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Review of 2009 and Plans for 2010. Part 3: Communication skills & Toastmasters

This post is a continuation from my previous entry about my review of 2009 and plans for the next coming year. (https://www.martinogg.com/2010/01/happy-new-year-a-review-of-last-year-and-my-plans-for-next-year/)

Communication skills have become a topic of focus for me over the last year. It began with a work training course about creating business ideas and pitching them to business minded people in order to receive funding. Because my company is heavily involved with engineering, the classes were geared towards geeks and had a communication-based focus about them – opposite to the technical focus we were used to in Uni at our various courses. I guess this is something they thought we needed to learn.. This is something I enjoyed very much, because time and again I felt that I had great ideas throughout uni and work-life but short of something I could code together to illustrate, the ideas never seemed to make the light of day. I was a very nervous speaker and giving speeches was the worst task I could imagine. Yet it is a very necessary part of business and idea development.

The course left me with a hunger to improve my communication skills. Previously the easiest way to stop the nerves was to avoid speeches or confrontations whenever possible. However now I was willing to face the fact that this was something that scared me and that in order to proceed, hiding away from it was not the answer.

I discovered the Toastmasters group shortly after and went to my first meeting in March last year. Since then I have attended every other week and participated in roles and speeches. In October I took the role of Toastmaster for the first time. It was a very nerve-racking ordeal but I got through it OK without dieing. On later reflection, it showed me that when it comes to social gatherings, its important not to act on nerves. Toastmasters helps to work on things like nerves, as well as communication skills in the form of feedback and speaking tasks.

One unexpected thing about the Toastmasters group is the people I’ve met there and engaging in their own views. Its actually pretty hard to get away from it when they give a speech about their favourite topics. I’ve met Life coaches, NLP practitioners, veteran Toastmasters, engineers, students and other beginner Toastmasters. By meeting every couple of weeks and hearing what they have to say, they inevitably give off a particular view to a subject which is diverse and inspiring to me and makes me challenge my own view. Quite a change from the usual haunt of workmates in the same department and friends who share the same general interests as me.

The end result of this is huge. From my initial view of wanting to improve my speaking skills, my aims have catapulted to other sections of my life such as challenging my own beliefs of the world, to more accurately planning what it takes to become more happy and goal setting. This is a topic I would like to mention later on in another post.

Plans for 2010

I aim to keep on going with the Toastmasters group. Its a very clearly structured environment and because its so encouraging for progression, I dont have to worry about planning what I’ll do. I’ll be continuing my speeches courses, taking roles and chatting to the other toastmasters.

One particular aim I’d like is to meet more people from diverse backgrounds. Its interesting to meet people from all walks of life and can have an influence over your own path. To achieve this I hope to keep on looking at more clubs and meetings which might achieve this. A few months ago I discovered meetup.com where people can join groups of a particular topic of interest and then have real life meet ups to discuss the topic. Edinburgh has loads of groups and I attended one to go for a visit to a local attraction.

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Review of 2009 and Plans for 2010. Part 1

Happy new year!

It has been almost a year since I began looking at personal development, and I’d like to give a quick review of some of the stuff I’ve done and what I’m looking forward to in the next year.

I’d like to have a go at breaking my posts down to smaller chunks, so I’ll post this in segments.

My path of personal development began at the start of 2009, when I entered into a course at work to develop product creation and selling skills. This was called “Dragons Apprentice”, a mixture of 2 closely related BBC TV programmes: Dragons Den and The Apprentice. Would you ever have guessed? 🙂 Unfortunately due to other work commitments I had to leave the course early but it left me hungry for more. This led me to look at my personal communication skills and think more about my effectiveness when talking to other people and to get over my nerves when speaking publicly. Since joining Toastmasters in March 2009, things have snowballed with various topics, including blogging, volunteering and looking at my own beliefs of my existence.

I’ll go for a topic per post. Topics I have so far are:

  • Blog
  • Mind set – Beliefs
  • Communication skills – Toastmasters
  • Health
  • Work-life
  • Life – major events

Ill try to make a post out of each topic.

Blog

I started this blog in February 2009 and I am glad to say that it is something I have benefited from, though not in the ways I expected.

As far as the technical side goes, I found it very interesting to begin the process of signing up for a domain, and uploading the software to get WordPress blog software online, and tinkering with all the settings to get something which aligned to the vision which I was aiming for. I even had a go at creating my own php code for the archive page which was interesting as this was the first web-based programming I’d ever done. I’ve posted the code here (https://www.martinogg.com/2009/06/article-archive-page-added-add-your-own-archive-page-easily-code-included/)

Unfortunately this site didnt turn into the mass traffic hub I thought it would. In fact if I look at the statistics I would see less than 10 hits per week and of them I assume most are bots, considering the amount of spam that comes in. I’ve manged the hefty sum of £6 from google adsense clicks, which is still too low for me to take out! So as far as attaining recognition and making money from this venture is concerned, its been a complete failure.

But positive results have come in unexpected places. Because I took the time to set up and continue doing blogging, it has made me more aware of other people’s blogs and writing. I now find myself reading and replying to posts made by others whereas I would otherwise have just skipped over them or not replied before. The result is I have read more about different opinions and this has opened me up to other thoughts I would never have previously considered.

I made some heavy claims in the blog at the start, about how this would be the saviour for everyone who read it and how I would post almost every day! Maybe it was a bit overzealous to make these claims but making these outrageous claims and seeing the result has allowed me to reform what I can reasonably achieve and what I can aim for.

The blog has taken on a new platform in my mind. Instead of being the soap box that I can proclaim that the world is flat, it is more of an access point for people to connect to my thoughts if they choose to. I dont take offence that it appears that not maybe people choose to do that, as my skills to do this still need to be more refined. It shows me that I need to work on my visions on life and the ability to articulate my views in a way that aligns to others.

Aims for the blog in 2010 would be to blog more often! A reasonable amount would be to blog at least once a week.

I’d like also to work on the technical skills behind the blog and keep up with other communication technologies. For example, I have a facebook which I use for my friends, but I dont use twitter. I would also like to spend more time communicating online with people in the field of personal development.

To be continued…

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