Over 500 Toastmasters invaded Chapman University on January 14 to attend the Founder’s District Leadership & Communication Experience (LACE) seeking training for their club officer positions, new skills as well as wisdom and truth.
It was the wisdom and truth part that was well-addressed by 2005 World Champion of Public Speaking and the keynote speaker for the festivities, Lance Miller.
Lance’s keynote address proved to be inspiring, irreverent, informative, humorous and passionate. The one thing that stood out about Lance from the very beginning was how much he credits Toastmasters for the skills he has developed and uses to help individuals and companies all over the world.
The primary focus of his talk was about being a championship club in which he stressed the top two reasons why clubs fail:
- The first reason being that no one takes ownership of the club when issues arise in which club members have a pass-the-buck mentality. He referred to it as a condition known as SEP: Somebody Else’s Problem.
- The second reason is not working the Toastmasters program.
The interesting thing about these two observations is that when a club commits to working the Toastmasters program consistently and to its core, a lot of club issues can be avoided. This makes for a very smooth club operation that promotes membership development and success through the achievement of competent communicator and competent leader educationals, new members, Distinguished Toastmasters, clubs becoming distinguished. That part of Lance’s talk was crucial in terms of the attendees becoming aware how simple it is to succeed in Toastmasters and how simple it it is to fail if clubs and its members aren’t committed.
Another highlight of Lance’s talk was making the audience members aware of how being part of Toastmasters helps reignite their free will just by being a part of this great organization. Lance admitted during his talk that he is not particularly politically correct. He honestly pointed out the flaws of the Toastmasters program in which he used an example of two people with no flying experience getting into an airplane where one person will fly the plane and the other person will evaluate the person flying the plane using a manual to do so. Lance referred to that as “The blind leading the blind.”
That said, the audience didn’t take offense. Instead, they laughed and understood where Lance was coming from, which leads to the following point about how Toastmasters reignites the free will of its members.
Toastmasters promotes self-expression and total acceptance of its members no matter if a particular member is politically correct, brutally honest, too serious, too lighthearted or whatever the case may be. That means people from all walks of life can join Toastmasters and eventually thrive in it knowing they can be themselves and be accepted no matter what. The audience accepted Lance’s irreverent style and brutal honesty about Toastmasters during his talk.
Lance also spoke of how Toastmasters offers its members the opportunity to speak frequently if each member commits to achieving a competent communicator educational award every single year regardless of whether the member is a Distinguished Toastmaster or not. He spoke of that as a formula for winning, which he can certainly attest to because he is a prior World Champion of Public Speaking. He has been very successful around the world helping individuals, companies and other Toastmasters districts coax everything they can out of the proven Toastmasters program. The lesson in that is really simple: Speaking frequently will allow a member that commits to doing so to win more often. And, with winning comes the spoils and benefits of winning. Isn’t that why many of us have joined Toastmasters?
At the end of the day, the attendees of LACE received more than they bargained for. They are now ready to return to their clubs to share their nuggets of wisdom with those members that did not attend as clubs make their push to become distinguished clubs before the end of the year.