Don’t Miss It: June 19 is VanCore Election Day

Posted on June 13, 2013 by Vancore Toastmasters

Folks, it’s time for the annual election of VanCore directors. Here’s your chance to put your stamp on the club’s leadership team.

As per Toastmaster International rules, the past president – in our case, that’s Susan – drew up the slate of seven candidates, one for each of the seven executive positions, after consulting with the Nomination Committee.

Note that these are just nominees. Any VanCore member in good standing can nominate themselves. Something that’s been bugging you about the way the club operates? Some great idea you’ve been itching to implement? Hot coffee? More guest speakers? A trap door in the floor that deploys at the seven-minute mark, plunging windy speakers in the basement of 889 Hornby, thence to be trucked to Mitchell Island and sold for parts? Throw your hat in!

If you decide to run, please come prepared to make a two-minute speech to sell us all on your virtues. (The only circumstance in which you won’t have to speak is if nobody is running against you.)

If you don’t plan to run, please come to the meeting anyway. The more members show up, the closer we have to an accurate snapshot of what VanCore, as a group, wants. Directors will be chosen by secret ballot.

See you there.

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Let Your Life Speak

Posted on June 5, 2013 by Vancore Toastmasters

Sometimes, sitting in the audience at VanCore meetings, you can tell something big is taking shape.

What Niki has going on at the moment is more than a series of related stories.

In installments, Niki is telling a coming-of-age tale about her childhood in Iran. She is mining, to fantastic effect, the tension between East vs. West, and exploring a young girls’ deepening understanding of what freedom means. It’s personal AND political stuff, funny and terrifying. It keeps us all coming back eager for more, the way Dickens’s 19th century readers waited at the dock for the ship to arrive with the next chapter, so they could know what happened to Little Nell.

“Everything you needed to learn you already learned in kindergarten, eh?” Niki began one speech. “Consider yourself extremely lucky, then. Because I, along with many of my contemporaries who went to kindergarten in Iran in the 1980s, had a completely different experience. Many of us had to pay therapists to unlearn what we learned in kindergarten.”

Niki told of a climate in which even little kids were brainwashed with religious sloganeering. She recounted just how close she had come to bringing very heavy rain down on the family just because, she drew a picture of a figure skater, dress swirling. To her five-year-old self it was a symbol of art and freedom. To school administrators it was a forbidden glimpse of corrupt and hated Western life. (In a touching twist, the story revealed how her father kept that picture even after the family fled Iran and settled in Canada.) This was an emotionally tough speech to deliver, and Niki had trouble holding eye contact with the group – unusual for her.

The next week her story continued, but with welcome comic relief, as she told of being bewildered by the logic of Madonna lyrics.

What seems to be developing here is a book – or a one-woman play. Who is the audience? Perhaps schoolkids, who might gain new appreciation for how lucky they are to be growing up free to speak their mind. Or possibly it’s Persian immigrants who can look to her for as an example as someone who had, and has, the courage to speak her truth.

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Ummmmmm….

Posted on May 30, 2013 by Vancore Toastmasters

Don’t quite know how to say this but, um, we’re backsliding.

Or it could just have been one of those days for the good burghers of VanCore, a generally linguistically careful bunch.

“It was very ‘um’-y and ‘ah’-y today,” said Kate, who’d been working hard all meeting tallying up the filler words. There were a lot. Pretty much everyone was in the double digits.

“Um” and “ah” – not to mention “you know,” “yeah,” Uhn huhn” and the good old Canadian “eh” — are considered unwanted verbal tics that good speakers should aim to groom out. Although Bruce once gave a speech called “In Defense of Um,” the consensus is that “um”s and “ah”s bring down apparent IQ faster than aluminum in the tap water. Most of us don’t realize we’re using them unless someone like Kate tells us. Want to do a TED talk one day? Lose the “um”s and “ah”s.

On the plus side, members did very well working the “word of the day,” “bamboozle,” into their speeches. So meeting chair Jonathan suggested a way to make us feel better about ourselves.

When you use the word of the day you get a kind of carbon credit that offsets the “ums” and “ahs” we’ve been spewing.   “Ums and Ahs go into the books as a debit, and and using the word of the day goes down as a credit.

“The goal is Net Zero,” Jonathan said.

 

 

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Shape Up

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Vancore Toastmasters

A good rule of thumb at VanCore is: when you see Kate is signed up as Table Topics Master at the next meeting, be there. Kate is a teacher, and teachers (the good ones, anyway) are always stretching to get us to see the world in new ways, to develop skills we rarely test.

There were no topics in this week’s Table Topics by Kate. There were pictures. Each speaker you received a piece of paper with abstract shapes on it. Their job was to describe that page such that other members could reproduce the picture exactly. Try this sometime and you’ll see how hard it is. You’ll realize that we see cheat all the time – in the way we see the world and the way we listen. People communicate in shorthand, relating everything to what they know. We actually see and hear what we’ve seen and heard before. Genuine novelty meets a lot of resistance.

