April 2022 Shout Out Newsletter
Discover what District 48 members are up to this month!
The Shout Out Newsletter is all about the members of District 48. It’s the who, what, where and when of members’ activities.
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Table of Contents
Member Spotlight
Community Outreach
Speech Contestant Stories
Peak Inside Some of Our Clubs
Editor: District 48 Public Relations Manager
It’s all about our members!
Member Spotlight
Facing My Fear of Public Speaking Unleashed New Possibilities
How Toastmasters led to personal growth and career recognition as told by Dr. Hannah Lonsdale
Imagine this…
You’ve been invited to speak about your cutting-edge research at an important conference. It’s a huge opportunity. You spend weeks thinking about what you’re going to say and preparing yourself. Its finally time to speak. You hop up onto the stage, stand behind the podium and peer into the audience of 200 expectant faces. There are several prominent people in your field out there. One has his arms folded across his chest, looking skeptical.
You take a deep breath to begin, but the words come out in a shaky wobble. Your throat tightens. Beads of sweat form under the hot lights. You place your note cards onto the podium so that you can grip something solid with your shaking hands. Then the note cards slide slowly down the angled surface and become jumbled. The faces of the audience now display degrees of sympathy, frustration, or boredom. You limp through your material feeling that you will die of embarrassment and apologizing profusely. As you step down from the stage you wish with all of your heart that the ground will swallow you whole.
Unfortunately for me, this wasn’t just a bad dream where I could wake up, have a nice cup of tea and get on with my day. That is what happened the last time I spoke in public before I joined Toastmasters.
I moved to the USA from the UK in March 2019, to take on my first full-time academic research position at John Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida. When I first arrived, I didn’t know a single person and didn’t seem to be able to speak the language–American English is surprisingly different to British English.
Several months after my conference trauma, I nervously went to my first Toastmasters meeting on the recommendation of a co-worker. I had no idea what to expect. Happily, everyone was very welcoming, and the atmosphere was relaxed and informal. After several members confidently deliver polished speeches, the Table Topics master asked if I would like to take a turn at speaking. After a little encouragement I agreed and was given a question. I took a deep breath. There was the familiar tightening in my throat, and the feeling that everyone would think I was awful at this and…I burst into tears! How could I ever do this? Perhaps I could somehow just avoid public speaking altogether, even though as a researcher I needed to present my work at conferences. No, I couldn’t avoid it. I’d just have to try to improve. Even a tiny bit better would be fine, just enough to be coherent.
So, I kept coming back to the meetings. Week after week I would volunteer for Invocation or Jokemaster- roles that only required me to speak for thirty seconds or so. I’d take Table Topics when someone insisted, stuttering through a few sentences peppered with ums and ers and ahs. I remember the huge feeling of achievement when after a couple of months, I made it to the sixty second minimum. For my first Icebreaker speech, I put lots of photos into a PowerPoint presentation in the hope that it would take some of the audience’s attention off me and what I was saying.
Along my journey, I found unexpected things at Toastmasters. My fellow members unknowingly taught me a great deal about what it is to be American, and how people in many different professions and stages of life experienced their culture. Although I had joined to improve my ability to deliver a speech, I found that the impromptu speaking practice of Table Topics is perhaps of even greater value. I could speak better during conversations, in business meetings and even on dates. My confidence grew as I could better get ideas from my brain to come out of my mouth as words and coherent sentences.
I met Hunter in October 2019. He lived in Pittsburgh, so for months we mostly got to know each other on Skype. Then, of course, COVID-19 came along and turned everything on its head. Hunter was able to work remotely, so we decided to live together in Florida, and it was then the rest of the outside world who we needed to talk with on Skype. My weekly Toastmasters meeting also went virtual and we all began to develop our Zoom presentation skills. This felt less intimidating than standing on stage in a room full of people. My speaking confidence grew a little more. I delivered an online teaching session for about 30 people at my hospital. I presented some work at a couple of small virtual conferences. The ground did not swallow me whole and I definitely did not die!
I decided to apply for a moonshot- to present a virtual session at the biggest international conference in my specialty of Anesthesiology. Why not? They’ll pretty much definitely say no…except they said yes. They invited me to speak for 40 minutes on my research in Artificial Intelligence, followed by a Q&A session. If I told you I wasn’t nervous, I’d be lying. If I told you that I’m confident that I’ll deliver a perfectly composed and polished performance, I would also be lying. But I believe that I can do it–and not die.
Hunter and I are planning our wedding ceremony for the fall. Amongst the after-dinner speeches, there will definitely be one from the bride.
