Gurney-Hydro Toastmasters Club

People have many misconceptions when it comes to working in a team. First of all, is that the onus of whether the team achieves its objectives or not lies solely with the leader.   Not so.   The team leader steers the direction of the team, but ultimately, everyone in the team needs to play their role so that they can achieve success. The second misconception is that each individual is only responsible for their own little part of the team.   Again, this couldn’t be further from the truth and a very myopic view of the big picture. Your job may only encompass a very small part in the team, but nevertheless it is still crucial and at the end of the day, will affect the team’s performance. Think of it like a clock and each individual person in the team is a part of the clock.   Even if a tiny screw is missing, it will make the entire clock stop working. So definitely, when your team doesn’t perform it is your fault. It’s your fault because...

How innovative are you?  As shared by our VPE during the recent meeting, with Industry 4.0 in full swing, being innovative and doing things outside the norm is very important to ensure you stay competitive. Otherwise, you could one day potentially, find yourself being replaced by robots. Going round the table during introductions, it was clear that our participants for the night have very creative ways to think outside the box in their daily lives. And with only one speaker attempting the prepared speech for the night, we had to think outside the box to give value to our participants by asking or own professional speaker, Hayley James to conduct a mini seminar. Hayley conducting her seminar on "How to Enhance your Stage Presence" Hayley's seminar was all about enhancing your stage presence.  She started off by walking the audience through her process of getting everyone's attention to focus on her.  Then once she has everyone's undivided attenti...

We see it all the time in new speakers especially.   They stress themselves so much over the content of their speech that they forget the other equally important part – the delivery. We get it, presenting a speech for the first, second or even third time is very intimidating.   You’ll have all eyes on you for that 7 minute period of time that seems to stretch to forever.   The worst thing that can happen to you is that you forget what you want to say. WRONG! The worst thing that can happen is that you remember everything you want to say but still deliver a below average speech because you’re so caught up on the content that you neglect how you’re going to deliver the content. So you end up rooted to the same position, using very little hand gesture and body language, you speak in a monotonous voice and you avoid looking at the audience because you’re afraid that they might throw you off track. A lot of people often forget that it doesn’t matter ho...