To Judge Fairly

The competition season is upon us. It started this year with the Judging Workshop delivered for over 80 members of Toastmasters District 71 Division B by Teresa Dukes, our Immediate Past District Governor forUKandIreland.

It was great to review the rules as well as get in focus the main task of the competition judge : to pick the best speaker on the night.

It is very easy to inadvertedly favour speakers or speeches. Many of us were cought out doing this in our practice session without even realizing it.

Judging process requires different mind set from evaluating. We don’t aim to motivate and recomend things for improvement. We focus on deciding who performed the speech best according to the criteria on the judging form.

 The scoring sheet is a great help and can be further broken down in more detailed entries to make the decision easier.

 We should avoid benchmarking i.e. comparing the speakers performances to the first speaker. Instead we ought to mark each speech independently. As long as we apply the criteria consistently, the outcome should reflect the best performance.

 As with every skill we acquire, experience makes the judging easier, so lets volunteer for the judging this March.

Importance of Mental Flexibility

George Jerjian shared his insight into the subject of mental flexibility
this month in the workshop that is part of the Toastmaster
Success/Communication Series, Building Your Thinking Power.

As our past president, businessman, prolific author, accomplished speaker
and Toastmaster  of 13  years, George Jerjian was the perfect host.

In the series of challenging and fun exercises designed for this workshop we
had opportunity to examine how our own minds often use preconceptions that
limit our views.

The worhshop gave us all fresh prospective and renewed ability to tune out
preconceptions and see things with greater depth and clarity.

Mental flexibility is an important skill to maintain. It enables us to see
solutions and possibilities where otherS don’t see the options.

Many thanks to George for delivering the workshop to us.

George’s profile can be found on his website www.georgejerjian.co.uk