One of the new experiments in the Toastmaster International organization has been the formation of advanced clubs.
I belong to Mighty Oaks Advanced Club and I’d like to offer some thoughts following last night’s meeting.
One of our speakers gave a speech which wasn’t well crafted. It ran way overtime and consisted mainly of one unrelated personal family story after another. As far as I could tell the speaker hadn’t thought through why this speech and why this audience.
Even more disturbing to me were a couple of references to family situations that I found inappropriate.
Regrettably, the evaluator for the speech said it was a very good speech. Sorry, no it wasn’t. It was poorly crafted, offensive (at least to me and several others) and of no interest to the audience.
Soft peddling such a speech in an advanced club doesn’t serve the speaker who needs to learn how to improve.
If this speech had been given in a regular club, my assessment would have been so much more gentle and encouraging but, at the advanced club level, speeches like this should be discouraged.
It might serve this particular speaker well to return to the regular stream or step up and learn the lessons that are here for the taking.
(And as an aside: One of my speeches last year was very critically evaluated by one of our most skilled Toastmasters. I didn’t like what he had to say then and I don’t like it now however he was absolutely correct in everything he offered and I became a better speaker as a result.)
