At Toastmasters, members learn by speaking to groups and working with others in a supportive environment. Arlington Nooners Toastmasters Club is made up of 15-25 people who meet once a week for an hour. Each meeting gives everyone a chance to practice:
Conducting meetings: The Toastmaster of the week writes out an agenda and leads the meeting. This helps members learn basic meeting procedures, time management, and organizational techniques.
Presenting prepared speeches: Two or three members present speeches based on projects from the Toastmasters Communication and Leadership Program manual or an Advanced Speaking manual. Projects cover such topics as speech organization, vocal variety, language, gestures, and persuasion.
Offering constructive evaluation: The only true method of improvement is learning to accentuate one's strengths while striving to improve on one's weaknesses. To that end, every prepared speaker is assigned an evaluator who points out the speaker's strengths and offers suggestions for improvement. The evaluator comments on the way the speech is presented, not on the content of the speech.
Giving impromptu speeches: Members present one-to-two-minute impromptu speeches on assigned topics. This is designed to help members think quickly on their feet.
What is Toastmasters International?
Toastmasters International is a non-profit educational organization head quartered in Mission Viejo, California. Its mission is to make effective oral communication a world-wide reality. Mainly, this applies to improving public speaking skills. However, there is also a leadership and management aspect to the organization and its training.
Do I have to ask permission before attending a meeting of Arlington Nooners Toastmasters Club?
No. Toastmasters welcomes all guests. You might want to contact us to find out any important details such as whether the club is meeting on a holiday. Arlington Nooners is open to all and we'll be delighted to have you come to the meeting. As a guest, you will not be called upon to speak unless you have given permission to be called on before the meeting.
I'm scared to death of speaking! Why should I look into Toastmasters?
EVERYONE is afraid of speaking. In poll after poll, "public speaking" comes up as something more feared than "death." Public speaking is the nation's #1 fear. You are no different. Even if you think you're really good at speaking, there may be times when your heart stops and your palms sweat and you freeze before an audience. Toastmasters can help with that.
Remember that EVERYONE in a Toastmasters club is there because at some point they realized they needed help communicating and speaking before audiences. Every club member was a first-time guest before they joined. Almost everyone will remember how they felt when they gave their first speech. You will be pleasantly surprised to find out how supportive a Toastmasters club really will be. Toastmasters provides a non-threatening learning environment where your public speaking skills can be learned and polished without fear of any adverse consequences.
If you know you are nervous about public speaking, but aren't convinced that you should do anything about it, think about what skill is more important than any other when it comes to getting and keeping a good job?
Do you think you are already an excellent speaker? People who are already good speakers still find that Toastmasters can help them improve with such things as better speech structure and delivery. Even with the best speakers, there is always room for improvement. Toastmasters can provide you with skills that will keep you improving as a speaker.
If you still don't know whether you'd like Toastmasters, why not visit a meeting? We'll be happy you came by.
How is Toastmasters more beneficial than other forms of speaking improvement?
College and high school courses in public speaking usually involve the students sitting through dozens of lectures followed by one or two speaking opportunities. When the speeches are over they receive a grade. Often they are graded on what they did wrong. This isn't a way to build assurance and motivation. Also, they get limited opportunity to "practice by doing". Students get up at the end of the semester, give their speech, and sit down. Toastmasters promotes constant reinforcement and ongoing improvement - you truly do learn by doing. Since the program is self-paced, you can proceed as quickly or slowly as you are motivated to do.
If you have visited our club and found it to your liking, ask a member for an application form.
According to the bylaws all Toastmasters clubs operate under, any new member of a club must be voted into membership by the club. Members are welcomed enthusiastically into the club as soon as a membership application is turned in with payment of the appropriate dues.
How much does membership cost?
Upon joining Toastmasters, you will find yourself paying a fee which may include three different components. One is the standard $20.00 U.S. fee that every new member must pay in order to receive their educational materials (see "new member fee" below). The other two components are monthly dues, one for TI and one for the club. The dues for Arlington Nooners Toastmasters are $7.50 per month ($6.00 goes to Toastmasters International World Headquarters and $1.50 goes to the club).
All Toastmasters clubs are billed in March and September for semi-annual dues for their members who wish to remain members for the next six months. If you join in between those periods, you submit a pro-rated share of the dues.
To summarize, if you were to join Arlington Nooners at the following times, you would owe (new member fee plus dues):
Once you have become a member, dues of $45.00 are assessed every six months, in September and March.
Your semi-annual dues paid to Toastmasters International goes partly for a subscription to the monthly Toastmaster magazine, partly to support development of new educational programs, partly to support operations at Toastmasters International, and partly to support your local District organization.
What do I get for my new member fee?
Your $20.00 new member fee covers the cost of the following manuals which you will receive upon joining or shortly thereafter: the "Competent Communication" project manual, the Competent Leader manual, the "Gestures - Your Body Speaks" manual, the "A Speaker's Guide to Evaluation" manual, and the manual, "Your Speaking Voice". The latter three are instructional manuals rather than project manuals. The "Competent Communication" manual is your speach workbook and the Competent Leader manual is your leadership workbook... Upon completion of the ten projects in the Competent Communication manual, you will receive two Advanced Speaking manuals to continue your speaking growth.