Hannah Lonsdale is a member of Toastmasters @ All Children's Hospital (TACH)
Community Outreach
Neva Fairchild works at the American Federation for the Blind®
Excerpted from Imagine a World with No Limits: A Conversation with Neva Fairchild
“My name is Neva Fairchild. I live in Flower Mound, Texas, with my husband, my semi-retired seeing-eye dog, and a mutt we adopted a few months ago. I have worked for over 30 years in the field of vision rehabilitation. Since I began working for the American Foundation for the Blind in 2008, I have overseen an independent living model home, a website promoting employment called CareerConnect, and now, the Blind Leaders Development Program. I have been married for 45 years and we have two adult children, both of whom are married. I have four adorable grandchildren, but I may be biased. I have been visually impaired all my life, but I had a lot more vision when I was a child than I do now.
My vision loss is caused by Cone Rod Degeneration, a form of Retinitis Pigmentosa. It is an inherited retinal disease that my daughter also has. I could see very large print when I was in elementary school if I held the book very close to my face. By 4th grade, print had gotten too small for me to see, and I began reading Talking Books for pleasure and not reading my textbooks. By 7th grade I could not read type-written tests visually, so someone had to read aloud to me. Now, I have no usable vision and over the years have developed lots of non-visual techniques to do all the things I need and want to do. I knit, I sculpt, I make greeting cards and scrap book pages. I babysit my 2-, 3-, and 10-year-old grandchildren, I cook and clean up (when I have to) and although I have reached retirement age, I still work full-time.
What is AFB? Why do you choose to work there?
AFB was created 100 years ago by influential people like Helen Keller. They realized that programs for people who were blind were popping up all over the U.S. but there wasn’t a great deal of collaboration. If you think about the times, 1921, communication was limited to telephone, telegraph, and snail mail. There was a need for a place to collect and share information about what worked and what didn’t in terms of training for jobs, independent living, and research into the needs of people who were blind or had low vision. AFB was created to fill that role, and we are still doing that today. I am proud to work for AFB and contribute to the body of knowledge that will help to create a future of no limits.”
Neva Fairchild is a member of Message Crafters
Speech Contestant Stories
Five Questions for Aaron Beverly, 2019 Toastmasters World Champion of Public Speaking®
Excerpted from an interview conducted by Jay Oza, Nov 15, 2019
Five questions
How do you prepare when you have to give a high-stakes speech?
The way I create and edit my speeches is that I am constantly thinking of ways to improve them. So once I create the draft, I am always thinking of how I can make it better. For example, here is how I created the speech that won me the 2019 Toastmasters World Champion of Public Speaking.
I wrote the first draft in July of 2019. But before writing the draft, I had been testing the material in other speeches and keynote speeches to see what worked with the audience. Once I found out what was resonating with the audience, I condensed the material in the five to seven-minute time frame for the Toastmasters contest. So it is an iterative process from start to finish, and along the way, I keep making the speech better.
How is a Toastmasters contest speech different from a typical corporate speech?
You change the order of how you present your stories.
The main thing you have to keep in mind is that corporate speeches are not entertainment speeches in that you have to get to your point quickly.
A typical entertainment speech follows this order:
Set the scene
Introduce the character
Introduce the conflict
Escalation of the conflict
Climax
Resolution.
In a corporate environment, you have to start with the problem and answer these key questions:
What is wrong?
How did it happen?
How are you going to fix it?
Also, you have a much shorter time to get your point across, and the audience is going to be asking questions.
How do you tell a story in a corporate environment?
A corporate story is a little different from a typical story. You have to focus on what went wrong. The story could be about a problem and how you're going to fix it.
In a typical story, you introduce the protagonist and then the antagonist. Meanwhile, in a corporate setting, you first introduce the antagonist and explain the backstory about that antagonist. Then you bring in the protagonist to be the hero of the situation and rectify the situation.
In short, it's a different order of storytelling in how we normally tell stories in that you first introduce a character in the setting and then introduce the conflict or the bad guy and then have the escalation. It doesn't work like that in a corporate environment. It has to be a lot tighter, and you have to start with the problem first and why it exists and then how you're going to solve it.
Who has most influenced your speaking style?
I take a lot of inspiration from comedians, and you may even see it in the style that I have on stage where I have very quick and punchy delivery, and that comes from my studying of comedians. I really like comedians like Hasan Minhaj and old-school comedians like Eddie Murphy and Robin Williams.
I really look at their content, their presentations, and I see what I can use in my public speaking presentations from watching them. I believe that comedians are the best example of public speaking in the modern-day, even more so than the professional speakers. Comedians have an excellent command of the stage, and they are very entertaining.
What is the one tip that can improve one's speaking skills?
One tip that I have is to record yourself, whether it's audio recording or video recording. Unfortunately, what I have found is that a lot of people don't do this. So if you want to improve your public speaking skills, I recommend people they record themselves and then listen to the recording or watch the recording to see how it looks and sounds and pay attention to distractions like filler words and any grammatical errors that you tend to make. This is hard for many, but you just have to get into the habit of recording yourself, and you will start seeing an improvement in the way you speak.