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I am a Toastmaster and have been since January 2004. My initiative this month, besides competing in the upcoming club speech contests, is to write more often. Eight times, precisely, for my Level 4 elective project of Pathways.

For today, I’m going to take you back 14 years to consider joining Toastmasters.

At a meeting of the Canadian Authors’ Association that spring, I had the privilege of hearing a speaker who had no fear of the stage, or so it seemed. I spoke to the person next to me. Was it that the speaker had little vision and couldn’t see us well, that he could speak so easily, or had he practised speaking until he was comfortable with it?

I’d been chatting with a woman who was also at that meeting. Her name was Marge. I asked her that question after the speaker was done. She told me that she was a Toastmaster and that I could come and check it out. I gave it serious thought, since I had begun writing and it was suggested that writers learn to speak for a day in the future when we might teach writing, or promote a book, and just because others are curious about writing. Though I couldn’t forsee a book in my future at the time, I thought it would be wise to work towards.

That was May or June and I was writing opinion editorials for the Record that year. There were three young people in our home and life was full. We had music lessons, team sports, volunteer activities and more. It was September when I had cause to think of speaking again. I had an editorial that caught the attention of a hometown audience and the editor of the Gazette asked to interview me for a September edition. Yikes! I had to speak and my words would be recorded and published. I had to get this right.

I contacted the cofounder of The Word Guild who’d said those words about writers and speaking and got some quick tips on handling the interview. The day came and I was nervous, but I remembered Nancy’s words and took the interview as calmly as I could. And at the end of that day determined that I’d try out Toastmasters. I called Marge and asked her what day the club met and she agreed to meet me at the door. That was in October.

After attending the club as a guest, longer than a couple of weeks, I deemed it a good thing and joined in early January. I received my manuals and prepared to enter into the spirit of that welcoming club that had so many accomplished speakers. My mentor, Tammy, scheduled my first speech in about two weeks from my official joining date. Then I had to write my speech.

I wrote and printed, scrunched up the paper, and did that several times before finding my speech topic. One day as I was driving to some errand, I had the idea that I’d use a poem I’d just written for my topic and build the speech around it. I went home and wrote and that was the speech I would give to my club.

More next post on that speech, My Ice Breaker.

Me, after a couple of years in Toastmasters