Join Toastmasters With Me!

Hello, tender friends !

I hope you’re staying safe and dry wherever you are! Here in Southwest Virginia we’re recovering from flooding last night.

Thankfully we all stayed safe.

While I missed out on some activities yesterday because of the weather, I was fortunately able to attend my Toastmasters meeting this week. I won this ribbon by default, as I was the only speaker that night, but it’s always a blast anyway!

I’ve posted some speeches I’ve given at toastmasters on the blog here before, but I wanted to make a special post to invite people who may be interested in trying the group out to please join me!

I made a new friend at the gym a few weeks ago and she said she’d like to try the group out sometime, and I wanted to share with other people who may be local who are considering it.

For those who don’t know, Toastmasters is a public speaking group, and the Roanoke chapter is full of wonderful humans. I was nervous to join the group 2 years ago, thinking all the silly things that everybody thinks- What if I sound ridiculous and silly giving a speech? What if I think something is really great or interesting but nobody else cares?

As soon as I arrived to my first meeting, all of my fears were allayed. While giving constructive feedback on every speech is obviously part of the purpose of the group, the feedback is given so kindly and gently that even people scared of public speaking would likely feel comfortable here. It’s also cool to analyze the energy you get from speaking something out loud compared to writing.

The group is also good practice for organizational leadership, as roles rotate for each meeting. One of the assigned roles is the “grammarian/umm counter” who tallies up all of our speaking mishaps on a chart to share at the end of the meeting. We then place coins in the piggy bank for each infraction to help us remember to get these imperfections out of our speech. It’s all in good fun, and it does help you to remember to avoid those mistakes the next time!

If you’re local and would like to attend a meeting sometime, please let me know. You can attend a few times to test it out before committing to really joining the group and paying dues. Some people attend a few times to test it out and then decide it’s not for them. That’s totally okay, and you won’t know unless you give it a try.

I hope to connect with you soon if this might interest you.

Thank you for stopping by, tender friends, and thank you for sharing!

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