Gurney-Hydro Toastmasters Club

If you study any great leader, you will find they have many characteristics that contribute to their success.  Below are four that are the most fundamental.  Start with these first and build upon them. Leadership Characteristic #1: Compelling Desire When you take on a leadership role in any project or organization, you must have a goal, a vision of the end game that you want to achieve.  That goal must be driven by a compelling desire for it to happen.  Why do you want to achieve this?  For everyone, it’s the pain/pleasure factor – to get away from a pain or to gain pleasure.  Simple as that.  What is yours? For example, you take on a leadership role in your Toastmasters club because you want to see the club membership grow.  Why?  So that it will be easier to fill roles?  So that your club can achieve the DCP goals? Ask yourself the reason until it becomes so compelling that nothing will stop you from achieving it. Leadersh...

You read that right! Toastmasters is the place where it’s alright to fail.  In fact, it is the safest place for you to fail. As quoted by Robert Kiyosaki above, you don’t achieve success without failing first.  And you need to fail fast and hard as early as possible, learn from your mistakes and come back strong. Statistics have shown that only 8% of people achieve success on the first try without failing first.  And it is an even smaller percentage of these people who manage to retain their success. The reason is simple – if you don’t fail, you don’t learn anything.  The people who get lucky and achieve their goals on the first try will normally not be able to sustain that success for the long term.  It is the people who have failed time and again who are the ones who go all the way. Failure teaches us a number of things. It tells us where we went wrong, the areas that we need to improve upon to be better.  Thomas Edison failed to invent the...

Prost!   Lift up your mug and toast to life, food, friends and beer! Our members and guests got introduced to Oktoberfest during our meeting.   We decided to have some fun and celebrate the most famous beer festival with – what else – but beer and sausages courtesy of our Datin Joanne Tan. We also had girls in dirndls.   Hey, we’re not called the most happening club for nothing *wink* We only had one speaker for the night, our guests, Kitsh.   His ice breaker sang praises to his mother and all the people who have shone a light in his life.  He also encouraged his listeners to embrace their true self even though people may disagree with them. This was followed by a very informative sharing session by our VPE, Sheryl on Oktoberfest.   She delved into the history of the festival, the customs and traditions and how it went from a celebration of a royal wedding (bet you didn’t know that) into the world’s biggest beer festival. O...