I’ve come a long way.

While I have been quiet here, I have been attending Toastmasters meetings as often as possible. The club I belong to meets every week on Wednesdays at lunch time. I joined two years ago in August, and I did not attend meetings for a few months out of fear of being required to actually speak in front of people.

You see, in the middle of each meeting is a a Table Topics session where a Topic Master gets up and chooses people to answer a question with no prior knowledge of the question. The answer is supposed to last between one and two minutes. It’s an exercise in thinking on your feet and being put on the spot to answer a question like politicians often do. Everyone votes on who did the best job responding to the question (whether or not you actually answered it is mostly irrelevant.) The winner gets to take home a trophy that he/she is to bring back for next week’s challenge.

Even after I started going to meetings, I made sure I had a technician duty to try to get out of participating in Table Topics. It wasn’t until about a year ago that I finally started allowing them to call on me. I improved gradually, but I never took home the trophy. New people have joined the club since then and have taken it home at least once if not two or three times.

Well, today I entered an official table topics contest knowing that I was up against trophy winners, and the winner today will go on to compete against the winners of the other clubs in the area. That scares the hell out of me, but I signed up for the contest knowing that I had lost to the other contestants at least once before.

Well, I won today. I will be representing our club at the Area contest in two weeks.