A great metaphor from Jeffrey Cufaude that shows an example for personal leadership and leadership within District 27. Reminds me that my copy of The Leadership Challenge is getting a little lonely on my bookshelf and makes me think it would be a good idea to take another look into it. How can District 27's leaders--Area Governors, Division Governors, Lieutenant Governors, and the District Governor help you get your job done?

If you want to make yourself popular in airports, be the traveler with a multi-outlet power strip in your briefcase.  Its arrival brings sighs of relief from fellow travelers, making you an instant hero as you multiply the outlets available for others to use.

We would be wise to think similarly in our leadership efforts.  Whether you oversee a small project or an entire organization, more of your attention needs to focus on enabling others to act, one of the five leadership practices from The Leadership Challenge.

When we are in positions of leadership, our attention must focus on building the organizational culture and supportive policies and systems that make it easier for others to act in pursuit of our mission, vision, and goals.   We break through barriers, help dismantle obstacles, and introduce accelerators to progress.  This is our work ... helping others do theirs.  It is clock-building, not time telling as described by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in Built to Last.

No doubt right now some of your colleagues have ideas in need of a little power boost to get in motion.  You could be (or bring) the outlet they need to jumpstart their efforts.

So” may be the new “well,” “um,” “oh” and “like.” No longer content to lurk in the middle of sentences, it has jumped to the beginning, where it can portend many things: transition, certitude, logic, attentiveness, a major insight.

So much meaning in a two-letter utterance!

Denise Graveline takes us from the football field to the guitar studio and provides some valuable insight.

"You can't stop when you make a mistake," he said.  "You're pausing to think what you did wrong and how to fix it. But you've got to keep going. The pros make mistakes all the time, but they keep going."

...

Take the stopping.  I know full well that "ums" trip lots of speakers up. The speaker's got a heightened awareness of any mistakes she makes, especially if she's nervous or not as practiced at it.  And ums serve as a verbal pause while you're trying to remember what it was you wanted to say.  They're also a normally occurring part of everyone's speech.  Nonetheless, if an um throws you off and you stop, you'll find your momentum and focus tough to recover.

When we're trying to learn or perfect a new skill, we often forget our other experience or accomplishments and what we've already learned. Here's a reminder of how valuable it can be to apply all our experience. Click through to read Denise's whole post, then let us know how you've learned to be a better speaker from another of your skills.

But beyond tooting my own horn, it occurred to me, while watching the other speakers, that a Toastmasters Speech has its own unique style. It is part performance art, part motivational appeal and part moralistic sermon. There’s no rule saying it has to be that way, but winning speeches generally contain a moral lesson or message of some sort and tend to be physically demonstrative and emotional in tone.

Some new Toastmasters I have met, mostly those coming in to learn business or sales presentation, question the value of learning such a style. It’s not directly applicable to what they need to do in business, they say.

I always counter that by pointing out that there are no tires on an American football field. Yet football players often train by running through rows of tires. It would seem a pointless exercise, training for something that will never happen in a game situation, but of course, that’s not why they do it.

They run through the tires because it trains them to stay balanced, to place their feet precisely and to lift their feet when they run. It trains them in the type of skills that ARE directly applicable to successfully running through the jumble of flying limbs and falling bodies that litter the field during the average play.

That’s what Toastmasters does too. It trains speakers to speak with power, flexibility and precision. It trains them to use their faces and bodies to reinforce their spoken message. It trains them to control or eliminate nervous mannerisms that undercut their authority. It trains them to think about what, specifically, they are trying to communicate and how they can most clearly and effectively structure the words and ideas. It trains them to be disciplined, to stay on message and not go on pointless, unproductive tangents. It trains them to stand in front of a crowd, of any size, with composure and confidence.

It trains them in precisely the skills that are directly applicable to delivering a disciplined response to a media inquiry, to presenting a scripted sales demonstration with an air of spontaneity, to explaining a complex technical problem to the suits in management or to rallying the troops in times of uncertainty.

Those are the skills that will make you stand out from the pack and put you on the fast track to the top.

This from the blog of R. L. Howser, who competed in the Toastmasters All-Japan Speech Contest championship and will be traveling to California for this year's finals. I confess to the same doubts about contest speeches, but I really appreciate what Howser says about the value of Toastmaster training and I know it has worked for me in many ways and on many levels, most recently as a lab in which I redeveloped the ability to speak after a stroke. What about you? Do you still see the importance of running through the tires?

via @OliviaMitchell