Category Archives: Toastmasters

CART, Speaking and Toastmasters

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Yesterday, I went to see the presentations from World IA day. One of the attendees was deaf and they provided CART (communication access real time translation.) I’ve seen a real time interpreter before, but never actually typing the words on a screen real time. I found this interesting from a speaking point of view.

One of the speaker used a lot of filler words which got me looking into how the CART stenographer handled it. He typed “so” and “you know” with consistency.  Once in a while, he’d type “um”. He left most of those out though. Which is fine. They don’t add any value to understanding.

Which of course, is why we are trained to avoid them in the first place. Filler words don’t add understanding to hearing listeners either.

 

toastmasters – a different table topics

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When I was an area governor, one of my clubs complained that meetings weren’t fun enough. I tried a few things including some different formats for table topics to mix things up. One of them resulted in a lot of laughter. I’ve done it twice since at my own club.

The approach

I wrote sets of five words on a piece of paper. I tried to pick words that had nothing to do with each other. I also tried to pick a word or name that meant something to the club to create a shared reference. For example, suppose the President of the club was named Bob and the words were:

  1. elephant
  2. Kansas
  3. necktie
  4. sofa
  5. Bob

I then had people get up in pairs. The first person was told to speak for 60-90 seconds telling a story that uses those five words. Then the other person had 30-60 seconds to “agree” and support the story as if they were there. For example, suppose the first person said they saw an elephant wearing a necktie. The second person could say that he ran into the first person at the zoo, saw the elephant and couldn’t believe it.

Why it works

Putting together random words into a story tends to be funny whether the speaker is funny or not. Sticking in the shared experience (person’s name, company specific info, etc) makes people laugh as well. It preserves the spirit of speaking impromptu. It also creates a faster rhythm.

“out of scope”

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Wow. I haven’t blogged in almost a month! Not technical, but I’m going to share a gripe on “out of scope” today. I’ve had two instances where I went to a “session” expecting to learn one thing and then when asking a question, learning the “speaker” considers it is out of scope. You’ll notice I didn’t use the word meeting, presentation or presenter in there once.

Meetings
At the NY SPIN, Ramvasan spoke about “Facilitating Meetings”. So far so good. However, he only considers meetings to be certain things. And a one hour training session isn’t one of them. Nor is a “mandatory” meeting. Nor is anything that isn’t a team meeting as near as I can tell.

Presentations
Yesterday, I went to the Toastmasters conference and attended a “session” called “Presentation Zen.” It was about how you are the presentation and not the slides. So far so good. However, he doesn’t consider a “session” where you have to deliver a lot of facts to be a presentation. He did give some ideas on what to do. But when pushed fell back to the definition.

Both of these feel a bit like a cop out to me. Surely an expert/presenter on a topic has an opinion on how to handle things that aren’t exactly what they set out to speak about.

What’s worse is this closes the mind of the audience. If you are going to draw a box around your material and dismiss what is outside the box, I want to find this out in the first five minutes of the presentation. Not when someone has something that sounds like a perfectly legitimate question.