The general evaluator runs the evaluations part of the meeting:
Introduces evaluators
Requests timing reports and voting for the Best Evaluator award
Requests ah-counter report, grammarian report
Gives their feedback on the meeting and may provide specific feedback/ideas to each evaluator – this should all be done in 2-3 minutes.
How to be a credible general evaluator?
Think about all that we are trying to do with the theme of credibility – all different aspects of it, all four priorities.
Listen carefully, and take notes.
Use the opportunity to share if you had ideas, observations, or points in your notes that weren’t covered in other evaluations and reports.
If you have specific feedback for any role players, bring it up. Again, keep it very specific, and avoid general statements.
Think of evaluation speeches critically. If you thought of opportunities for feedback on specific objectives of a speech project, feel free to bring them up. (Now, this is a very comprehensive skill; you have to think about the goals of every speech project. Do the best you can on this part. Still, an excellent idea to start thinking about it. It will do wonders for your communication capabilities.)
The general evaluation is your evaluation of the meeting. It is your opinion, your reaction. Use the speech evaluation techniques here as well, except that you are giving feedback to several individuals, not just one.
Coaches do a lot of this at our meetings. It is a good idea for members to start developing this.
Use CL manual projects to think of all the different aspects of it. For example, active listening, critical thinking, time management, facilitation, planning, encouraging others, etc.
Develop ideas in your own words. What does it mean?
Have a list of critical points to develop in your speech. Think about how these points tie into your overall message.
Develop each key point in your own words as they come to you naturally.
Avoid trying to memorize the whole speech verbatim.
Avoid reading the whole speech from paper or phone.
While delivering your speech, think of meaningful eye contact with at least a few in your audience, if not all. You make eye contact with a person just long enough so that person feels a personal connection to you. Do this with many people in the audience, if not all. When you do that, public speaking becomes one-on-one speaking with people in attendance, one person at a time..
Make a conscious attempt to deliver the message with vocal variety.
Change in projection
Change in pace of your speech delivery
Vary your pitch
Pauses to take deep breathes, pauses when you are trying to develop words (no need for filler words 🙂 )
Stretch critical words in your message for emphasis
Deven had given this speech below at his club in Orange, Paul Revere Toastmasters, to record video on this. It has more on the three ideas, and specific things to try with each:
[Deven’s note: While watching the video recording of my speech, I noticed that my eye contact didn’t come through for someone watching it now. This room set up is such that the width of the room is almost four times as much as depth. When I speak, there are more people to my sides than in the front. If I were to do it again, I’d look at Mark much more, or more specifically, at his iPhone, so the video shows my eye contact. 🙂
How about hand gestures? I didn’t try anything specifically for the hand gestures.
While practicing the three things, you naturally develop hand gestures over time. Every person should and probably would have his/her gestures. There are specific techniques about making your hand gestures full/big and holding them for impact, useful to develop awareness about it. Use feedback loop at toastmasters to cultivate a mindset for hand gestures, try the ideas, you will build your body language in time.
Read and think about your project objectives. Toastmasters manuals have explained each project well, take your time to understand it all, absorb it, and then most importantly, try to use it in your speech preparation and delivery.
Prepare and make a sincere attempt.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT:
Stay true to your natural self when you speak, no need to pretend to be someone else.
Be vulnerable. Show, express, channel your emotions.
Trying is all we ask at toastmasters. Give it a shot. There are no judgments here, neither from your peers nor from the coaches.
Maintain your speech bank. When an idea comes up to you, jot it down. It will become an excellent repository of topics for you. Keep it with you at every Toastmasters meeting.
Think about your next speech now; no need to wait till the last week. Think about potential topics, what you would/could do for it, …etc. It will do wonders for your confidence and comfort level.
Have fun with your speech; it is your speech topic, after all. You can take it wherever you like.
It is your reaction to the speech as it came across to you: what you saw, heard, and felt in the message.
If different individuals give evaluation feedback to the same speaker, will that be different? The answer is yes: each person has a different perspective, state of mind, temperament, and background to feel and perceive the speech.
You organize the evaluation as a 2-3 min speech to share your feedback and reaction to the speech.
It is an opportunity for the speaker to see how a fellow toastie received their speech.
It is a helpful peer-to-peer support system to improve and learn.
The speaker should appreciate feedback from the evaluator. The evaluator, a fellow toastie, listens to the speech presentation carefully, thinks critically about the project objectives, writes notes, prepares detailed feedback, and sincerely attempts to deliver it constructively.
At a Toastmasters meeting, the speaker avoids interrupting, countering, talking back, or arguing with an evaluator in the middle of the evaluation.
