I have been trying to persuade my friends at work joining Toastmasters, so far the response is pretty negative. Other than a few co-ops and new grads in my team, I can’t convince a friend form the lunch group just to show up in the meeting and try it out. They are not interested in the joining mainly due to they think it is a waste of time. You have to sacrifice a hour lunch time a week and also the time spent in preparing the speech. They think giving mockery speech is useless. Public speaking is like playing sports, the more you practice, the better you will be. Most of us engineer don’t require to give presentation in daily work. We don’t have much chance to improve our practice presentation skill unless work on in explicitly. For most of us in the group, English is our secondary language. The best way to build up the confidence in giving speech in English is to practice on the topics you are familiar with. I have two more speech to go to complete my CTM. I can see the improvement I have made since I joined Toastmasters. Moreover, the membership fee is free! It is paid by the company. Why not give up chit-chat, ping-pong or foosball once a week to improve yourself?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"