Toastmasters International

Toastmasters International
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Toastmasters international as its name suggests has quite an audience and membership as well. It global footprint spreads to around 116 countries and a membership register of about 280,000 members. The organizations works towards helping its members to develop leadership skills that includes great communications skills, where the members have to learn through presentations in various workshops that are organized within the 13,500 clubs. Members evaluate themselves as there are no instructors to pressure them (Toastmasters, 2013).
Having attended one of their presentations at the Kingstown centre on the 1st of August 2013, I had a chance to listen to the speakers of the day and assess their strong and weak points in the ability to be public speakers. At the venue the members are welcomed with great appreciation for their presence, where the ushers also give flyers and magazines with instructions on the how the various events at the functions would run. There was a timer whose name was Mohan Khemlani, who had several colored cards to wave at the speakers signaling the time left. At the six minutes before the time the timer would wave the yellow card, then the green card at the five minute mark and lastly the red card to signal that time was up.
After the recital of the Pledge of Alliance, the first speaker to the stage was Brenda Washington on her topic ‘My confession`. As she started off she paused for about 3 to 4 minutes so that she could get the attention of the audience, after which she greeted the club members and the guests very warmly. Throughout the presentation, she came out as a great speaker with excellent facial expressions. She also maintained her eye contact with the audience, such that it was quite easy to follow her through the presentation. The second speaker was, Margret Weaver with her topic on ‘DCP Translated`. She had been the one who welcomed me at the event. As she made her presentation, she was quite easy to follow as her facial expression was in sync with the content. Other than that she coupled easy to understand language with hand gestures which kept the audience interested throughout the presentation. Even those persons from the audience that did not speak English as their native language had an easy time following what she was saying. Her gesturing made it even easier to follow and understand more vividly. To reinforce her presentation skills, she used charts that had representation of her material in graphics and text. The audience had the chance to glance at the topic content in for of pictures which she would go ahead and explain, so that the audience could have a much easier time relating with the content. The third and last speaker at the venue was, Shree Thadavai who talked about ‘Who wants to be a millionaire`. Compared to the other two this speaker did not really have the sting to the whole presentation. However it is importan...