Why You Should Join Toastmasters

Someone asked me that day, “Praveen, what I should do to improve my public speaking skills? I told him to join Toastmasters club and the person asked, “What is Toastmaster?” Now, this is not the first time I am getting these kinds of reactions. So many people are not aware of this amazing Club. It’s an international public speaking club present in more than 130 countries, but why should you join Toastmasters club?

Number one reason is when you go there and speak, you get an evaluation. Evaluation is the key in speaking. By the way, evaluation is the key in every skill but especially a skill like speaking which is an essential skill to grow in our life. Evaluation is the key, so when you speak there, they will evaluate you on various parameters and then you will come to know what your strengths are and what your areas of improvement in speaking are.

After training so many people, I’ve noticed that many people are under the illusion that they speak very effectively on the stage. You must understand public speaking is a skill, just like singing and dancing. If you are going on the stage and singing without having learned singing or if you are going on the stage to dance without learning to dance, you know what happens or what will happen. Similarly, with speaking if you are going on the stage without learning public speaking skills, it might be very interesting but only for you. It may not be interesting for the audience and when I say public speaking, I am not at all talking about standing in front of 10,000 people to speak. We are doing public speaking every day, in our offices, if you are in teaching; you do public speaking in your class. Even if you are a student, you do it in your seminars.

 Public speaking is an essential skill and that's why it's important to know where you are in speaking what are your strengths and what are your areas of improvement. So the first reason, you should join Toastmaster is to get evaluated. The second reason you should join Toastmaster is that you will get an opportunity to practice, just like if you are fond of cricket, you will go on the ground and you play and when you play you need players, you need bowlers, you need someone to field. In the same way, with speaking, if you want to practice speaking you would want people to listen to you, you want an audience. You want to speak in front of people, Toastmasters will give you the platform where you can go and practice in front of people.

The third reason you should join Toastmasters is one of my favourite reasons. In Toastmaster, they have a lot of contests every week. They do something called speech contest and after the speech contest, imagine for a moment that you have just spoken and you are participating in that speech contest and just before the results, when your head will be down and you would be thinking, “whether I will be winning or not” and that excitement, that thrill. When was the last time you had that excitement and thrill? Maybe in your school. But irrespective of your age, irrespective of your gender, irrespective of where you are in your career and irrespective of your position. We all have that child within us and that child needs this excitement, Toastmaster will give you that thrill.

That thrill not only in the normal speech contest but also they have something called International speech contest. Toastmaster will provide you enough opportunity to experience that thrill.

 So these are the three reasons you should join Toastmasters. What are you waiting for? Just go on Google, find the nearest Toastmaster and go and absorb the energy. Work on one of the most important skills which decide success. The skill of speaking in front of people.