District 45’s Fall Conference will be held on November 4-6, 2005 in Lewiston-Auburn, Maine

For more information about the conference, visit:
http://www.district45conference.com/

Congratulations Club 9307!  We achieved 7 out of 10 goals this last year, making us a Select Distinguished Club.  We achieved these goals by: acquiring one ATM, one CL, 4 new members and then 7 additional new members, training 5 officers in July '04 and 4 in January '05, and submitting our renewals and officer lists on time.  As you can see, it takes many of us working together to achieve our collective goals. 

As you enjoy the last weeks of summer, now is a good time to think about the goals you might wish to achieve as a speaker and leader by June 2006.  If you're not sure about next steps... just ask.  We're all here to help one another.

Due to low attendance in July, there will be no meetings of the TIC Talkers Toastmasters Club on August 2nd, 16th and 30th.  There will be a meeting on August 23rd.  Have a safe and fun summer!

Marcus Buckingham is the 2005 recipient of The Golden Gavel which is the most prestigious award offered by Toastmasters International.

 

In his current bestseller, 'The One Thing You Need to Know,' Marcus states that

"Every minute you invest in an activity that grates on you is a poorly invested minute.  It is a minute in which you will learn little and that will leave you weaker and less resilient for the next minute."

His simple advice to sustain individual success is to discover what one doesn't like and then... stop doing it. 

I don’t get it. There are things to be done that nobody in their right mind would do if they had a choice.  If every last one of us only engaged in activities that we were good at, or were interested in doing, life would be far more difficult for all of us.

Personally, I have learned a lot from investing time in activities that grated on me.  It almost seems like the greater the grating, the greater the insights I was able to glean from the experience.  I learned that there are more important things in life than doing what I do best.  There is doing what is best for the team, whether at home or in the workplace, which all comes down to doing what is best for 'the other.'  I also learned that I have more abilities and skills than I ever thought possible.  Nothing builds confidence like being able to do something that was once perceived by the self as 'un-doable.'

 

The one thing that amazed me about Marcus Buckingham is that while he is now known as an unusually talented public speaker, he grew up with a debilitating stammer that threatened to destroy his self-confidence. But one day, while giving a much-dreaded lesson during chapel at his school in front of 300 students, 12-year-old Buckingham discovered that his stammer vanished when speaking to large audiences. He learned to control his stammer by visualizing a large audience when speaking to friends one-on-one.  What if Marcus had never stepped outside of his comfort zone as a speaker? 

How many of us would rather do anything else but speak in front of a large audience?  Yet I have heard some great speeches at Toastmasters meetings and contests from people who didn’t start out liking to speak in public.  We can learn so much from each other and from ourselves when we dare to do what we don’t like.  

Do you know these people?  This photo was probably taken the summer of 2000 or 2001.
Pictured standing, from left, are Ulrich Lobsiger, Chris White, Catherine MacDonald, Don Connor, ? and Bob Marshall.  Seated, from left, are Charley Vaughan, Peter Freeman, Ruth Flemming, Wendy Vickery, Amy-Lynn Bell and Faye Rose.  If you have any idea who the unknown person (?) is, please leave a comment so that I can update this entry.

If anyone has more current photos, please let me know so that they can be posted for all of our viewing enjoyment.

This may be your first exposure to blogging or you may have read numerous blogs over the past few years.  Contrary to what you may think, blogging is not just for nerds.  If you're a TIC Talker and you would like to blog here, please send me an email at amy@digital-fx.ca and I will provide you with author privileges.  If you're not sure if you'd like to make the leap into blogging yet, try adding your comments to any of the many posts already on the TIC Talkers blog.