It’s competition season in Toastmasters! You may already be signed up as a speaker or taking on a key leadership role for your own club’s competition. But I still encourage you to take on a judge role at a visiting club, here’s why:
- If you are a contestant, it’s a great way to check out the competition as well as spend an evening focusing on the actual criteria on which yuou will be judged. For instance, in a table topics contest 30% of the score is for structure – open, body and close. How do other competitors achieve that with so little time to think?
- If you are part of organizing your own contest, visit another club to do some recon – How does the timing work out over the evening? What works well and what doesn’t? Maybe there are ideas to ‘borrow’ or lessons to learn. A judging or other role gives you particular insight into a competition from a different perspective. Don’t forget to get your leadership brownie points for this as part of the leadership manual!
- For everyone, judging is an important transferable skill that works for other parts of life. Avoiding bias, being able to evaluate on the fly and ranking different performances are all part of it. Just today I’ve been using that very skill to rate some keynote speakers at an industry conference I went to for work.
Convinced? Well here are some club contests for you to go along to, email the club and sign up for a judge role.
- Windsor Speakers club contest – Monday 15th September
- Chiltern Speakers club contest – Tuesday 16th September
- Wokingham Speakers club contest – Tuesday 16th September
- Worthing Speakers club contest – Thursday 18th September
- Maidenhead Speakers club contest – Monday 22nd September
- Area 21 Contest, Burnham Park Hall – Saturday 27th September
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Tracy can you clarify please – under the 2014 rules is it permissible for someone competing at their own club to judge at another club? In the past it wasn’t allowed.
As far as I know, yes, at the club level the only requirements are you are a club member in good standing and you aren’t competing in that contest itself. After the club level, you cannot judge and compete even if in a different area/district/division. My rules reference is http://www.toastmasters.org/2014speechcontestrulebook