That’s Dan Toussant, my DTM brother. We started this trek to the Distinguished Toastmaster together and with Terri Fullmer, we were all minted at the District 10 Fall Conference in 2013.

In life, Dan is a recruiter and with his business partner, Katherine Burik, owns The Interview Doctor.

They’ve written several books, host a website with a daily blog and help people find jobs. I asked him to join me today to contribute to the Advanced Manual Review Project. Today on the table – Communicating With Video.

Communicating with Video

 

DAN TOUSSANT:  Let’s talk about the value of the advance manual called Communicating on Video. I had selected it and I think everybody who picks an advanced manual thinks about how this will make me a better speaker or a better person or better at what I do in my business. And this communicating on video, as I looked at it, is something that ties into what I’ve wanted to do with my business through webinars including being videotaped that I get more familiar with the ins and outs of videos. Youtube is huge, and I think it’s one of the most commonly visited sites on the web, so video has become part of how we communicate. This manual, when you look at the projects, some of them are not that easy to accomplish with just yourself. In fact, some of them require a team orientation with other Toastmasters to get them done. And all of them involve an advance club opportunity in my view, as there’s projects that require quite a bit of planning – for example the interview show. That I think we did at our regular Thursday club meeting, not an advanced club meeting, but it was quite a production – we had the camera, we had makeup, we had scripts, we did rehearsals, and there was a lot to that particular project. Bonnie is a nutritionist, and I had her on as the expert, and pulling that particular project together, I had to have a lot of help from Bonnie.

The other projects and I look through my manual, and why would somebody do a straight talk project, I am a belief if that you have things you care about, Toastmasters is one of those venues where you can develop voice on things that are important to you. That’s what I did with Straight Talk. It was a topic that I found really important, but as I prepared and delivered what is kind of an editorial project, whereon some nightly newscast, there’ll be at the very end an editorial, a director will come on with an opinion, it’s kind of a straight talk kind of presentation.

The first project, the one that does involve that does involve sharing some opinions that you know somebody’s going to agree, but most likely a lot of people are going to disagree, looking back, my evaluator clearly disagreed with my point of view on that.

Kim: Was that me?

Dan:  No, actually, it wasn’t. But it was funny that it was a fairly hot topic, one where people disagree on the subject, but it’s one that having passionate views on something, can play into this manual very well. The press conference is another project in that manual. Number 4, that I used again as a situation that I had some strong opinions about and this is one that involved some high school football players and what they had done at a party that was very bad and very wrong, but like most scandal stories, it was more about the cover up than the initial wrong. I chose to be the superintendent of the school district, handling a press conference, in which I hoped he would actually do this, and take the coach and tell him he was through for covering it up,