SPEAKER_02 0:12

Hi, my name's Brendan O'Sullivan, a Toastmaster from Brisbane, Australia. Welcome to my Toastmasters World Tour podcast. Please join me as I travel virtually around the world and chat to Toastmasters from different countries and all walks of life. Let's explore. Travel virtually to the City of Angels and Bangers by Ozzie Ocker. Cock, Thailand, famous for its rich culture, floating markets, street food, and nightlife to chat to Fuzi Gotuaku. He was a finalist in the 2024 Toastmasters World Championship of Public Speaking with a highly entertaining and theatrical speech. Having spent most of his career as a teacher teaching theatre art, teaching remains his greatest passion. Thus he recently published his first book Public Speaking from A to Z. The Speaker's Handbook for Powerful Presentations. Let's hear all about it directly from Furzy. Welcome to the show, Ferzy. I'm so excited to have you on. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_00 1:48

Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And thanks for having me on. You know, I've really spent most of my career as a as a teacher and a principal, Brendan, and I taught theater arts. So all my training has been in theater arts and understanding how people view you and making sure that people are listening and paying attention and and learning. As a teacher, you can talk and you can teach, but if they're not paying attention and they're not and you're not presenting information in a way that they can absorb, then they're not learning. Right? And ultimately the most important thing is for them to learn. So the natural carryover to speaking is are you are you getting it? Are you getting the message?

SPEAKER_02 2:32

Sure. So I hear what you're saying that you know you're a teacher and you're into dramatic arts as well. It kind of begs the question: did you need to join Toastmasters in the first place? And and why did you join?

SPEAKER_00 2:45

That's an excellent question. You know, I I first went to a Toastmaster meeting out of a complete accident. Yeah, somebody and I had miscommunication. And I was so apologetic. I was so sorry because I think I miscommunicated, I misunderstood. And uh and so as I was walking her out of the building and saying, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, her boss was there, and I was so sorry to him, and we were walking out of my school, and she said, We got to talking about public speaking, because that's what I teach on the school campus. And then she said, Well, I'm going to a meeting tonight where we do public speaking. And it was Toastmasters. So I only went to the meeting because I I wanted to apologize, basically. Right? I mean, it was on me to to make up for this mistake. And when I was there, I thought, oh my gosh, this is it. This is what I want. It's a it's a community. That's the important thing. It's a community of people who liked what I liked.

SPEAKER_02 3:52

I think that's the first person I've had that has told me they've gone to Toastmasters out of what it sounds essentially like politeness.

SPEAKER_00 3:58

Yeah, that's exactly it. I had no idea what I was getting into, and this was in China, so I really had no idea what I was getting into.

SPEAKER_02 4:06

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Whereabouts in China was that? This was in Shanghai.

SPEAKER_02 4:11

Okay, cool. And what club was that called?

SPEAKER_00 4:16

Oh gosh. Xu Jia Hui. XJH. Shu Jia Hui. I know, why couldn't it have been something easy, you know? Philosopher's Den, something. Is the Xu Jia Hui area in Shanghai?

SPEAKER_02 4:32

I see, I see. And how long do you remember there?

SPEAKER_00 4:37

That was in my last six months in China, so I was only a member for six months. And then I had to return back to the US.

SPEAKER_02 4:45

What made you keep going to Toastmasters? Do you found it beneficial even though you had some of these skills already?

SPEAKER_00 4:52

I had all the skills, to tell you the truth. I simply found myself teaching again. But this time I'm teaching adults. Not students, which is kind of nice because you can see it immediately. You you find a you find a new sense of purpose. You find where, okay, what I have to offer isn't just limited to this little square of life. You know, I'm not just here working with kids, I'm here working with grown-ups, and I'm working with them in their adult lives, and they're gonna take what I give them and they're gonna go directly to work, and it's gonna impact their lives immediately. One of the things about teaching is everything that they do is sort of a hear me now, believe me later. You know, just accept what I'm telling you, and in ten years this will work for you. I guarantee you. You know, that you're planting the tree, knowing that you're not gonna get fruit for another 10 years, and sometimes that's really hard. And after you've done it for 25 years, at some point you would like to know that the tree is really going to give shade.

SPEAKER_02 6:02

Yeah, it's a fabulous analogy. I I've noted that you have been incredibly generous with Toastmasters worldwide with your time and expertise. And I was going to ask you about that, you know, why you're so generous, but I think if I'm hearing you rightly, that was really there from the very beginning, that you were helping people out from the very beginning, and you found that quite fulfilling.