Is Toastmasters a social or drinking organization in some regard?
The format varies slightly from week to week, but the basics include:
Meetings of Arlington Nooners last from 12 noon to 1 p.m on Mondays.
When you join Toastmasters, you receive a basic speaking manual, the Competent Communication Manual, containing ten speech projects. Each project calls on you to prepare a speech on a subject of your own choosing but using certain speaking principles. Each manual project lists the objectives for that paricular speech and includes a written checklist for your evaluator to use when evaluating the speech.
What speech projects are there for me to work on?
In the basic Competent Communication Manual, there are ten speech projects:
All ten projects above are open for you to choose whatever topic you like. Even if you pick a controversial subject, Toastmasters audiences will evaluate you on how well you presented your subject, not on whether they agreed with you or not.
Table Topics is fun! Basically, it calls on you, the guest or member, to present a one to two minute impromptu speech on a subject not known to you until the moment you get up to speak. A member of the club assigned to be Topicsmaster will prepare a few impromptu topics and call on members (or guests, if they've given assent in advance to being called on) to stand up and speak on the topic.
Topics might include current events (e.g. "What would you do about education if you were the President of the United States?") or philosophy ("If you had no shoes and met a man who had no feet, how would you feel?") or the wacky ("Reach into this bag. Pull an item out. Tell us about it").
Table Topics is designed to help you organize your thoughts quickly and effectively.
The Evaluation is how the speaker receives feedback on their effectiveness as a speaker. All prepared speakers have their speeches evaluated, verbally and in writing by one member of the club. Evaluation is challenging to do well because it requires an evaluator to do more than say, "Here's what you did wrong." A good evaluator will say, "Here's what you did well, and here's why doing that was good. Here is something you might want to work on for your next speech, and here's how you might work on it."
Why all the emphasis on time limits?
As noted above, speeches have time limits, Table Topics have time limits (1-2 minutes) and evaluations have time limits (2-3 minutes). This is in order to drive home the point that a good speaker makes effective use of the time allotted and does not keep going and going until the audience is bored. In the real world, there are generally practical limits on how long a meeting can or should go.
By setting time limits on speeches and presentations, participants learn brevity and time management and the club meeting itself can be expected to end on schedule.
Why all this structure to the meeting?
Meetings generally are not complicated once you get used to the timing and the different roles members of the group play. Since the average club is expected to have 20 or more members, you need a lot of roles for people to play in order to involve everyone. Because meeting assignments vary from meeting to meeting, everyone gets practice performing the different roles over the course of several meetings.
One meeting, you might be assigned to give a speech, the next you might be Timer, and the next you might be the Toastmaster of the meeting running the whole show. This keeps you flexible and gives you practice at a variety of communication skills including speaking, listening, giving feedback, being creative and challenging, telling a joke, and so on.
It stands for "Competent Communicator." The CC is the basic speaking certification offered through Toastmasters. To earn a CC designation, you have to complete the Competent Communication manual, which means you have to work your way through the ten speech projects contained therein.
What should my main objective be as a new Toastmasters member?
There are two "right" answers to this question. The first is that your main objective should be to attend every meeting you can and participate to the fullest, helping yourself and the other members of the club to become better communicators. The other "right" answer is that you should be working toward the CC award.
Do I have to give all the speeches at Toastmasters club meetings?
No. As long as you are giving the speech to an audience with at least one Toastmasters member in attendance, and that a fellow Toastmaster completes the manual evaluation for that project, you may count that speech toward a CC.
Do I have to work through the Competent Communication Manual in the order the projects are given?
No. You can do the projects out of order if you like. It is recommended that you follow the order given since the projects progress upwards in difficulty and each assignment builds on the information and skills learned in the previous assignments. But if you have a speech idea or opportunity that better suits one of the later projects, you may skip over earlier ones and do that one first.
What happens after I achieve my CC level?
You progress to the Advanced Speaking and Leadership manual. Please see the Members page for more information.
How is Toastmasters organized?
All Toastmasters members belong to a club. Clubs consist of at least eight members and may have forty or more. The recommended size for a club is 20-25 members. Clubs exist in communities around the world, especially in North America. There are, at present, over 8,000 clubs around the world.
There are many sorts of clubs: community clubs, military clubs, company clubs, institutional clubs, collegiate clubs, and so on. At this time, the majority of the new clubs being chartered are 'company clubs', i.e. clubs chartered at and meeting at businesses and organizations, in many cases open only to employees or members of those organizations. Never fear, however, there are thousands of community clubs already in existence as well.
For more information about Toastmasters International, checkout the Toastmasters International website at www.toastmasters.org. You can call Toastmasters International at 1-714-858- 8255. Or, you can write Toastmasters International at P.O. Box 9052, Mission Viejo, California, 92690-7052.
Toastmasters is a wonderful organization! Check it out!
You can also contact us here with any comments or questions.
No. The name "Toastmasters" derives from the founding of the organization, in the 1920's, when one of the main types of public speaking a member of society would engage in was after dinner speaking, also known as "Toast mastering".
Because Arlington Nooners meet at lunchtime, many of our members bring a sack lunch to eat during the meeting.