Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening everybody. And welcome to today's episode of the Never Peak Project podcast. My name is Coach Ranger. I'm your host. And in today's episode, I'm going to be answering the question, is Toastmasters really worth it on your journey of solopreneurship?
I'm going to be going over a few things that I've noticed in my time as Toastmasters back when I was in college, as well as the last few months that I have been in it now here in the Mid Peninsula of California. I'm going to be diving into three main areas today, covering community, confidence, and consistency. So go ahead, sit back, relax, grab the beverage of your choice, and let's dive into the topic of today's discussion.
I joined Toastmasters back in around 2015 after I started attending UC Davis for college. I joined pretty quickly because I had heard in high school that Toastmasters won the best ways to improve your public speaking, your stage performance, and really help you get out of your shell. I had done a lot of public speaking when I was in school through the FFA, through the student body, the office that I served my senior year.
One of my buddies and I actually between my senior and freshman year from high school to college attended a Toastmasters meeting in Reno, Nevada. Surprisingly, we were turned away from joining because we were both under the age of 18.
So that is something to keep in mind for the younger listeners that you have to be at least 18 to join, but don't get discouraged right away because there are plenty of resources online, communities, as well as opportunities for you to hone your personal development and public speaking skills. One of those is the Lions Club. I know that Lions Clubs all over the United States, all over the world really, have speaking competitions throughout the year.
If you're under the age of 18 but want to start getting your feet wet with public speaking, either join your local debate club, look for a local adult service organization like Lions or Rotary that do speaking competitions, or join something like 4-H or the Future Farmers of America. Once I had started going to college a few months in, I finally turned 18, I was finally legally able to join Toastmasters. I joined it pretty quickly.
I think I joined at the end of October or the beginning of September, just a few weeks after my birthday, and I absolutely loved it. Within a few months, I got my first officer position doing PR and marketing for the group. It was really just cranking through the competent communicator and competent leadership manuals that were present at the time that I had joined.
I was only able to be in it for about a year, year and a half because my class schedule changed and I ended up having classes several quarters in a row during the club meetings. So that kind of got pushed to the wayside and I had to put my dreams of Distinguished Toastmaster on hold for a few years as I finished up my degree and went into the world of being an actual, air quotes around that, adult in 2019 once I had graduated.
Because of COVID and my job that I had at the time, it was really difficult for me to find a club that I wanted to join. I really didn't wanna do the online clubs or go virtual. I felt like if I was going to do a public speaking club, I really wanted to be able to be in a group of people in person every week to go over it. I tried doing a couple of the online clubs and while I'm sure they're great for some, I didn't really wanna spend my time doing that.
Recently, however, now that I'm back from the walk and I'm a little bit more situated in my current living situation and my business, I want to get back into the game so that I can start practicing those public speaking skills so that I can eventually move into more speaking roles and keynote addresses.
That's a really big goal of mine, is to give a keynote someday at a leadership conference, whether it is the Future Farmers of America or just various conferences for professional organizations that happen all over the US. I reached out to one of the local clubs called ProMasters and I fell in love with them immediately.
There are a couple other coaches in the group, a lot of really great experienced speakers that have been in there for decades or years and I really just love the vibe and the environment that has been created there.
And it's already been helping me a ton in just a few months and I have been participating in the group and I just wanted to share a few things that I noticed when it comes to entrepreneurs and how Toastmasters can really help us with crafting our message and really being clear on who we are and what we offer to the marketplace. As well as touching on how important it is to be in a group like this in order to continuously improve yourself.
And that's really what I want to harbor on and focus on for this entire episode is the understanding that as a business owner you are the foundation of everything that goes on in your business. You need to continuously build yourself up, make yourself stronger and that will cause everything else in your business to flow better, to be stronger. When you're stronger, the business is stronger. I think that Toastmasters is a fantastic example of how important communities like this really is.
Toastmasters really is a fantastic community because they're very clear on who they are there to support. They are there to support professionals that want to grow and improve their public speaking. It's pretty clear it is a problem that a ton of people face, something like a majority of people fear public speaking more than they fear death, which is such an interesting thing.
I'm sure a lot of us can remember it to a time when we were forced to speak in front of a group, whether it was reading out loud to the class, presenting our findings on a research project or just had to talk about something in front of everybody, how you kind of get those sweaty palms, how you start feeling kind of icky and nervous and your chest heightens and it just feels terrifying. Toastmasters is there to alleviate that stress so that you can be a more competent leader and communicator.
That really is solidified by their overall mission statement, which is to provide a supportive learning environment for members to develop communication and leadership skills. What I really love about the community that Toastmasters has creative is it has criticism and feedback built into the overall system.
You're not just going there and saying things out loud to the group for a minute or two or five or 10 and nothing really happening, but they really put that evaluation at the center of everything.
It's not just about talking, it's really about listening, hearing where others are coming from, hearing what they're saying and being able to craft a message back to that speaker to let them know ways that they can improve, things that they're doing great in and really just challenging them consistently to be better. I really just love the whole idea of communities like this that provide a safe place to fail.