SPEAKER_00 6:29

Yes. Well, you know, you it it boils down to you you have something and you have something for a reason, and now your job is to share it. I knew I always knew I was I was born to be a teacher. I w I wasn't born to be a speaker, I wasn't born to be an actor. I I was born to be a teacher. And that's what I love to do. Even when I stepped into administration as a principal, it wasn't the the right fit. You know. You'll wear it, you'll wear it because you need to wear something, but it's not what you feel most comfortable in.

SPEAKER_02 7:05

Yeah. But you do so much of this for free, don't you? Like that's very it's incredibly generous of you. You haven't thought of monetizing it more?

SPEAKER_00 7:14

Uh well, that's what I'm doing now. That's what I'm doing now as a speech coach. Uh, and when people want more private time, yes. Uh for groups, I tend to be a little bit more generous with it because I want to I want to share it. You know, it's none of it is really a secret, to tell you the truth. There's really very little that I talk about that isn't out there. I think all I'm really doing is synthesizing it and distilling it down and putting it through a filter of experience.

SPEAKER_02 7:45

Yeah, and leading by example, and you're also giving evaluations. You've got the group Ferzy Speakers Lab. How did that come about?

SPEAKER_00 7:55

There was in in China on one of the apps called WeChat, which is like WhatsApp, there was a group of people and they gathered together to do speeches, table topics. That's all they were doing. They were there to practice their table topics, many were there to practice English. And I found that community to be quite vibrant, and that's really what I believe in. I believe in that community. I think that's the one thing we have in Toastmasters that you can't get anywhere else. You can you can learn about speaking from many videos, there's many books out there. The one thing that Toastmasters gives us is a community, yeah. And so I wanted to create that kind of community myself. So I still have the WeChat group, that's the one for China, because they use one set of apps, and the rest of the world kind of uses another set of apps. So now I've got two groups, and the the WhatsApp group I invite anybody into. It doesn't cost anything, neither of the groups cost anything. So it's a really free way for people to speak, and I'm also pushing the evaluations because I think people misunderstand how important evaluations are to both the receiver and the giver. When you evaluate, you're actually speaking. We forget that. So everybody's on there trying to get, can I get an evaluation? Can I get an evaluation? I'm like, well, you kind of you kind of get what you give, you know. So give evaluations, and then when you're giving, you're gonna find yourself using the skills. Uh after all, how can you tell someone I would like for you to have pitch variety? How do you tell someone to have pitch variety if you don't have pitch variety?

SPEAKER_01 9:41

Yes, right?

SPEAKER_00 9:42

So you you you make that natural connection. The more you can analyze, the more you can analyze in somebody's speech, the more you can identify, analyze, tell them how to get better, the more you're going to get better, right? There's a self-teaching involved. The mistakes that we make, we learn from them, we move forward.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

So I think that's a very important part of it. And uh with every group that I go and give a speech to, I invite them in, and so we've grown. We at one point we had over 1,200, so much so that the WhatsApp could not handle it, and I had to start a whole new group. So we lost about 400. Well, actually, we lost quite a few people. We lost about 800, and now they're just slowly gathering back in. We're now over 600 again.

SPEAKER_02 10:27

Yeah, well, amazing. You mentioned that there are books out there on public speaking, and I note that you've recently launched your own book, Public Speaking from A to Z, The Speaker's Handbook for Powerful Presentations. When did you first start writing that? And when was it actually published?

SPEAKER_00 10:47

I started writing it in December.

SPEAKER_02 10:50

Oh, well, that's quick.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

Brandon, I I had no intention of writing a book. I really didn't. I I think my gift is in speaking, and it's not as a writer. Um, but I was talking to the folks in Chicago who were going to have me come out at their conference, and they said, Oh, yeah, we'll have this, we'll do this, we'll do that, and we'll have a little desk area where you can sell your book. I went, I don't have a book. They go, Well, you need to get one. You need to write a book and sell it. I'm like, great. Okay, I'll get right on that, you know. And then I was still wasn't sure. And then some friends of mine said, Yeah, get a book, you do this, and this is how you extend the learning. And then that made sense to me. I extend the learning when I'm not there.

SPEAKER_01 11:39

Right?

SPEAKER_00 11:39

How do you how do you do that? How do you keep learning going on for the student even when I'm not when the professor's not in the room? That's really the key thing. So I gave myself three months to write the book. It took me four.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

Wow, that's incredible.

