finding something new about your fears and being forced to deal with them.

I thought Table Topics would be the hardest for me.  It was why I joined Toastmasters to begin with.  I thought it would help me learn how to join in random conversations; to know how to find something to say and how to say it.  But it has turned out to be the easiest for me - because we are given a prompt, a specific question to answer.  And what I have learned is that my self-consciousness, when I am forced to speak, manifests itself as babbling.  I can babble inanely for at least two minutes, about anything I am asked.  Working on organizing the babbling into coherent, well-spoken thoughts is infinitely easier than the rest of what I have found in myself.

I volunteered to be the Table Topics Master thinking it would be easy.  Thinking up questions for everyone else to answer - easy peasy. 

Then I found out the theme for that day's meeting was "Automobile Accidents."

Yeah, I made that face too.

Trying to think up several questions that were in some way tied to the theme, but not morbid or depressing was not easy.  I also found myself worrying about what other people would think about my questions... Were they too easy?  Were they lame?  "I can't ask THAT!!  It's so unprofessional..."  Etc.

THIS... THIS is the problem I have with small talk with people I don't know well.  I worry about the impression I am making.  To an extent, I don't particularly care what people think of me... if they are right.  By which I mean that as long as what they think is in line with who I am and what I think of myself; I don't care if they think I'm wordy or too anal-rententive - because I am.  But I don't want to say or ask something that would give an incorrect view of who I am.  For example:  Nine times out of ten, when I say "I don't want kids, ever!" people assume that I do not like kids.  This is incorrect.  But tacking on the "ever!" and using the tone I do (which is emphatic) causes ninety percent of the population to assume that I do. 

So being the Table Topic Master, being handed a topic I didn't choose, and then having to think of questions that fit in the theme and give me a snapshot of the person answering them, was an EXCERSIZE for me.  In addition, trying to find a way to segway from one question to the next felt stilted and awkward to me.  I HATED it.  Transitions in speeches, in writing, are fairly easy to work on.  But Table Topics Mastering involves using what someone else said and working it into the next question for someone else.  This is a vital communication skill.  I don't have it.  I'm at a loss for how to comment on something someone else said and use it to ask another question.

...But I'm excited about forcing myself to figure it out.

The Perfect Date: An Icebreaker

OR... Speech #1 - The Icebreaker:

This is draft of my first speech...  I'll have my thoughts on last week's meeting and being the TableTopics Master tomorrow...and then my thoughts on being (bum Bum BUM) the actual TOASTMASTER on Wednesday...or Thursday... actually prolly not Thursday - that's Game Day.  But sometime soon.  :)

On Friday, June 13th, 2008 I met the man I would marry and somehow convinced him to come with us to karaoke.  My friends later remarked that this was 'Perfect.'  But, as time passed, we learned that was really perfect about that night was the date, itself.  That’s right.  I met my husband for the first time on Friday the 13th.  

I was five when I saw my first scary movie.  My parents had put my sisters and I to bed, but I was piqued that I wasn’t “old enough” to stay up and watch the movie with my parents.  So after they turned off the lights, I crept down the stairs and curled behind the corner of the couch just as the movie started.  I watched the last three fourths of the movie from behind my fingers and with my teeth latched onto my bottom lip… too stubborn to admit defeat and go back to bed like a ‘baby,’ and too terrified of the repercussions of being caught to scream, squeal or climb onto the couch between my parents.

Being five though…  I hadn’t thought ahead to how to NOT get caught when the movie ended.  So in addition to having to swallow my pride and ask for the bathroom light to be left on and my bedroom door to be left open, I also wound up grounded for a week.   But it was too late.  The damage had been done.  I was hooked.

I spent the rest of my childhood trying to facilitate scary movie watching.  My parents wouldn’t allow us to watch anything with ‘adult content’ – which was almost everything since they were, at the time, VERY Southern Baptist – so I would engineer slumber parties at my friends’ houses instead of my own, knowing whose parents shared my parents strict standards and whose didn’t.  As I got older, I realized there was an entire section of movies hidden away, separate from the rest, in my parents room – so I would snatch upon any and every excuse I could think of for my parents to get out of the house.   I watched a lot of movies in bits and pieces – effectively ruining the scary factor – that way.

