Tips for Toastmasters: Five Tips for Successful Meetings:

A Toastmasters meeting is what makes a club thrive. If your meetings are run effectively, your members will be more enthusiastic and guests will be more apt to join. So here are some tips to help make your next Toastmasters meeting a huge success:

1. Start and end on time:

Effective time management shows everyone that you value their time as well as your own. If you always start the meeting ten minutes late, people will start showing up later and later. Likewise, if you end late, people will start getting angry and having negative feelings about the group.  Read more... (539 words, 2 images, estimated 2:09 mins reading time)

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Personal Power: Preventing Missed Opportunities

The August Edition of the Fast Results E-Zine was about opportunities and the importance of not missing them. Let’s face it, missing an opportunity is one of the biggest mistakes we can make. Often, it’s taking advantage of opportunities that help us succeed. Missing an opportunity can do everything from frustrating us to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory: I only had a camera with me, if I only had something to write down that idea I had, if I had just asked her out before the other guy did, if I had just introduced myself to the prospective client before my competitor did, if I had just sent my resume out a day earlier….  Read more... (403 words, 2 images, estimated 1:37 mins reading time)

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Overcoming Hopelessness: Part 2 – Getting Out of the Rut:

DespairIn part one of this series we talked about the fact that you’re not alone in feeling that sense of hopelessness – practically everyone feels it from time to time. Realizing that your feeling this way is the beginning of the process for pulling yourself out. What we’re going to talk about in this part is how you end up feeling that way to begin with and some things you can do to get out of it.

Why we feel hopelessness:  Read more... (1196 words, 4 images, estimated 4:47 mins reading time)

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Overcoming Hopelessness – Part 1

DespairThere truly is no worse feeling in the world than hopelessness. People who feel like things can never get any better and only get worse end up in the direst situations. They experience depression, alienate themselves from others and some become suicidal. It’s a terrible emotion to feel and it’s difficult to watch someone you care about experience it.  Read more... (459 words, 4 images, estimated 1:50 mins reading time)

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Public Speaking Success: Death by Time Limit – Tip for Trainers

public speaking time limitThe time limit: it can be fatal in the case of a Toastmasters Speech contest, but it’s not limited to just Toastmasters. I’ve seen speakers and trainers do a fabulous job with their presentations but have turned the audience’s perception of them negative but talking too much. As speakers, we naturally want to provide our audience with maximum value but less can often be more.  Read more... (671 words, 4 images, estimated 2:41 mins reading time)

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