Page 7 - Voices! - october 2015

FROM THE DESK

We All Deserve a Great Club
by Leanna Lindquist, DTM Program Quality Director

Is your club living up to your expectations? Take a moment and remind
yourself why you joined Toastmasters. What attracted you to the club? Has it
changed since you joined? Do you feel that the reasons for joining the club no
longer exist? Has it been awhile since your club was Distinguished?

We each bear our share of responsibility for the health and wellbeing of our
clubs. If you believe your needs are no longer being met in your club what
can you do?

• Talk with your Vice President Education – share your concerns
• Request a Moments of Truth if one hasn’t been conducted since July 1st
• Talk with other members, do they share your feelings
• Model the behavior you wish to see – always give a manual speech, use your CL Manual
• Offer to present a speech from the Successful Club Series
• Visit other clubs to get out of your comfort zone and to add a new perspective

Don’t underestimate the value of a little healthy competition. Challenge your club members
to make your club a Distinguished Club. Challenge them to earn an educational
award. Purchase a Wall Chart Set from TI and keep track of your member’s
progress. Each of the charts is 18”x24”. Progress for each member can be
tracked in the Competent Communicator Manual, Competent Leader Manual
and the Advanced Communicator Manuals. Display them at every meeting.
There is something about looking at how many speeches you have given
compared to others that can spur you on.

A club is only as good as its members make it. Make your club a great club.

Trust is a feeling, a distinctly human experience. Simply doing everything that you promise you’re going to do
does not mean people will trust you. It just means you’re reliable. And we all have friends who are total screw-
ups, and yet, we still trust them. Trust comes from a sense of common values and beliefs.

And the reason trust is important is because when we are surrounded with people who believe what we
believe, we’re more confident to take risks. We’re more confident to experiment, which requires failure, by the
way. We’re more confident to go off and explore knowing that there is someone from within our community,
someone who believes what we believe, someone we trust and who trusts us will watch our back, help us when
we fall over and watch our stuff and look after our children while we’re gone. Our very survival depends on our
ability to surround ourselves with people who believe what we believe. (Simon Sinek, Ted Talk Hour, May, 2015)

Volume 2 Issue 4 - OCT 2015 7