Between my parents censorship and the time delay between the US and Japan, where I spent roughly half my childhood, I missed a LOT of movies.  So the instant I struck out on my own, I started making up for lost time… and now I realize that, for me, Horror Movies are a lot like Pokemon… I gotta catch them all.

But my love for all things Horror isn’t the only reason that it makes sense I would meet the man of my dreams on a night they made an entire set of Horror flicks about.

Friday the 13th is also widely considered an ‘unlucky’ day… and one of the first things we learned in our relationship is that, together, the two of us have to be the Unluckiest entity on the planet.  We could eat at McDonalds morning, noon and night and never win so much as a small drink with the purchase of a sammich and fries from the Monopoly game.  In fact, we would probably find the one sticker some jerk printed on his last day at the sticker factory that says “Do not pass Go, Do Not Collect $200” and somehow – wind up in jail.

For example:  When we went to Bonnaroo for our first anniversary, we bought a new tent since the one we had was missing some pieces.  When we reached the festival and started setting it up… we found that the tarp piece that stretches from the ground on one side, up over the top and back to the ground on the other side, was missing.  No biggie.  A typical day in June in Nashville is beautiful and hot.  Our tent top was mostly mesh, so the heat would just pass up on through, rather than getting trapped inside…  About twenty minutes after we finished setting up – it started raining.  Not just raining, thunderstorms of biblical proportions.  Then my husbands air mattress popped.  Then our roommate called to let us know it was hailing in Austin and Robbie’s windshield had been cracked…  You get the picture – and I left out the flight delays, rental car fiasco, demon spawned GPS and psychotic frat boys.

Over the years we have learned to just shake our heads and laugh, or shrug at our bad luck.  My husband has learned to not question my desperate need to DVR things like ‘Dinocroc vs. Supergator’  and ‘Frankenfish’ and our friends have learned it’s safest if we all travel separately.  So when it came time to pick a wedding date, it only made sense to pick the anniversary of the day we met, rather than the day we officially decided to not date anyone else.  And while some couples renew their vows on the fifth, tenth or twenty-fifth anniversaries, we plan to celebrate our “Teenths” – any time our anniversary falls on Friday the 13th, because, for us, that is The Perfect Date.

:)

'The Perfect Date: An Introduction to Amandaland'

Holy crap I just realized tomorrow is Wednesday and I hadn't blogged about last week's meeting yet.  This, obviously, means Fable III will have to wait a little bit longer before we can reconvene.

Somehow I am always the first to arrive to these meetings.  I'm not sure if that's cause I'm an anal-retentive Virgo or because my reminders flash earlier than everyone else's or because I'm still new and excited... but what I am sure of is that it is a very bad idea to sit all alone in the room for a good five minutes before anyone shows up on a day that I am giving a speech.

I was infinitely more nervous than I thought I'd be.  I spent those five minutes not going over my speech in my head like I should have, but instead on focusing on the five hundred different ways this entire 'speech' thing could go horribly wrong.  I was convinced I had toilet paper stuck to my shoe, or my pants were unzipped or that I would trip and fall on the way to the podium...  My hands, literally, shook from the moment I sat down, through the small talk as people began to filter in, through the explanations and the Pledge, through the first speech and only ceased when my name was called and I could latch them on to the podium to keep them from shaking any more - which, by the way, my Evaluator totally called me out for lol.

To recap for a whole second:  Everyone's first speech is the Icebreaker. You spend four to six minutes talking about the subject you are supposed to know best - yourself.  I spent more than one night tossing and turning trying to decide exactly what about myself to talk about.  Even blogged about it.

Eventually though, I settled on a topic.  So Halloween weekend, while the boys were scouring New Orleans for a liquor store, I laid on the bed in the hotel room and drafted out a rough outline.  Only...by "outline" I mean entire speech - because my brain refuses to work in outline form.  It's a jerk that way.  And then Wednesday morning I grabbed a conference room at work to lock myself in for a few minutes so I could time it.  I was pretty pleased when I looked at the timer and saw 5:30 as the average time, so I called it a day and returned to work until the meeting.

