TME – Spike Gu, ACB & CL

Summiting Session – Emily Minor, CC & ALS, on “Critical Left Brain/Right Brain Evaluations.”

Table Topics – Jenny Ni, CC & CL

Speakers:

• Carlo Wolff, ACB & ALB – The Emperor’s New Suit from the Storytelling manual
• Susan Zhou, DTM – Lead and Learn for Resolving Conflict from the Professional Speakers manual

We’ll have a guest General Evaluator, Gabor Holch, the president of Leadership TMC!  Rebecca Hong, DTM and District 85 Governor, and Joyce Hu, CC & CL, will be our individual evaluators.

We’ll be meeting at the Carpark, our super-secret underground lair.  Admission is just 30 RMB for members of other TM clubs, and 40 RMB for non-TM members.  We hope to see you there!

You will find videos from parts of the session here.

All up, we enjoyed six training sessions over the course of the afternoon, mostly based on the Leadership Excellence, Better Speaker and Successful Club Series’ Toastmasters training programs:

• Plan Your Toastmasters Journey: Rebecca Hong DTM
• Impromptu Speaking: Sam Ng ACG CL
• Selecting Your Topic: Suhail Nasir ACB ALB
• Evaluate to Motivate: Daniel Smith DTM
• Mentoring: Yingdan Liu ACS ALS
• Resolving Conflict: Andrew Shih ACS ALS

Also, we had speeches from:

• Flame Li CC CL,
• Cheng Zhiyuan CC CL,
• Michelle Lee ACB ALB,
• Cindy Mi CTM,
• Mollen Wang CC CL, and
• Michelle Lv CC

Complimented with CAT-style evaluations delivered by our own Carlo Wolff ACB CL, Wendy Wang ACB ALB, and Spike Gu ACB CL.

Congratulations to our Division Governor, Susan Zhou DTM, for bringing this event together, along with the other Division Governors, Joseph Hu CC ALB, and Louie Lu ACB CL.

• “If I could make a suggestion…”
• “One suggestion that I would have…”
• “Now onto some suggestions…”

A well-used signpost becomes a distraction for the audience and a crutch for the speaker.

Let’s stop wasting time talking about it and instead use that time to give relevant, targeted, and useful suggestions.

As an evaluator, emphasise what the speaker did well that audience can learn from, and areas that the speaker could improve that would also help the audience.

Leave your personal comments for a private conversation with the speaker and perhaps in the written evaluation.

• Utilization: Use whatever happens to get across your message.
• Frame the message and prepare the audience.
• Say less; communicate more.
• Take your time. When you do, speak with a purpose.
• Share the emotional component of the message, not just the content. Communicate feeling AND information. They’ll remember the feeling long after they forget your information and will forget your information immediately if they don’t like the feeling they get around you.
• Everytime we stand up, we’re looking to expand our skills. There are no small roles, only short ones. When you have a short role, it’s a concentrated experience to use in refining your skills.
• Set the frame – when you speak, identify the criteria for success or at least the guidelines that you are working towards.
• There are no excuses – don’t make them for yourself or give them to other people. Just give your best. Always.
• When things go wrong, strive to make the problem invisible. Make it look as though it was part of the plan.
• Give your audience the gift of your message. They are VIPs (Very Important People) so if you don’t have a point to saying something yet, think of one.
• Great evaluators highlight examples of great things that we can learn from, highlight ways that we can improve and presents the combination of the two for the benefit of the audience. Speak of “the speaker” to the audience rather than speaking to the speaker. Give your personal evaluation for the speaker later.
• Have a great introduction. Introductions set the stage for the audience and help them get more from the presentation. The easiest way is to write one yourself.

Don’t ask the audience if they liked it. Or anything else for that matter. Certainly don’t ask for another round of applause. In fact, in 2-3 minutes don’t ask the audience anything unless the manual specifically requires it as you have just enough time to do what you need to do but not enough time to waste grandstanding. Even then, the manual probably should be changed in my opinion…

Too many evaluators use their evaluation as a chance to grab the limelight. Instead, focus on the speaker and let the quality of your evaluation draw to you the attention that you deserve.

Skip restating the speech. We’ve already heard it once – if we slept through it the first time, we might well sleep through your evaluation of it too!

Focus. Say what’s most important first. Be specific. Have only a few points – maybe three strengths and three points for improvement. Use your critical thinking to identify what’s most important and leave the rest to the written evaluation. Your audience won’t remember a long list anyway.

Make no apologies. When you give points for improvement, you are doing a service to the speaker and the audience – there’s no need for apologies or comments like “there’s always room for improvement…”

To me, there are just three parts to being an evaluator:

1. Highlight (strenghts)
2. Helpout (show areas for improvement)
3. Handover (to the Toastmaster or General Evaluator – that means you shut up and sit down)

Being a good evaluator is not that complicated really…

One more thing: Speak in the third person.

Speak to the audience, not to the speaker – address your comments as “Mension had a strong, commanding voice and a dynamic, entertaining presence” (which Mension, the Immediate Past President of Lighthouse Toastmasters does of course!) rather than making it into a public conversation with the speaker.

Once you’ve delivered your evaluation you can give personal comments to the speaker, but save them until later. The oral evaluation is a speech in its own right – a speech should be delivered in the third person.

(Check Evaluate to Motivate for the formal Toastmasters training of course but really you just have to think about how strange it is to say “you” in a speech when you’re just talking to the speaker, you could probably work it out yourself.)

