Toastmasters! It might be for you

Recently I fulfilled a fifteen-year-old goal and joined Toastmasters. The COVID-19 situation has somewhat dampened our meetings, but I enjoy it a lot. My goals in doing so were to: (1) gain credentials and some branding that I can use in my erstwhile business; (2) improve my nonacademic public speaking skills; and (3) meet people in the community. We also have to have community service credit at the college, so this seemed like a good option.

Next month I give my second speech in my first pathway. They are somewhat lenient on topics, so I hope this works.

All my life I have been in a minority. That’s a pretty bold statement, so let me explain. In my family, the men have outnumbered the women 3 to 1 or 4 to 1 for three generations. My father had eight brothers and three sisters. My mother had three brothers and no sisters. My husband has three brothers and no sisters, and I had three brothers and no sisters. My mother-in-laws grandchildren numbered 4 boys and one girl; my mother’s grandchildren numbered three boys and one girl. I could go on, but I’ll stop. In other words, I’ve grown up and lived in a family where the females are the minority, a family with lots of uncles, brothers, male cousins, and a husband and son. This has been an education about family and men, and I’ve learned four lessons I’d like to share with you.

Lesson Number One: Men and women are different. That may be an unpopular opinion in some circles today, but it’s not going anywhere. We’re just different, in the way we think and communicate and solve problems and parent and work. Unfortunately, people misinterpret different as less than in some way. Not as smart, for one. Since we are all here in a quest to improve our communication skills, I will share what my research has taught me about the difference between male and female communication patterns, which we joke about a lot.

First, we know all statement about male and female communication differences are generalization; they might be true of the majority, but not necessarily true of individuals.

Second, as Communication scholar and linguist Deborah Tannen states, men tend to engage in report talk, with a desire to fix or solve problems, and women tend to engage more in rapport talk, where relationship is the main focus. For women, talk means relationship.

Third, in line with the second, we know that women tend to follow more inductive patterns and men deductive. What does that mean. Well, ask a woman a question, and you might, because women like to talk and interpret talk as relationship building, give a lot of details and finally get to a point in a way that may seem rambling and lead men to think where is this going? A man is more like to answer the question with a fairly direct answer, give some details if he has to, and then leave it at that. This doesn’t mean men talk less than women—there’s not really a measure for that, and men do interrupt in meetings more (sorry guys).

The point to all this is that women should recognize that men do not want details and men should recognize that women do not want to be fixed. The term “mansplaining” comes from the idea that a man might give a lot of information to help the woman out. His motives are good, but they get lost and worse, annoyed. The woman also may have good motives in all those details, but the main point gets lost.

I have many examples of all this from living with my many male family members, but I’ll move on to Lesson #2; 

Men are  more fun than women. Sorry, ladies. As Cyndi Lauper sang, girls may just want to have fun, but men excel at it. Having brothers meant getting into trouble. My brother Donald is 20 months younger than I, so we had built in playmates. Why he speaks to me today when I persecuted him so much as a child, I don’t know, but maybe it’s all the fun we had. If there was a body of water, we’d find a way to get into it. We found a huge muddy mini-pond, or maybe it was just a giant puddle, in the woods, and built a raft to float around in it. There was no end to what we could do with bicycles. Give us a small piece of plywood and we had a ramp to go off of and consequently wreck.. If there was a big underground pipe to walk through, we did. And we had beebee guns, of course. I grew up in the time when parents did not feel the need to supervise their children every moment, and in retrospect it’s a miracle we survived some of the stuff we pulled.

It didn’t end with childhood, though The men are more fun than women principle didn’t go away when I got older. I confess to being a workaholic married to someone who is the opposite. As a wife, my husband loved to get me into new sports. We rode all over East Tennessee on his motorcycle. He insisted I learn to snow ski. I was 40, and the main lesson I learned is that someone should not learn to ski in their 40s. We played a lot golf.  He taught me to shoot a gun, which I like.

If I hadn’t had brothers, I would not have broken through that barrier that says there are some things boys do and some things girls do and never the twain shall meet.

Part of the fun is that the things boys do are usually fun for girls too. Sexist or not, I had no problem playing erector sets as a child with my brother; there was no way he was going to play Barbies with me. For that, I had to find little girls in the neighborhood. It’s not that I was a tomboy. If I wanted to play with my brother, I had to play on his terms. Which brings me to the third lesson. 

Men can be more trouble than women. Not that women can’t be trouble; they can. But boys just seem to be able to find more ways to get into trouble. Equally, as I mentioned, being in the minority I had to go with the flow of the boys in the family more. My brothers gave my parents more gray hairs than I did, except I was the one who traveled 600 miles away for college. But that’s another story.

Lesson four:  Just because women are outnumbered, which they are in my family, that doesn’t affect their influence.  In fact, the fewer the women, perhaps the greater the influence, because we stand out. I’ve noticed three kinds of influence women in families can have: by weakness, by strength, and by kindness. By weakness I mean dependence and manipulation, and obviously that’s not positive. In my family, it’s never by weakness. The women are all strong, and I hope some day to write the novel of their lives to pay honor to their strength and kindness, and usually, the women in my family are kind.

My mother is the primary example. Few people were stronger and kinder and more giving, in her own way, than my mother.  She survived the early death of her husband when she was only 43 and still had three children under the age of 16, and one of them severely developmentally disabled. At 58 she moved over 600 miles to ensure a permanent home for that disabled son. My mother didn’t complain and she didn’t find ways to make her life easier at the expense of others. She balanced strength and kindness.  On mother’s day this year my husband said he considered himself to have had the best mother in law anybody could have had, and that was the best compliment he could ever have made.

Being the minority woman in a family of men doesn’t mean lack of influence. When kindness doesn’t work, strength of personality takes over, and then the saying, When mommy ain’t happy aint nobody happy works.  It works great. When momma puts her foot down, aint like nobody else putting their foot down.

Being in the minority has had its ups and downs, but I wouldn’t trade my uncles, brothers,  nephews, husband and son, for anything. Where else would I have learned to shoot beer cans with  a bee bee gun?