But VanCore members are a clever bunch, and they got it.

Each speaker learned from those who went before. The language became more and more descriptive and precise. Turns out, some people think in feet and inches, and some think in metres and centimetres. (The takeaway: know your audience. If you’re addressing young people in Vancouver, choose Metric. If you’re speaking to an older crowd in Seattle, go with Imperial.) The listeners became better at following instructions.

These skills may not be as sexy as giving a blow-the-doors-down speech. But without them, that speech never happens.

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Breaking the Ice

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Vancore Toastmasters

VanCore’s newest member, Patrick, thought he had the perfect title for the Icebreaker he delivered this week: The Polar Bear.

Turned out Patrick’s speech didn’t have much to do with polar bears. Please explain, Patrick.

“Have you ever heard of a better icebreaker than a polar bear?”

The Icebreaker is the least important, but in some ways the most significant, speech a Toastmaster will ever make. It’s the nervebuster, the initiation, and how we it tells people more about us than we think.

For instance, do we hang back for weeks or months, just observing and taking on lesser roles at meetings, before we make that first official speech — or do we dive right in? Do we stick with the subject we know most about — ourself — or do we go wider? Do we put our personality in it, or just stick to the facts, ma’am?

Patrick dove right in, wove a rich story of family history, and definitely put his personality into it.

His parents had fled wartime Vietnam with the idea of giving their kids the prospect of a better life. They ended up in a wilderness on the other side of the world. But to Patrick that wilderness, the small town of Terrace, British Columbia, was a kind of paradise. A mighty river teeming with salmon, welcoming people primed to be not just neighbours but friends. Patrick’s parents had five kids. They named them all, in part, “Bao,” meaning “precious treasure.” This caused understandable confusion when friends phoned the house.

“Is Bao there?”

“Which Bao are you looking for?”

Patrick not only broke the ice, he crushed it and served it in a tasty drink of his own invention.

Call it “The Polar Bear.”

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Mentor Telepathy

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Vancore Toastmasters

You don’t see many people learning to shoe horses at their daddy’s knee these days, or to can peaches in granny’s parlour.

We used to be a culture of apprenticeship. Now we just watch The Apprentice on TV. (How did Donald Trump gets his hair to go like that? Possibly he apprenticed to an alpaca.)

This is a shame, because the apprentice-master relationship was fantastically beneficial to both sides. The student got intensive one-on-one coaching in the finer points of the discipline, and the teacher got a meaningful sense of passing that hard-won knowledge on to someone who could, with luck, develop it even further, in a future the teacher will never live to see. Win-win. As they say.

Fortunately, Toastmasters still believes in mentors, and mentees, and the good things that happen when faucet meets sponge.

VanCore’s mentorship program is now ripping along. New members can choose to be paired with a veteran who will guide them through their first three manual speeches.

This week Renee devoted her speech to the idea of mentoring, of what it takes to be a mentor.

A mentor is not quite a friend. A friend concentrates on being there for you – making you laugh, think, and feel brave enough to ask that guy out – today. A mentor is invested in the person you will be tomorrow, when your potential blooms. A mentor, as Renee put it, “takes a special interest in the next steps.” If a friend encourages (and what good friend doesn’t?), a mentor guides.

Would you make a good mentor?

Renee looked around the table. “Rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 5,” she said. “To what extent do you understand the aspirations and the ambitions of those around you?” Mentorship, you could say, is an exercise in empathy. It’s one thing to teach someone to do what you do. The next level to figure out what it is that person hopes to do and to be, and help them get there on their own terms.

Now that’s a useful skill.

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Shuffling the deck

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Vancore Toastmasters

It’s good to do a different job now and then. People get slow and sleepy in the same role for too long; they need a new challenge to wake them up and make them stretch.

You see this principle in government (“Cabinet shuffle! Finance Minster: you’re now responsible for Education; Fisheries and Oceans? You’re now on Defense”), in couples therapy (“Role-playing time: Bob, you be Linda, Linda you be Bob”), even in the movie business, where actors often decide they want to direct, and gaffers decide they want to act – if only so people will stop calling them by that silly name.

It works in Toastmasters, too. Or at least you did this week, when a number of VanCore members stepped out of character and took on roles that were new to them. Megan chaired. Sun Hee was jokemaster. And Connie, who as club president is the brains of the operation, was “greeter,” which amounts to a move from the grill to the till. All flourished in their new gigs. And all grew a little as speakers by using those underdeveloped muscles.

VanCore is benefitting these days from another kind of nice mix: veterans and newcomers. Guests continually drop in, and this week we voted in new member Patrick Diep.

