I joined Toastmasters International in November 2019. I am sorry I didn’t do this years ago.
I joined my local club, Two Oceans Toastmasters, in Fish Hoek. Cape Town. It turns out this was a brilliant decision as it is one of the best clubs in the country. We were the first club of the current World Champion of Public Speaking, Verity Price – the first African to win the competition. Verity’s sister, a current member, placed second in the semi-finals a few years ago.
I have delivered more than 10 speeches and I am now about to start level five of my pathway: Visionary Communication – Develop your vision. The idea of the pathways is to deliver speeches that relate in some way to your career or vocation. This makes it a great way to develop and polish your skills, while meeting like-minded people. The meetings are always fun and I have met some wonderful people, and heard some amazing speeches.
My next speech will be 15 minutes long and I shall talk about the process of developing a vision for my work or personal life, outlining the achievable tasks that will move me toward this vision.
I thought about this for some time then realised I need to get my personal website running again. I bought this domain years ago but never put anything on it. I never felt I had something worth sharing. Then I read a blog post from Austin Kleon, who suggests we should share our work, as we’re doing it, even if we feel it isn’t ready.
For years I have read personal development books and collected bits of information on a variety of topics. I now have more than 50 000 notes in my Evernote account. It occurs to me that this is a rather pointless exercise unless I do something with all this digital knowledge.
I am now 50 and have also amassed some life experience, been to university, travelled, lived in a foreign country. I have married and had two beautiful daughters. I have been retrenched (one of the worst and best things to happen to me.) and made many, many mistakes. I have not yet written a blog though so I thought I would share my experiences, thoughts, what I am reading, and learning. I will use this as an outlet for my interests and curiosity. I hope you find something here useful or enjoyable. Hopefully you’re smarter than me and learn from my mistakes and don’t learn by making them yourself. If nothing else, this will give me a reason to clean up my Evernote account and see what treasure comes to light.I figure with that many notes, there must be something useful that I have forgotten.