A Toastie genuinely cares for fellow toasties in the group.
At Toastmasters, we encourage every teenager to get on their cutting edge, stretch their comfort zone, and try new ideas. So, an evaluator shares their reaction in a very positive and constructive way. The evaluation could be an opportunity to make friends with a new speaker or sometimes take the speaker in your wings. An evaluator always roots for the success of a fellow toastie making a speech attempt.
Think about it from the speaker’s perspective. Examples:
It is an Ice Breaker speech where the speaker stands up for a prepared presentation for the first time. In that case, it is essential not to overwhelm them with too many areas to improve: accentuate the positives a little bit more, maybe to encourage them.
You are giving feedback to an experienced speaker preparing for a competition or a critical school presentation. In that case, the speaker might find detailed insights for improvement more helpful.
Q:What if you disagree with a viewpoint a speaker shares in their speech? A: Focus on the speaker’s project objectives and how well you think they achieved them. It is an absolute NO-NO to counter the speaker or argue against their take in your evaluation.
Q:Do you have to agree with the speaker’s viewpoint even if you don’t believe in it? A: As an evaluator, you don’t have to agree or disagree with the speaker’s opinion or message. Look at it from the speaker’s perspective: think of what they did well and where they could improve to achieve their goals.
For example, what if you see a lot of value in social media and the speaker’s message was social media is the worst thing that happened to teenagers? Try to understand what they tried to convey and how well you think they succeeded in developing the statement. Probably okay to mention that your opinion on it was different, but the focus of an evaluation should be on what the speaker did well and where they could improve to develop their intended message.
Q:Do you share what a speaker could have done differently for a more substantial impact or impression on you? A: Yes. Evaluations are the heart and soul of toastmasters and an incredibly empowering tool for teenagers to grow and develop. Seeing a genuine perspective from a fellow teenager toastie regarding how their message was received and perceived is priceless. Speakers can use it to understand how to improve.
Q: Do you share what came across effectively from the speech? A: Yes. An evaluation isn’t just a fault-finding mission; it should also include positives from the speech.
Review the project objectives before the speech.
Write down notes while listening to the speech.
Focus on the project objectives while putting your thoughts together. Each project targets a specific area, for example, organizing your message, using descriptive language, vocal variety, body language, visual aids, persuading your audience, etc.
Smile and address the speaker using their name.
Make your feedback specific – pull in particular instances and details from the speech and use that when you give an evaluation. The speaker can understand and relate to your feedback when you do that.
Learn to give meaningful constructive feedback using speech evaluations (one-on-one evaluations). I think this should be our top priority this session.
This helps in a number of ways:
Effective listening
Critical thinking
Understanding speaker from his or her perspective
Cultivate empathy – ability to feel like the way other person does
Articulating a coherent message combining different ideas you capture when speaker speaks and objectives for a specific objective
Striking one-on-one conversation with the speaker to share your feedback, your opinion, your reaction to the speech in a constructive way
Emotional connection with individuals in audience is so critical. If they love you as a speaker, they will want to listen to you, they will root for you when you stand up and speak.
We focus on specific ideas and techniques that’d help develop emotional connection with audience.
It is an empowering skill to develop. So much of our speaking is impromptu, whether that is in group meetings, interviews, customer support, answering questions during training, etc.
Why emphasize table topics with the theme of credibility?
Table topics help us stay in the flow of the moment. When you do that, your ability to connect emotionally grows very quickly.
You develop “muscle” to think on your feet and develop ideas on the spot. It will make you better in all kinds of communication.
It makes you more comfortable under your skin, it makes you more natural.
Stories are compelling. Storytelling is around for thousands of years. We, humans, are hardwired to tell and share stories. It comes so naturally to us.
Stories create an opportunity to tap into our emotions, and then to express them naturally.
Stories can help you develop vocal variety, facial expressions, hand gestures, eye contact, and body language much faster.
Stories can help you be more comfortable under your skin, and that is an empowering asset to have as a person, as a communicator, and as a leader.
Stories can help you make friends, warm up to others, cultivate relationships.
Stories can be a powerful catalyst to mold people’s views, perspectives, opinions.
Stories create help create a new perspective to look at a situation; they can help you, and your audience sees it in a different light.
A Story Can Be … 🙂
A story can be inspiring.
A story can be fun.
A story can be based on an experience you might have at school, so people get to see it, hear it, feel it, from your perspective.
A story can be hilarious, making people laugh.
A story can be emotionally touching to people’s hearts in some way.
A story can be persuasive – a story can shift someone’s opinion or perspective on a specific topic.
What Makes up a Good Story?