SPEAKER_00 11:54

And uh, and we got it in just under the wire and and getting it out. And so I I feel pretty proud of it actually. Now that we're done with it, I'm quite proud of it.

SPEAKER_02 12:04

I'm sure what made it easier is that you've got this wealth of experience, and so it was all in there. It was just a matter of spitting it out onto paper or onto your computer. How was that process? It was it's your first book trying to get a book up and running.

SPEAKER_00 12:18

Pretty good. Pretty good. I have to admit, I wish I had a couple more months. You know, I wish I could go back and revise, because there are many things I'd love to change, but as they say, that'll be the next book. But uh, but the process itself, I I thought about what it is that people really need. And and from what I've seen, uh, people pretty have pretty short attention spans. I mean they're they're like you're you're there, they're like, oh, hang on. I shiny object. You know, we have very short attention spans. We're all kind of addicted to this. And and I wanted a book that you could pick up and put down, pick up and put down at your will.

SPEAKER_02 13:02

Yes. And it's A to Z. I presume you can jump in at any letter.

SPEAKER_00 13:07

Exactly. At any point. There's and and so I used AI. I'm I'm completely you know transparent about it. I used AI to gather those vocabulary terms and used AI to give us those definitions. Like I didn't want to go hunting for definitions. I thought that was a waste of time. So I thought this was the best use of AI. How do I get definitions? And AI helped me format the book.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:36

And then I coupled that, I coupled that kind of universal definition with my insight and experience. That's where I plugged in what I wanted.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

Perfect.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

Now there's a third component to it. Oh, part of the second component was also activities. Like, forget me just saying it. Now you have to do it. So you could go back and forth. You could go, okay, I read that part, okay, now I go do it. Now I come back to the book and I go do it. So there's that cycle of continuous improvement, right? You want to create that cycle of continuous improvement for yourself as a learner and speaker. The third component, this actually took one of the longest periods of time. I reached out to people that I knew around the globe and asked for their insights from their own experiences. And those are peppered in throughout the book. So that people aren't just listening to my voice per se, but they're listening to voices and insights from people around the world. You have a wealth of experience in this book. Even if you're talking about somebody's failure or somebody's starting points, it should help you no matter where you're at in your journey as a speaker. So I thought the combination, the confluence of those three things is really what makes the book so valuable to anybody.

SPEAKER_02 15:14

And I must say the title with the A to Z appeals to me immediately. My bookshelf is filled with Kiss books, keep it simple, stupid, idiots guides, and dummies guides. So I think anyone that came into my house might wonder, you know, about my level of intelligence. I just like knowing the fundamentals of it very well. I've got to ask you as well. I'm hoping the answer is B, B for Brendan. Do you have a favorite letter in the A to Z guide there? B for Brendan, definitely.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

Yep. No, I there are so many different things. I think one of the cool things that I did at the beginning of the book was if you have a topic, and there might be several key words in that topic, but sometimes we don't know what the keywords are. You know, we don't realize, oh, it's named after this and named after that, and named after that. We don't realize that. We just know this one access point. So no matter where you are and what you know, you'll find a word that fits your query, as it were. Once I have that word and I read it, and it might be 15 seconds long, it might be 30 seconds, it might be two minutes. There are different lengths. At the bottom is a C also. So now it'll take me to this word, which is related to it. Oh, now I get into it. And then at the bottom of that, C also. Oh, okay. So this might take me 30 seconds, this might take me a minute, this could take me five minutes, but I can stop at any point in the process, or if I've got a data read, then I can just follow the flow from dot to dot to dot from C also. And then of course, while I'm on that page, I see the next topic, it has nothing to do with the topic I'm on, but now a new journey goes. I'm gonna follow another set of dots, right? So again, if you've got a short attention span, this naturally helps you. It's just like on a phone when you're scrolling, right? That's what people do, they're doom scrolling, right? Yes, go ahead and doom scroll on the book. Yeah, that's awesome. And you can either turn the physical page or you're on Kindle, so you're just doom scrolling from chapter to chapter.

SPEAKER_02 17:43

Yes. Totally relatable. I was gonna ask you that. So it's on Kindle, and then there's a physical copy you can buy from what Amazon or where does where do people, if they want to buy the book, where do they get it?

SPEAKER_00 17:54

Yep, they go to Amazon and look up public speaking A to Z. I figure that's about an easy topic as any. Yes. I'm looking up public speaking and you know, here we go. Or find Furzy. Not not too many Ferzies out there.