It’s hard to know what category to put Niki in. She’s no longer a newbie but not quite a veteran. But she’s fast becoming a dynamic speaker. Niki is also more candid than your average bear, and this week’s speech took us on a tour through her personal and even spiritual landscape. Niki’s investigations into various world religions have led her to this conclusion: We may all look like unique individuals, but so connected are we in the web of life that any differences between us are purely illusory. In other words:

“You’re me, and I’m you.”

Which ought to make the next cabinet shuffle a bit easier.

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Judging the Judges

Posted on March 10, 2013 by Vancore Toastmasters

If you’re training food critics, you probably send them to Tojo’s, not McDonald’s. Critics rise to the level of the quality of what’s served to them. (In theory.)

If you’re holding an evaluation contest — as VanCore did this week — you try to bring in an accomplished speaker. There’s just more … substance there for the contestants to test their chops on.

We got a good one in Lori Collerman, a longtime Toastmaster who belongs to not one but, count ‘em, four local clubs. So involved is Lori in club work that her speaking skills were suffering. So she graciously agreed to come sharpen them up with us.

And Lori delivered, with a rocking five-minute speech about the three things it takes to be supernaturally successful. When she was done, and everybody had toweled off, our three contestants — VanCore vets Cory, Borzo and Mary-Lou — prepared their compliment sandwiches.

It was frankly a bit hard to find “bread” for these sandwiches – the “challenges” that bracket the praise. But they did.

A good evaluation tackles three dimensions of the speech: Content, Organization, and Delivery.

Content: Was it just good, new, interesting and maybe important stuff you learned?

Organization: Was the speech clear and easy to follow?

Delivery: Did the speaker make you forget you had to go to the bathroom?

It is dangerous work, being an evaluator in a formal competition. You have three and a half minutes. Go under and you waste valuable time. Go over and — boom — you’re disqualified.

In the end Cory was judged the winner. He takes home a bag of gavels and an official vanity license plate that reads: E-VAL-U-8-R.

(Actually, no. Cory just wins the represent VanCore at the upcoming Area Evaluation Contest.)

But in some ways Borzo, who came second, had the best, tightest evaluation of the day. It was his evaluation of the evaluators:

“I’d like the names and addresses everyone who voted against me,” he deadpanned.

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To all the hopeless romantics…

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Vancore Toastmasters

This week, before giving the toast, Dylan made a confession: “I am a hopeless romantic.”

imagesHe was about to jet off to Toronto to visit his girlfriend for a couple of weeks. He had arranged the plane ticket so that he’d be arriving to surprise her on Valentine’s Day.

Did we know the story of St. Valentine? Dylan asked. Turns out this gentleman was the original hopeless romantic.

It is said that St. Valentine, a temple priest in the Roman Empire, fell afoul of Claudius II by performing marriage ceremonies for soldiers (who by law were supposed to remain bachelors). He was sentenced to death. In jail, awaiting execution, he wrote a letter to his gal professing his love. It was a pretty great letter, with the kind of heartfelt focus that comes from knowing you’re going to be beheaded in the morning.

Dylan raised a pretend glass.

“To St. Valentine!” And all the rest of the hopeless romantics, on Valentine’s Day.

It was that kind of day at VanCore this week. Love was in the air. The opening words, the toast, and even Table Topics took the theme of Valentine’s Day. And why not? Love is a stranger to no heart.

Indeed, there was so much love in the air at this meeting that everyone felt too polite to tell Bruce his fly was open the entire time.

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Two Words: Stage Time

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Vancore Toastmasters

From the department of mixed metaphors:

This week Megan knocked her “Icebreaker” out of the park.

Megan’s a new-ish member but not a new member. She’s been in the club for a few months. Many of us were eagerly awaiting her first formal speech. A couple of times she almost had it ready, she says, but then she got busy. Things came up. Life intervened.

Sound familiar?

How many of us delay presenting our speeches-in-progress because they are not quite fully cooked?

We are a culture of perfectionists. We like to keep things under wraps until they are … finished. We want other people to see the very best we can do.

That’s commendable. But it may also be a mistake.

Recently Darren LaCroix, former world public-speaking champion, was in town giving a workshop on how to be funnier. At root his talk wasn’t about how to be funnier. It was about how to fail. How to fail, and how to fail better, and how to appreciate what a gift it is to fail. And how do you learn to fail better? By getting up and giving that speech, even when it’s not fully cooked.

When LaCroix went to his first Toastmasters meeting, he was surprised by the crowd. These people were very different than the bunch he used to encounter in comedy clubs. They were warm, encouraging, … sober. What a fantastic opportunity to try out your chops in such a supportive environment. LaCroix was stunned that sometimes the spaces available for speeches went unused. That invaluable “stage time” was there for the grabbing, and people chose not to grab it.

Let’s learn from that, folks. Let’s grab it. Let’s use that glorious stage time.

Hey: who wants to wait longer than we have to for Megan’s next speech?

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