1. Submit a proposal for the upcoming District 30 Spring Conference to present a session on Social Media, in particular how LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter can benefit Toastmaster members -  in particular obtaining information not found by their club and district leaders, as well as publicizing the organization to their friends, connections and followers.  If the conference committee are not interested, I hope this would be considered for the next Summer TLI.
2. Plan to give more speeches as I only gave one in 2009 and that was for the International Speech Contest.  Some of the speech topics I plan to present are using Social Media, promoting Scott Berkun‘s Confessions of a Public Speaker book, the Tiger Woods scandal, and Curling, which is my new interest this winter.  I need to make use of the speech skills and experience I obtained throughout the years as I don’t have many opportunities to speak outside of Toastmasters, plus give speeches on topics that matter to me.
3. Avoid being a club officer after June 30th – I haven’t done much as the Arlington Heights‘ PR officer, so my goal should be the lay the foundation for my successor to build on.  The club is doing well with membership so we should not have a dearth of members who are willing to step up and become officers for the upcoming term.  While I plan to remain a dedicated Toastmaster member for my two clubs, my days of being heavily involved in the clubs should long be over and I need to move forward in becoming a more well-rounded Toastmaster member, especially with speaking.

There may be more things I plan to do for this year, I’ll post updates throughout the year.  I’ll continue to update the blog on a variety of Toastmaster topics, including observations on District 30 and Toastmasters International.  So stay tuned…

As the Arlington Heights club did not have an Evaluation contest due to no one there stepping up to compete, I volunteer to represent them in the Area Contest as I’d like to give the contest another try – the only other time I competed in that contest was in 2003 and I couldn’t even get past the club contest!  After I volunteered late last month, I had a couple of evaluation opportunities at the North Suburban club this month, including tonight’s club contest (members in more than one club can compete in more than one club contest but only in one Area Contest).  I realized both times that I have one primary problem when giving evaluations – I tend to say some of the same things over again as I worried about not having much to say.  Usually when I write some notes for an evaluation, I’ll put down up to three good points about the speech and up to three areas of improvement.  So during my time giving the evaluation, I ended up repeating some of my comments about what is great about the speech and perhaps repeat an area of improvement.  As a result, the two evaluations took more than three minutes, the first ended up approaching four minutes, which would result in a disqualification if it was a contest.

So my challenges now on giving evaluations would be to state my points about the speech without repeating them and no summarizing the speech apart from the start and end of my evaluations.  Chances are that should be enough to give a two-minute evaluation as I normally don’t speak fast so I should no longer worry about speaking too little.  I have two more opportunities to give evaluations prior to the Area Contest, one next week at Arlington Heights and one the following week at North Suburban, so I can not only be better prepared for the Area Contest but be a better evaluator in general.