SPEAKER_02 18:11

F-U-R-S-E-Y. Yeah. And we'll put some links in the podcast notes. I love the idea of this book, Ferzy. When I saw you perform your speech at the finals of the World Championship of Public Speaking at Anaheim in 2024, as well as loving the whole speech, a real standout feature as well was your incredible physical and theatrical delivery of the speech. So this book I think sounds fabulous, but the Chicago people have given you a bit of a boot to get the book going. I'm gonna give you a further boot and say we need a video version of that book so that people can see your physicality and what you bring to the screen. It's just because it's just amazing, even on this podcast chat, you sort of move in and out when you and you're not even trying to demonstrate that necessarily.

SPEAKER_00 19:05

Well, I appreciate that, Brendan, and you I'm gonna use that to segue and and and springboard from that. One of the things I also wanted to do with the book was there's a QR code where once you've purchased the book, obviously, that if you want to go further with it, you can join the community. And in the community, if you have questions about the book, I can answer them.

SPEAKER_01 19:32

Well, okay.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

And I can pop my videos in there. I have a whole series of videos, uh, some of them usually they're around two minutes long, just short little quips, or it'll link directly up to my YouTube so that the videos are there to but if people have questions, because you're absolutely right, sometimes something I say will spark more curiosity in the reader, and now they're going, what do you mean by that? Could it do this? Now I can build off of their questions, use that as a prompt, and create a video and then share that with the group so that it becomes an active document, a living document, and that community can be vibrant. So you're not just buying a book, you're you're kind of buying access to a whole series of information that that will feed your appetite for as long as you want it to.

SPEAKER_02 20:29

Well, what a bargain.

SPEAKER_00 20:30

This group will be just for the book.

SPEAKER_02 20:34

Oh, I see. Will that be on YouTube, will it?

SPEAKER_00 20:36

Uh, it will be in in on uh on a on a WhatsApp channel. It'll have its own WhatsApp channel. And like like I've got a copy of the book here. Where is it? Somewhere. Oh, wrong book, Frizzy. Uh I was going, why are the pages blank? It's one of those books where you write your ideas down. Um, but yeah, it's it you just simply you continue the journey, you scan that, and it's only for the people who who purchased the book.

SPEAKER_02 21:02

Purchase the book, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 21:04

So that you have your own tight community. It's not open. Now, of course, if a thousand people buy the book, then then you've got a thousand people in the community. But my experience is that it's only gonna be a handful of people. It's not going to be uh where you speak a lot, it's not gonna be like the lab where you're training yourself like it. This is more of a QA. I'll drop videos in there and you can go, Frizy, how do you do that?

SPEAKER_02 21:30

Yeah. And when was it actually published, the book?

SPEAKER_00 21:34

Oh gosh, April 11th.

SPEAKER_02 21:38

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 21:38

Just just coming up on a month.

SPEAKER_02 21:41

Yeah, well, that's awesome. And how have sales been going so far? Do they give you feedback on that? The publishers?

SPEAKER_00 21:46

Yeah, you can look it up. Sales have been going well. It's better when I get the information right. Sometimes I'm sending the wrong information out to people. But it's uh it's it's going very well. It's being very Well received. The people who have read it feel like it's something that they want to use. I know somebody um was writing, somebody gave a feedback on it and said they're they've been a professional speaker for 20 years, and they think this is a good book. They think they think there's something in this book that they're going to continue to use and pull out of. So I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_02 22:24

Now, obviously, I first met you through the World Championship public speaking at a Toastmasters event, but I presume this book is not purely aimed at Toastmasters, it's aimed at anyone interested in public speaking. Would I be right in assuming that?

SPEAKER_00 22:36

Yes, sir. Absolutely. It's also I tried to keep an eye out for the fact that there might be students in high school, college who would need that. And also the businessman. How he's got to go give a speech, she has to go give a presentation, and she just needs a little tip on something. How do I warm up? Well, there it is, vocal warmups. Right? How do I warm up? Well, there's vocal warmups and there's physical warm-ups, right? So again, you go to warmups and that you see, oh, warm-up vocal, warm-up physical. And then from warm-up vocal, you'll go to diaphragmatic breathing. Oh, from diaphragmatic breathing, you're gonna go to clarity of sound. You're gonna go to so you ping pong back and forth the topics, and pretty soon you're going, oh my gosh, there's so much here that I can use. And I'll need to come back to it because it's not just something that I digest once.

SPEAKER_02 23:33

100%. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

I've got to keep coming back to understand how to use diaphragmatic breathing.

SPEAKER_02 23:38

Yeah. It often reminds me of golf. You gotta put it all together at once, and you gotta keep revisiting the basics.