A story should have one of two things:
Fighting a bad guy who can either be a real person, or a struggle, or challenge, or anxiety, or some kind of disturbance, or a situation, or some type of barrier character(s) in the story might have faced.
A shift in perspective from inside for one or more characters: Your opinion changes. The way you might be looking at yourself, or someone else, or your relationship to someone or something changes. It helped you grow in some way. Maybe there was something that surprised you leading to a fun, or excitement, or anxiety.
The story has a climax – a pinnacle moment.
When the story is personal, keep this in mind – it should be more than merely sharing experience.
Example One: “my trip Hawaii” – what all you did in your trip – can that be a story? The answer is yes, and no.
Yes – When for example, you develop how the trip changed you in some respect (experience of Hawaiian culture, appreciation for the island, anything else that molded you in some regard). Think of event(s) or moment(s) that might have stirred your thoughts, or somehow left an imprint on you, or changed your perspective.
No – Simply sharing the experience and telling what you saw and did, wouldn’t necessarily make it a story for our purposes here.
Example Two: Your experience from the basketball season last year – can that be a story? Your journey to earning your Tae Kwon Doe (or Karate) black belt – can that be a story? Your journey leading up to the on-stage performance for dancing or music – can that be a story? The answer is yes, and no.
Yes, when, for example, you share from your heart what you had to overcome, or how it became a transforming experience for you, or how it changed you as a person.
No, when you simply describe timelines of different things along the way and explain what you did.
Insightful nugget from Leonard Szymczak, my fellow club member with Dana Point Coastmasters:
A great story involves the acronym MICE
M = Milieu or setting that is interesting. I = Idea or message that touches the heart, mind, body, and soul. C = Characters with a burning desire who must overcome obstacles to achieve what they desire, and in the process change. E = Event that propels the story forward.
About delivering your story …
Simply tell the story. Go right into it.
Let people experience your story; feel your account. Telling a story is an emotional experience. Keep it that way. Avoid explaining the logic behind it, or analyzing it for your audience. For example, when a movie ends, you walk away with the impression it might have made on you, the reaction it might have inspired in you. However, there is no analysis in the movie; in the end, it merely ends the story.
While telling stories at toastmasters, avoid giving moral of the story to your audience, let them feel it, and extract their takeaway. (That is unless your speech objective is to develop and articulate the message behind your story.)
Open yourself up. Be vulnerable. As we know by now, showing vulnerability is an incredibly powerful way to connect with others. It requires courage, and our toastmasters club is an ideal stage to explore & learn that, as no one is going to judge you. We are all friends trying it together.
Examples of Stories – Personal Topics
Your struggles and triumphs in sports
Goal you are striving to achieve, or you might have achieved – for example, recital for your dancing program, or music program, earning your black belt in Tae Kwon Do/Karate, earning a merit badge with your boys scouts or girls scouts initiative
Story of your basketball team
Story of your school MUN team trying to advance to the next level
Story from a fun experience with friends
Story from something hilarious at school
Your account on starting or joining a club
How many times do you laugh with friends? There is probably a story to tell from every one of those instances.
What makes you nervous – there can be a compelling story to share from that.
Friends and experiences you might have had with them
Impact or shift in a perspective from a vacation trip
Stories from Books
How many stories can you tell from Harry Potter books?
How many stories can you develop from Hunger Games?
Parcy Jackson books and movies (check out the link, it has info about other novels and sequels)
What are the different stories you can develop from the movie Passengers?
Which movies did you watch last summer?
When you think of any movie or TV show that you might have watched, what would say about it to a friend without any preparation?
Maybe that is the part close to your heart, use that to develop your story.
That will be your own story for any book or movie, as everyone is unique in his or her takeaways from what they read, see, feel, perceive, interpret.
Ideas from School Work, Classes?
What do you learn in history at school?
What do you read for your assignments?
Stories of Other People
Successful leaders – Abraham Lincoln, Ben Franklin, Mahatma Gandhiji, Steve Jobs, Mother Teresa, Mohammad Yunus, Charles Schwab, etc.
People you follow, admire
People excelling in something that you are passionate about – sports athletes, video game designers, singers, coaches at school, actors in movies and/or TV shows
Who are your favorite people? Who do you admire?
This is presentation from Carmine Gallo at Google Talks. He has brought up a number of insights in this talk.
Can you lose power because of Power Point (or Keynote for that matter)?
Can power point get in your way to make a clear point?
The answer can be yes. When you are presenting, you are the focal point of your presentation. Or, rather you should be the focal point of your presentation. You are in charge, and not your power point presentation.
Here is one hilarious, energetic and yet insightful video on it from Don McMillan… check it out… 🙂
And see how his vocal variety is adding impact to his presentation.
