HOLA's Secret Sauce 6? Educational Talks

In Toastmasters, we are here to learn - and Pathways is the usual path we take to start our learning. However, there are times we want to konw more about certain topics that the manuals gloss over - or we would like to listen to others (non-Toastmasters, even) who've been working in their respective industries, perhaps able to share their experiece, stories, tips.

These talks can also be easily shared by our members; wanting to spread the ideas and practices. HOLA usually had these talks in our first year, and we continued with it on our second year.

Now, one of the things we learned was that if we had a full line-up of three speakers, plu table topics, their conterpart evaluations and E remarks - that would easily become a tw-hour meeting. With teh eduational talk that can easily last between twenty minutes to an hour, we're looking at 3 and a half to maybe three hours of meeting time. No matter how interesting things were, that can be a long meeting - and even our members were pointing it out.

So we moved our Eductional talks to or Pocket meeting schedules, which sould accomodate the time, and still not exceed two hours. Overtime meeting problem solved.

As for the reason behind all these educational talks - well, it was two-fold. We wanted to share some knowledge - ones we thought as useful to the members of HOLA, plus we also opened the talks to non-HOLA members. Why so? So we could be known by other Toastmsters. As we made these Educational Talks a regular thing, we started attracting guests. We also wanted the Division (at least it started that way) to grow with all these communication and leadership pocket lectures. As we expanded beyond H, the Educational talks became open to any Toastmaster.

As can be seen by the picture - all this started out as special topics by guest speakers, but it turned into our Honing Excellence Series. This allowed us to learn, practice and stretch our capabilities as either speakers/communicators, or leaders.