I especially liked how she broke up the five evaluators into four ’styles’ of evaluations. It was a speech marathon so there were a lot of evaluators, though each had a different style. Instead of just describing each the style of each evaluator, she highlighted the similarities and differences.

To me, this showed that Wendy wasn’t just passively watching the meeting, but that she was analyzing and thinking critically about what she was observing. And, as one of the evaluators myself, that made me know that at least one person in the audience was paying attention!

It’s the same when we give individual evaluations. A great evaluator won’t just repeat what was said but rather will add a layer of analysis so that the audience can understand the lessons contained in the speech more deeply. Like reading a review of a film might help us better appreciate it, or listening to a book review might help us better understand it, an evaluator can not only highlight the strengths of a speaker but can help their audience grow and become even more.

To me, a great evaluation is a mini-training session. The evaluator uses the speaker as a stimulus to which they respond to the audience – highlighting the strengths of the speaker as examples that the audience can emulate, and areas for improvement that the audience may seek to amend in their own speaking.

That’s why evaluations are so important. They can be more demanding than table topics. More challenging than a prepared speech. More varied than being the Toastmaster of the meeting.

CAT is preparing our members for the coming evaluations contest through the next few months. As well as our usual array of training sessions, we will be having evaluations of evaluators and having some CC-level speeches so that we can get more used to evaluating at per contest requirements. One of our members competed at the District (National) contest last year and we have an array of other experienced members.

Hope that you can join us!

• Introduce with purpose and impact. Providing a little bit of information about a speaker helps prepare the audience for the information that’s coming while also providing the introducer – such as the TME – with a great opportunity to learn how to make introductions.
• Keep focused on the purpose with each session. It’s tempting to allow the flexibility of the Toastmasters program to lose structure. By keeping sessions focused around manual projects and specific training outcomes, we can help ensure that sessions remain relevant and interesting rather than indulging a speaker’s need to spend time on the stage.
• Time on stage is valuable. It’s attention that you take from your audience that they could be spending on the rest of their life – or time that they could be using for their own speaking. Treat that attention with respect, appreciation and humility. Make their investment in you worth their while.
• If you have too much time, finish early. Extend breaks. Expand the time available for Table Topics or Evaluations. But all that being done, finishing a meeting on time – or early – is a great thing, and certainly better than allowing a meeting to drag on.
• Evaluations serve the speaker by providing feedback, but they also are intended to serve the audience: Highlight the speaker’s strengths as examples for them to copy, and use what you see as the areas for improvement as lessons for us all.
• Every time you speak is an opportunity for you to learn and refine your skills. Even a 30-second slot is a chance for you to demonstrate your best skills for those 30 seconds – so use that time.
• When you have a projector, use it.
• When you have a warmup session, keep it relevant to speaking.

Finally, say everything that needs to be said. Then stop.

Many speeches very much miss the point. Sometimes its because the speaker didn’t understand the langauge used in the project. But mostly it’s more laziness. When you’re delivering a speech, care for your audience enough to read through the manual – make notes on that book so that your evaluator can see that you actively read the pages and have thought about how you can incorporate the lessons.

Maybe it’s a bit of a challenge, but it’s the best way to get the most from your Toastmasters experience – and not just waste your audiences’ and your own time.

Raymond is a fantastic comedian. He grabs the audience, looks at things in a slightly twisted way, and doesn’t take himself too seriously. More than this, Raymond is a very likeable person.

But I was really taken back by his speech on Tuesday night. Here were a few highlights worth mentioning:

• Raymond read his project. Unlike many speakers, his project manual had underlining and notes all through it, showing that he had read the project in detail and intended to get the most from the speech.
• Raymond cleared the stage before he started. A whiteboard was in the middle of the performance area and he took the time to remove this potentially distracting object, pushing it off to the side of the room. It was a little thing, but it not only made sure that nothing was going to distract his audience, but it showed that he was in command of his environment.
• Raymond made it personal. While he is a funny and very likeable person anyway, his story revealed part of his past – opening himself to the audience and deepening his impact.
• Clean transition to the story. After starting in the present moment, Raymond transported us back to events from the distant past smoothly and elegantly. And then, just as I was ready to think he couldn’t make his speech any better, he tied back to his start as he concluded his speech.

Raymond’s speech was a joy to experience – and as anyone who has seen one of my evaluations will know, it is not often that I would say such a thing!

A great speech made it even more demanding to highlight some suggestions for improvement. One thing that I noticed was a slight lull in the energy level in one part of the speech – a period that just wasn’t quite as crisp as the rest. Despite outstanding gestures – necessary for the huge audience of People’s Square meetings – he sometimes came to a neutral position with his elbows bent and his hands across his naval, a posture that didn’t seem congruent with the energy of the rest of his presentation. And he tended to look down when he paused.

And seeing his speech reminded me of the importance of developing our vocal quality. It is challenging to develop projection and resonance, yet it is a very powerful thing to do. One friend described Australian Champion Mark having “a voice like chocolate”… a voice that doesn’t just command, but has their audience begging to be told.

Leaders are more powerful when they can access that strong voice, even if they don’t always use it.

While Raymond completed his ACB more rapidly than many people would dare – completing up to two speeches in a week at one point – his development reinforces to me the value of getting up there and speaking. Use the manual project as a tool to develop your skills, but keep presenting speeches!

Raymond, well done and congratulations on your ACB – your speech rocked!

- Daniel Smith, DTM