If you listen to the long-time members of Toastmasters, you may hear this:

“He went through the CC too fast.”

There’s no time limit to the Competent Communicator.  You could go to 10 club meetings  and give 10 speeches in one day and you’ll get the CC.  I personally would be exhausted by that kind of crazy, but there’s no rule against it.  But rushing through the program has some serious drawbacks.

Today on the table, we talk about getting through the DTM before the Revitalized Education Program changes everything – how not to waste your time – either by going too fast, or by going too slow when we don’t have to.

INTRO

There are 2 things to guarantee you’ll be a better speaker in six months. There are 2 conditions for those to work.

* The first condition:

We need to listen as much as we need to speak.

Giving yourself the opportunity to watch other speakers gives you the opportunity to learn from their mistakes – and their successes.

I was talking to Katherine Burik of the Stark Community Toastmasters about a speech she was preparing to give to a group of realtors about public speaking.  The idea had been given to her to show up looking unprepared.  If you’ve seen Ivan Beggs at the District TLI or the Southern Make-Up TLI this summer, you know he did this to make a point. Ivan made it work because we all know how good he is – we know he’d never really show up with his shirt untucked and his tie all twisted.  His credibility is already established.  I suggested to Katherine that as this crowd doesn’t know her, starting out looking incompetent is not a good way to build confidence in an audience.

Now, that’s an extended case.  I’m mentoring Katherine based on what I saw Ivan do.  But we’ve all seen those speeches that made us make a mental note “DON’T EVER DO THAT” as well as “I have GOT to try that.” Rushing through means seeing fewer speeches – less opportunities to learn the good and the bad by example.

* The second condition

We need to evaluate others to learn speech analysis so we can apply it to our own speeches.

We get too close to our own work.  There’s an old writing adage –

Kill Your Darlings.

Hard advice.  We write that beautiful turn of a phrase and no matter how hard it is to say, we just keep it in there… We love it.  We can’t let it go.

But when we evaluate others, we learn to pick up on those sorts of things.   We can learn to recognize that phrase that works on paper – but not in speech.

When we go through the Competent Communicator, we learn those steps – research, how to say it, get to the point.  So when someone makes a great speech, you want to praise them for it… and do it yourself.  Other times, we have to find a nice way to make that speech’s flaws into points of growth – sometimes that takes all of the time from table topics and all the way through the other evaluators’ time to craft a diplomatic way to say it.

Speakers want good evaluations.  I really believe that.  We don’t want fluffy statements of how good we are – we want honest opinions about what worked – and what didn’t.  However, I’m convinced that the real beneficiary of evaluations is the evaluator.  After analyzing others’ speeches, speech writing changes – for the better.  That’s an unspoken but interesting part of the Toastmasters experience – we get to learn from other’s mistakes. More actively, we benefit - possibly more than the speaker - when we give an evaluation.  That analysis we put into evaluations creeps back at us when we’re writing our own speeches and crafting our presentations.  So the time when we’re not the speaker is just as valuable as when we are.

So what are we doing with a blog and podcast dedicated to getting people through the ...