Presidents Address – Meeting 25th Feb 2008

Fellow toastmasters, welcome guests and especially our area governor Eamonn Murphy who is joining us here tonight for his second official visit of the year.

A few weeks ago I received an email from the Ukheadquarters of an organisation I’ve been involved with for a long time now. Much longer than I’ve been involved with Toastmasters. I was being invited to speak at our annual conference next June and once I got over the initial shock, I answered “of course, no problem, love to”. Then I sat down to do an initial draft of the 20 to 25 minute talk I’m supposed to give.The initial draft went surprisingly well. And I had completed about 20 minutes of talking time when I stopped, printed out what I had and stood in front of the mirror as I normally would to practice a speech. I started my timer and started speaking out loud. In the end I figured I had about 20 minutes completed so I needed to use the next 5 to bring it all together and then I’d be sorted.

It was then I realised what I had done. The speech was totally unconnected with Toastmasters but here I had automatically gone through the same process that I would have used for a Toastmasters speech. I had written a speech that had a START, a MIDDLE and hopefully soon it will have an END. I had timed it as it would be spoken and not as it would be read, and I had practiced it in front of a mirror to see how it would sound.It struck me that society out there must be daily benefiting from the skills of current and past Toastmasters. We all know that people join Toastmasters in order to learn to speak in public. We have all read the sometimes LAH DE DA testimonials advocating Toastmasters and how it saved somebody’s life when their public speaking skills stopped the rioting crowd from burning down the local GAA club.

Might I suggest that it benefits society in general in much more subtle ways.That simple rule of having a start, a middle, and an end to what we say, we learn from our second speech in Toastmasters. We use it in all speeches including topics, as Liam pointed out referring to Maria Kirks topic reply at our last meeting. Eventually it becomes ingrained and our brains structure our speech that way automatically.

So might I also suggest that you keep an eye, over the next days and weeks, on how you answer questions in your employment, when you are talking socially, even when it’s a question from the kids about homework. You might be surprised to find that you pause a little longer than you used to before answering. That you are probably speaking for about two minutes or so. That your answer has more structure than you thought and that when you finish you are greeted with a short silence.

The silence is because your answer has been so clear, so succinct and so authoritative that those around you need time to consider it before responding. You may even find that the subject changes entirely because, having answered so completely, there is simply no more to be said on that particular subject.

As a society we need better speakers. We need ordinary people to have opinions and to know how to voice them. We need ordinary people who can and will speak up for themselves. We need ordinary people willing and able to declare their interest in their particular religion, their particular politics, their particular interests.

Otherwise you leave the field free to those who would seek to manipulate you with advertising, to those who seek to confuse you with spin, to those who seek to bore you into submission while they get on with their particular version of life. As a result we loose diversity, we loose choice, we loose difference and there is just no point in going on holidays anymore because it’s McDonalds and Coca Cola all the way down.

Our Toastmaster for tonight is someone who I know will have no difficulty voicing her opinion and letting us know what is to happen next. Toastmaster: Celine McGrath