Toastmasters makes me practice!

Whew! Tonight was a challenge. I’ve just got home from a Toastmasters Meeting where I was giving a short speech as part of my journey towards becoming a Competent Communicator.

Immediately beforehand I had been listening to a teleclass about how important it is to stop looking at what you don’t want when things don’t quite go your way, or someone says something you don’t like, and instead focus on what you do want.

In the Toastmasters Meeting, only half an hour later, I had an opportunity to put that teleclass message into practice. My speech had not gone quite according to plan; suffice to say, as I mentioned to someone afterwards, ‘My body may have been up on the stage, but I was not in it’. It resulted in a speech that was competent but not really expressing any of who I am.

Anyway, I noticed afterwards that I was feeling really low and that I was beginning to be resentful about the other people making speeches, who in my eyes were all doing much better than me. I even caught myself thinking ‘I’ll never get any better at making speeches’. Wow. Talk about self pity! But the good news is that I remembered the teleclass; I put into practice one of the tips (which was using the Byron Katie method of asking 4 questions) and immediately began to feel better, and see the positive side of what I’d been seeing as so awful.

So now I can write about this, to show that this kind of thing happens all the time, and the trick is to notice when you’ve fallen into the pits, and to consciously and deliberately climb your way out again, as I did. This is the essence of The RichThinking Way, my new programme, which clearly I’m getting to put into practice just as much as others on it!