Imagine yourself sitting in front of a crowd of 80 people. All eyes are on you and are waiting to hear what you have to say. You feel prepared and everything is ready to go, but things don’t go quite as planned.
Speaking in front of a crowd of 80, or even just one person, can be a challenge for many. Public speaking is a skill that is acquired over time and takes practice along with effort.
Fortunately, for students and faculty at Colorado Mesa University, Toastmasters International is looking to join the club ranks and become a part of the Maverick family.
Toastmasters International is a network of clubs that help men and women across the world become more confident with their communication skills and speaking with others. The goal of this organization is to give people a voice and improve their skills and confidence to effectively express their thoughts and emotions.
Meetings have a specific agenda, and each meeting has a “Toastmaster” who will welcome everyone, make announcements, and make sure the meeting is running in tune with the agenda. During the meeting, “roles” such as Speaker, Inspiration, and Joke, as well as others, will be assigned to different members.
For example, the “Speaker” will give a speech and everyone will give an evaluation. The evaluation will start with a kind response, then an analytical evaluation followed by more positive remarks. Also, after someone speaks, there is a round of applause to give a sense of belonging and encourage self-improvement.
“Table Topics” are another speech practice that will hold special importance during the meeting, in which a member will ask a question to other members to see if they can fit their response within a specific timeframe.
The plan currently is, starting in the Fall of 2019, for Toastmasters to launch as a club at CMU for any students or faculty who want to improve their speech. For the spring, demonstration meetings are planned while allowing for flexibility of current plans to accelerate if membership grows past expectations.
“I hope that we can provide an opportunity for people to come and practice their communication and leadership skills,” Julie Seidel said. “A place where they’ll feel a real sense of community and a sense of support as they develop those skills.”
Seidel, who plans to be the club’s faculty advisor, knows the benefits of joining Toastmasters.
“I went to being terrified of just standing up to introduce myself at my first Toastmasters meeting to now feeling comfortable standing in front of 80 students in a big classroom,” Seidel said.
Seidel was a former member, but plans to rejoin to get the club started and help bring the experience to the university.
Of course, there will be other Toastmasters members that will join the club. Rebecca Mullen has been with Toastmasters for two and a half years and, from experience, knows there’s also a personal aspect to the club that accommodates the learning.
“A third of the people that are with us are just joining, so you’ve always got these fresh people who are just getting exposed to the format of a Toastmasters meeting,” Mullen said. “One of the great things is that it’s the safest place to fail on planet Earth. The whole point of the meeting is to “fail”. When you see something like what happened with Katie, everybody in the room learned because of what happened to her.”
“It’s about raising your awareness to an issue that is potential for change. By having your awareness raised then you begin to be able to practice and then people begin to give you corrective instruction in that practice. It’s just this cycle of making a mistake, noticing it, correcting it and evaluating others.”
Communication skills aren’t the only skill that can be learned at the meeting. Leadership plays a pivotal role within Toastmasters and is something that can be achieved through the organization by rising through the ranks, from member to an accredited speaker.
Jay Ballenberger joined Toastmasters two months ago and learned he wanted to become a leader after spending time with the club.
“Great leaders are people who are always creating more leaders,” Ballenberger said. “That’s exactly it. If I can make somebody else feel empowered enough to feel like a leader, they’re gonna start acting like a leader… no matter where your background is, what your life experience is there are always ways that we can be better communicators, more thoughtful communicators, more empathetic communicators, and people respect that.”
“If students can gain some of these basic skills of running a meeting or they can just see what a well run meeting looks like, they bring that into their professional and personal lives and now they’ve got a set of standards that they could live up to and teach other people how to do that too.”
Another benefit for students is being able to use the Toastmasters journey as leadership experience on their resume which helps create a competitive advantage in the workplace.
A certain goal members strive to accomplish is making sure the one-hour meeting doesn’t go past the hour mark. Ballenberger mentioned having the meeting follow a specific agenda gives the meeting a professional feel and helps get things done.
Brogan Butler, a mechanical engineering student at CMU, mentioned how much-improved communication can benefit students after graduation. Butler recognizes that communication is one of the most sought after skills from employees when employers do their evaluations.
Toastmasters has plans for a unique vision within the CMU club and hope to create a community within the university, as well as expanding on the community within the different Toastmaster clubs around Grand Junction.
“The experience has been amazing,” Ballenberger said. “It’s super supportive. Everybody is coming at it from such individual places. Life experiences are incredibly far-ranging. Everybody is there to be supportive and help other people get better while asking for the same support.”
For more information, interested parties can contact faculty advisor Julie Seidel at (303) 931-9631 or jseidel@coloradomesa.edu.