I would much rather stumble and mess up and force myself to grow in an environment where everybody has that same goal rather than stumble and fail and fall on my face in front of a bunch of the customers or business partners down the road. That community has already been so supportive in helping me craft clear messaging around the lessons that I learned on my walk across the country.
It's helped me give better elevator pitches or impromptu speeches at BNI meetings, BRN meetings, the Chamber of Commerce, et cetera. It's really helped me get to the point faster and more efficiently than I have before. Really cutting out the fluff of the overall message so you can really focus on the meat and potatoes of what it is that you're trying to say. The second seed that I wanna focus on is what it's doing for your confidence.
Confidence is a huge thing for solopreneurs, nonprofit leaders, because when you're confident, it really just exudes and spreads out across the room. If people are kind of meek and shy, it really dilutes their message and can cause you to not really look like a professional or somebody that is competent in what they do.
If you aren't confident in your product, if you aren't 100% sure and passionate about it, that's going to show when you're communicating with prospective clients and other business owners down the road. The two major parts of a Toastmasters meeting are the prepared public speeches where they're usually about five to seven minutes long and that gives you a chance to craft a longer message in front of a group.
When you're spending that five to 10 minutes in front of a group of people, you kind of have to step out of your comfort zone. When you're doing that, you're building yourself to be a stronger, more effective leader. The other area that they do are the impromptu speeches called table topics that are typically one to two minutes long. There's some grace period on either side, but really that is helping you craft a quicker, cleaner message when you are put on the spot.
It's kind of like holding your feet to the fire so that you're able to walk on hotter surfaces down the road and not react negatively to it. If somebody asks you a question about your product or service that you've never been asked before, you not only have to get through an answer, but you have to get through that initial flusteredness that surrounds being asked something that you're not prepared for.
But when it comes to that second seat, I think Toastmasters does a fantastic job in being very effective in how they structure that. The third thing that I love about Toastmasters and why I think it's fantastic for entrepreneurs to jump into is that it is all about consistency. Every single week or every two weeks, depending on the club that you join, you are putting yourself and your professional and personal development first.
You're showing up week after week, time after time, in order to be a better speaker, be a better leader, and really just focus on yourself and where you wanna go. What I love the most about Toastmasters is that now they have a program called Pathways, where you pick a pathway that you wanna go down that really leads you to a very specific outcome. So right now I'm working through a pathway called Presentation Mastery.
There are motivational speaking, there is education, there is leadership, and et cetera, et cetera. There's a ton of different pathways that you can go down that's extremely structured, and it takes you down each path step by step and tells you what to focus on. It really makes it easy to focus on one skill at a time. If they had kinda just thrown you in the ring and said, write a perfect speech, you wouldn't know what that is.
And referring back to another episode, I talked a little bit about bucket words. Bucket words are words that might seem simple, but they carry a lot of different skills or characteristics inside of them. So when I say give me the perfect speech, it's gonna be hard for you to know that humor and eye contact and body language and motion and tone and inflections and content and structure and all these different things are in that bucket.
But over time, with the pathways, you're really able to week by week focus on one thing at a time and add that to your tool belts to be able to put it into that bucket at the end to create a more effective speech. And that's what I really love about the overall consistency of Toastmasters. Because you kind of always know generally what to expect at a meeting, but there's just enough fun thrown into it that you are still on your toes and it feels fresh.
To really wrap up this episode, I do think that Toastmasters is a fantastic investment of your money, time and energy, because of the three C's of community, confidence and consistency. You have a fantastic support network of like-minded individuals that wanna see you grow and prosper, you really have to push yourself out of your comfort zone in order to grow and being in a nice safe environment like this is a fantastic way to do so.
And paired with that last aspect of consistency, being able to do it week after week after week after week and see yourself from your first speech all the way to getting that distinguished Toastmaster title is a fantastic way for you to grow, grow, grow. So if you'd like to learn any more about Toastmasters or join a meeting, please let me know. If you wanna learn about Toastmasters or experience it firsthand for yourself, please reach out and let me know.
My group is called Pro Masters and we meet every single Thursday from 7.30 to 8.30 in the morning. Get it done first thing in the morning, eat the frog first thing, so that you can focus on the rest of your day. And you already have a win under your belt. You'll be able to say that I gave a speech or a table topic or an evaluation first thing in the morning. And it really just warms you up for the rest of the day.
If you'd like to join for a meeting, we meet every single Thursday in person at the College of San Mateo at 7.30 a.m. We also have a hybrid Zoom option as well. So if it's a little bit of a drive for you or you don't wanna come in person every single week, there's a way for you to still join and be a part of the greatest club in the universe.
If you'd like any information, please send me an email rangeratwithinrangedcoaching.com and just in the title, just let me know that you're interested in joining Toastmasters or you have some questions about the program. I'd be more than happy to invite you along and mentor you once you are inside of the club. Really for today, that's all that I have. I super appreciate your guys' time and attention while I kinda give an ode to Toastmasters.
If you'd like to join again, please send me an email and I will be more than happy to send you the Zoom link or the address of the meeting. Until next time, remember that the best is yet to come as long as you are willing to make the decision to never settle, never quit and never peak. I'll see you guys in the next one.