Toastmasters

Benefits of Toastmasters – 1

Atul Sharma
Latest posts by Atul Sharma (see all)

I joined my first Toastmasters meeting on Oct 19, 2016, and since then I have hardly missed any meeting. I have been a member of many clubs in different states in the US. One thing I believe – Once a Toastmaster, Always a Toastmaster.

Even after 4 years, I think Toastmaster has given me a lot. I was trying to list down the reasons to join the toastmasters and ended up with 40 benefits. Please have a look and see if you add something on this list or still going to match my list.

1. Public speaking skills

This is the first thing and the primary objective of Toastmasters meetings. We get ample opportunity to give a prepared speech based on the different pathways and manuals. Each speech is a project and it has several guidelines to abide by the speaker. Constructive feedback by the assigned evaluator helps a lot to improve and polish our public speaking skills, ranging from eye contact, pronunciation, grammar, body language, gesture and so many.

2. Leadership

A club officer, a district officer, or any other role provides us a good opportunity to lead on designated and focused areas. For example – Club President gets a free hand to implement the creative and innovative way of conducting club meetings, President takes care of grievances of any member and at the same time, he chairs the Executive committee meeting and leads all the club officers. On the same line, other officers also perform their designated duties. District officers get a similar leadership opportunity with a bigger scope.

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3. Impromptu Speaking

Table Topics are an integral part of any toastmasters meeting. It is for everyone participating in the meeting on a volunteer basis, anyone can opt-out to participate but this is very interesting, and I have merely seen anyone opting out. It helps during interviews, roast, toast, dinner discussions, and many occasions. This article gives complete details to master impromptu speaking.

4. Time Management

Everything in Toastmasters meeting is time bound. It starts on time and never exceeds the stipulated time. Other than that, speakers, table topics respondents and evaluators have their time limit for their assignments. Green, Yellow and Red cards are shown by timer to remind them of time and even If they go beyond that, they attract disqualification.

5. Better Storyteller

As part of the project, we get a chance to prepare, rehearse, and deliver any story. They can be from real life, personal experience, history, folk story, or anything.    

6. Better Presenter

Various projects give us a chance to research, develop, and present any topic based on the project. It may involve the use of suitable props or PowerPoints or anything you can take there. Not only our pathways projects, if we need to have a job-related presentation, but we can also do it here as a rehearsal process and the constructive feedback from the group will be bonus advantages.  

7. Better Listener

Toastmasters meetings are the best place to enhance your listening skills. We get this opportunity

  • as an evaluator for any speech,
  • as Table Topics Master to summarize the responses
  • as a grammarian, to point out filler words, grammatical errors, new words, and a lot.
  • as General evaluator for evaluating the whole meeting

This skill helps you professionally as well as personally, most importantly talking to your spouse (mainly your wife, not to offend)

8. Delegation

Toastmaster also gives the opportunity to be part of many committees and lead a few. It can be part of any role of any advisory committee.

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In our leadership role, sometimes we do not trust our team and we don’t delegate the tasks properly. There we need to have a proper framework to track and monitor how and what they are doing but making sure we are not doing micromanagement and irritating our team.  An officer’s role and High-Performance Leadership (HPL) project we get this opportunity and that helps us become a good leader.

9. Strategic Planning 

This is another very important quality we develop from Toastmasters world.

  • Individual as planning to complete and reach pathways and DTM
  • As a club officer to excel in the assigned role.
  • Club president to strategize the awards etc to get distinguished recognition.
  • As Club Coach to guide the club to reach the needed milestone.
  • Area Director, Division Director, and District Directors strategize their territory to excel.

10. Better command over Language

Based on the geographical location of the club, it can help polish the native language. Toastmasters clubs are in 143 countries and mostly in 7 languages as per this, English (61.1%), Mandarin (4%), Hindi (3.2%), Spanish (2.7%), French (2.5%), Tamil (2.1%) and Japanese (1.6%)

11. Giving Effective feedback

In different roles, a Toastmaster provides constructive feedback to different members for their different assignments. For this, some members follow the Sandwich model of feedback, some follow different way and eventually it teaches the way to give feedback, not to criticize. This is also very useful in personal and professional life.

12. New friends

In toastmaster, we get members from different backgrounds and industries. We get many options to choose from our friends. I have more friends from Toastmasters than from my office.   

13. Understanding of Parliamentary Process

For any decision, Toastmasters follow the parliamentary process. It needs a proper quorum to be present and such gives good exposure and experience to the process.

14. Free Mentorship

When we join a club, one mentor is assigned. Now that mentor makes us familiar with Toastmasters patterns and practices and with this, we excel in our Toastmaster journey and learn many lifelong lessons by paying nothing additional to Toastmasters membership fee.

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15. Opportunity to become a Mentor/Coach

When we become a seasoned Toastmaster, we also get the opportunity to become a mentor of the new member. A toastmaster also gets a chance to become a club coach to help struggling clubs on different fronts.

16. Office away Office

Toastmasters organization adheres to different hierarchy and protocols at the club and district level and in fact at the international level. So, it teaches professionalism when not even in office and we learn them by mutual support of the other peers.  

17. College away College

We may experience various training about leadership and many other soft skills in the Toastmasters when we have left the college. No need to pay hefty college fees or long hours assignments. It facilitates learning by doing and totally self-paced. No pressure for anyone. No embarrassment after having a bad grade. 

18. Diverse Cultural Setup

In one club, members are from various cultural backgrounds. This setup becomes a good platform for cultural exchange. Few clubs operate in hybrid structure means – physical meetings that allow virtual attendance as well. In this way, we get international exposure and expand our horizons.  

19. Socialize

In Toastmasters meetings, we connect with many members and get a chance to improve our social skills by connecting them personally.

20. Better Content writing

For our speech, we apply different techniques and approaches to make it interesting for our audience. We prepare our speech considering the level and knowledge of the audience. This enables us to deliver a great speech.

Wow, till here you have read 20 benefits of joining Toastmasters. 20 more are in the next article.

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