My ODE to Toastmasters International--And my Farewell

I’d like us to go back in our minds to four years ago, January and February of 2020. How fast time flies and how soon we can forget. We had just had an election and because one of the candidates didn’t like the results, thousands joined him for a rally in Washington DC on Jan 6 and hundreds of those supporters entered the Capitol building. Some just wanted to make a statement, some wanted to raise Cain, and did.  Also that month, we started hearing about people getting sick on cruise ships and a new virus in China. Some of us just said, I don’t like cruises any way and most just filed it away. In late February, I was in a meeting with the President and Vice President of the College and they vaguely mentioned that we might have to shut down for a while because of what was coming—yet no one was really talking about massive sickness in the US at that time. Only, it was coming. How little did we know how our lives would be upended.

Four years ago in Jan & February, though, two something elses happened , a lot smaller than either of those, minuscule in importance but still impactful for me. First, I moved to Dalton, under circumstances I will skip for this speech. More to the point, I started attending and joined Lingo Masters, the Dalton chapter for Toastmasters International. It was not my first experience with Toastmasters—I had attended a couple of meetings in the mid-2000s after I came to teach at Dalton State. But joining didn’t work out, and to my knowledge those clubs didn’t last a lot longer. However, I enjoyed the meetings and thought they were a great idea, just not for me at the time. 

Honestly, why should I join a public speaking club? I had taught the subject for 25 plus years at that point. So I went on my merry way.

Until my colleague, Jerry Drye, started talking about his joining Lingomasters. Jerry is persuasive, and got me interested. Now that I lived in Dalton in Winter of 2020, attending would be easier, and I had one goal: to improve my public speaking to non-academic audiences. To get out of my stuffiness and pretentiousness of language. To get real, maybe.

So, I joined, I think around March. By then, as you all remember, the world shut down March 13, that fateful day. Toastmasters went online after the first few meetings I attended. Thus began my journey with Toastmasters.

As part of finishing the first pathway, Presentation Mastery, I am assigned to give a 10-12 minute speech reflecting on my journey in the pathway, which matches my journey in TM. That is why I am here. I did not pick the subject or the time limit, so if this seems long, I apologize. Hopefully it won’t be. I’d like to reflect on three areas of my experience: the projects, the people, and the purpose. Yes, like the many fundamentalist preachers I have heard, I am using cheesy alliteration. But it helps me remember

First, the projects were challenging. To complete the Presentation Mastery pathway, one must give 16 speeches, or that’s what came up in a leadership meeting. My count gives 15. I’ll return to this in a minute. These speeches required preparation and practice.  Every pathway starts with an icebreaker, then there are persuasive speeches, inspirational ones, ones evaluating other speakers and informative speeches.  A good variety. I spoke on growing up in a family of men, owning dogs, leadership, my blog and podcast, and accreditation work at the college.  These are done as deliverables to the educational materials of the pathway, which I believe is the strongest aspect of the Toastmasters program. We call it High Impact practices or experiential learning in the education field. You read, then you apply in real situations, and you get feedback. High impact practices are educational experiences where there is diversity, intense time on task, interaction with the other learners and instructor,  public demonstration of competence, frequent feedback opportunities, periodic times for reflection, and real world application, and high performance expectations. Yes, that is TM, and it is high impact. As I’ve said before, the material in the pathways also aligns with the curriculum of a college speech course. It’s valid and academically sound. 

The fact that it has taken me four years to finish a pathway says something. It says I didn’t exactly rush through it! It also says the program is challenging and varied. Each speech takes into account the main threads of public speaking: purpose, audience, content, and speaker. I had to dig and show creativity for these projects. 

I think creativity is something Toastmasters also does well, at least for me. I think creativity is in all of us, but we don’t get or make the opportunity to do the work to bring it out.  As many of you know, Chatgpt4 and AI-generated writing went mainstream in 2023. For academics who teach writing and communication, it’s been a disaster. I can smell an AI-generated paper, which is very, very easy for a student to obtain in less than a couple of minutes—well, I can smell it a mile away. I know after the first 50 words it’s from AI. Why? No soul, no creativity—maybe some cutesiness, but not something a human would want to admit to writing if they have any pride. It’s organized, grammatically correct, and mostly factually accurate (well, mostly, they get some things amazingly wrong). And boring. 

Now, you can get a machine to write your speech—but not to give it. And not give it any credibility, any human connection, and not much sense of the audiences and its nuances, needs, characteristics.

That’s human creativity. That, I believe, is something TM and the pathways can develop. Creativity is not about painting a picture or composing a symphony. It is about seeing a problem in a way that wasn’t seen before and providing answers not thought of before. As Albert Einstein said, no problem was ever solved by the same consciousness that created it. Our world needs creativity, and we all should do the hard work of developing ours. That’s the main takeway from TM—the projects pushed my creativity.

The second aspect of my Toastmaster is really the most important, and I am violating a principle by putting it in the middle and not spending as much time on it. It’s the people that made my four years in TM special. I have made great friends here. I enjoy the meetings because I enjoy the people who attend. I said earlier that I wanted to get experience giving speeches to non-academic audiences. That doesn’t mean anything except that the people I spoke to don’t do the same kind of work I do. I have learned so much about industry, for one thing, but I’ve also just plain had fun with you all and only wish I had joined earlier to enjoy more of Maria Zamora’s cooking. I will remember your speeches, like Debbie’s speech about her friend with the intellectual disability, and Doug’s Navy experiences, and Jon’s speech about his dad’s passing. Friendships are not the glue of life, they are life. I am thankful for that reason to TM and Lingo.

The third takeaway from Toastmasters, though, or really the question, is whether my purpose for joining was realized over the last four years. Yes, it was. I had many opportunities to speak to different kinds of people. At least 15 speeches, plus I did some competition speaking and of course everyone does a number of impromptu table topics. All of those were to real audiences, not just my students who have to listen! In that time I also spoke in several other venues that had nothing to do with TM, such as writers conferences and at church events. 

That being the case: that TM has fulfilled its purpose for me through challenging projects and that I have met special people, I will say today that I am at a cross roads in my life. I have announced my retirement from my administrative duties and perhaps the college in general , for May 25. We have to hire and train my replacement, whoever that poor soul is. My granddaughter is three weeks old today and I don’t feel like I see her enough already, and she’s 20 minutes away. And I’m aging, although I do not feel like it, most of the time. Two of my novels will be coming out soon and if I’m learned anything about writing is that one has to market and be rather forward about one’s art. 

Seasons in life are real. Like physical seasons, they are limited. Winter and summer don’t last forever, thank goodness. With the end of one season and the beginning of another we have anxiety, excitement, sadness, joy, and ambiguity and uncertainty. And we have to make choices.

I will be ending my time in Toastmasters when my term is up later this year, grateful for the experience. I do so with anxiety, excitement, sadness, joy, and ambiguity, but not uncertainty. I am certain it’s the right thing to do and that this has been a worthy investment of my time and effort. Thank you for making this a great ride.