However...  the speech was engineered to elicit laughter from the audience.  What I learned as I gave my speech was that I should allow more time when being funny - because pauses for laughter eat into your time limit.  I was over by a few seconds... I don't remember the exact time - but it wasn't over 6:30, so I was pleased.

I'm debating posting the draft of the speech itself.  Would that be too much?   Would anyone care to read it?

The short version is that I met my husband on Friday the 13th - which was the Perfect Date for us - because I have an unhealthy obsession with Horror movies and the two of us, together, have the worst luck on the planet.

The comments I got back were mostly about how awesome I was.  (No, really.  But that's kind of the point of evaluating an Icebreaker, is to make them feel more confident about the next speech.)  The critiques I did receive were the death-grip-on-the-podium-thing at the beginning of my speech (it relaxed as I warmed up and got going), and that there was a lot of content in the speech itself - enough for almost two whole speeches.  It was suggested that I split them, retool them and re-give them for later sections of the Competent Communicator book.

I didn't win the best speech vote.  I will not lie and say I am okay with that lol.  But - I will get another shot soon.

Having done both now - I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that the speech portion of ToastMasters is infinitely more scary and hard for me than Table Topics is.  I had expected the opposite and am a bit...nonplussed?... at this realization.  It makes me want to start on the next speech soon though.  I WILL CONQUER MY WEAKNESSES - I AM SQUISH HEAR ME ROAR!

For tomorrow - I signed up to be the Table Topics Master.  This means *I* get to pick the ridiculous and random questions and make whoever I choose answer them.  {insert maniacal, evil laughter here}

Scary Movie WAGon

Last week I was the WAG for our ToastMasters meeting.  The WAG, as I got to explain, is responsible for counting the number of a times a speaker uses ‘filler words.’  Filler words include, but are not limited to ‘um’, ‘ah’,’ ‘you know’,’well’ etc…  Some charters apparently charge their members a nominal fee each time they use a filler word, (like a nickel per word, just enough to make you more aware of using them) but our club just counts them.  You also get to be a grammer nazi if you so choose.  I was also responsible for the Word of the Day.  I chose antipathy.  I love that word.  It also fit with the Horror Movie theme we had in honor of Halloween.

Word-of-the-day, Ah-counter, Grammerian = WAG

I learned that counting the number of times someone uses a filler word is a lot harder than it sounds.  :/  It wound up being a pretty tough lesson in active listening.  I found myself wandering, caught up in wondering why using “um” to designate that you are thinking is necessarily a bad thing.  I use it a lot, especially over IM at work to let someone know that I have received their request, and am thinking it over.  I found myself thinking about what I should say instead and then coming back to where I was and what I was supposed to be doing with a guilty snap.  Then I learned that you have to really LISTEN to a person speak to determine what their filler words are.  Not everyone uses the standard “um” or “ah”.  I learned that some people will bite back the same word multiple times while they search for the right word, not quite a stutter, but – as one person later called it “a verbal double clutch.”

I have realized in the days since that I double-clutch my words a lot too, changing my mind in the middle of forming the word in my mouth, and then getting the two confused on my tongue.  I think it might be a confidence thing; a fear of being misunderstood that makes me overzealous to find the exact right word, for each word.

Signing up for the WAG spot was supposed to be my baby-step up to giving my first speech…but I think I was more nervous doing this when it came time to give my report than I will be when I stand to give my speech.  To look at the people in the eye and critique them, knowing how hard it might have been for them to speak at all – even knowing they signed on for it just like I did, was infinitely more scary than I thought it would be.  I dislike critiquing.  who knew?

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I wrote my speech for tomorrow's meeting while in New Orleans.  It's funny that LAST week's topic was horror movies, since that is what my speech is (partially) on... but ce la vie.  Tonight...at some point...I have to time it.  Is it weird that I'm nervous about even 'giving' the speech to no one?  Cause I am... a little bit.