SPEAKER_00 23:46

Yes. And that was one of the things that I referred to in the introduction, it's step by step. It's not flip the switch, right? You can't flip the switch and become a great speaker. It's going to be day by day, speech by speech, step by step. And and I don't want to miss, I don't want to mislead anyone. You know, it's not. You know how a lot of things on the internet right now are do this and your life is gonna be great, right? Everything is a sell. Everything is trying to sell you on magic because we're all used to working and learning at the speed of light.

SPEAKER_01 24:27

Yes, yes, yes.

SPEAKER_00 24:29

This isn't. I'm I'm gonna be totally up front with people. It takes practice. Yes, you don't get to that point of expertise by simply flipping a switch. There are many switches along the way, yes, and they all have to line up and go green. And then even then, you have to continue to stoke the fire.

SPEAKER_02 24:50

You know, makes complete sense. One of my friends suggested to me recently, I've got zero doubt this is just an excellent product, said you can have a great product, but the bigger issue is in the marketing, about getting it known out there. You obviously have the advantage that you've been a finalist in the world championship public speaker and you're extremely well known in the Toastmasters community. How has the marketing process been for you?

SPEAKER_00 25:17

Big challenge. That's a whole new realm. I definitely got insight and input from as many people as I could. I think if I had it to do over again, I'm sure there are things I could have done better. But uh, but I do know that I think I was able to get the word out pretty quickly and it became a best seller within the first weekend. So that's been good, right? Yeah, it got to be number one bestseller over the weekend. And so I think those license. So I think those people really helped me out. And uh and now I want to keep sustaining that that growth.

SPEAKER_02 25:55

What was your main thrust of marketing? Was it LinkedIn or was it something else?

SPEAKER_00 25:59

It was through that community. It was through the community that uh that had grown up around me. I I had I had inadvertently fostered. Like I didn't I didn't grow the community to to sell the book because it's been going on for years, the community, but because of all that foundational work, um I you know you planted the tree five years ago, and today fruit came out.

SPEAKER_02 26:30

And I couldn't be more pleased to see that, to see you getting some reward from that because you've been incredibly generous. And speaking of generosity, I ran a speechcraft course in October last year to teach fellow skin cancer doctors how to be better, connect with the audience better when they're educating, and had the incredible honor of you coming on and delivering an educational. And as much as your world championship final speech was just amazing all around, it stood out for me, particularly with the use of body language and physical delivery. So you gave an educational on that body language and physical delivery of speeches. Could you share any insights with our audience today on that?

SPEAKER_00 27:14

I think when we're talking about body language, we also have to think about our facial expressions and our eyes, even our eyebrows. My guess is your f you and your fellow doctors aren't always giving public speeches 100% of the time. My guess is many of your conversations happen just like this, one-on-one, in a room with someone who's receiving the worst news of their life, and they have to keep finding a reason to live. And so one of the things that we want to do is have that hope in our eyebrows, right? And and I'm engaged with you, even though there's all those other things going on in my life as a doctor, I'm not, you know, immune to my family here and my mother-in-law there, and my work, and my government, and vacation, and but I'm I'm I'm gonna be right here. And and the voice matches too, right? Yes, you you can't speak to somebody one-on-one like you're blasting away at a 1,000-seat auditorium. We want to have the vocal training to to speak in such a way that it's a heart-to-heart conversation and and and our expressions and our eyes and our and our and our our hands, right? Yeah, and so we can use all of that, not just in a wide form, but here, because I think this is partly where things fail as well, one-to-one. So how do we use our physicality? How do we use our body language? How we sit in chairs, how we arrange our chairs, we don't even think about that. Should this conversation happen across a desk? Or could we come over here to my two side chairs that I can talk with you and uh and have a cup of tea, you know, where we can really talk and discuss plans to move forward. I think those kinds of things uh we often forget. And I tried to include some of that in the book as well. Not necessarily our office, but understanding our space. When you go to speak and communicate, what's your space like? When you're doing a training, which is different from uh a lot of people think of public speaking as one-directional, right? I'm blasting away one direction like a like a speaker system, yeah. But really, in many cases, it's it's a dialogue, it's back and forth. Yeah, would they say something like uh on this day, on this date, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. You want to know what the next best invention was? The second telephone. So he had someone to talk to him.

SPEAKER_01 30:14

Very good.

SPEAKER_00 30:15

So having one, so blasting away in an audience isn't the best thing ever. The best thing is when they can come back and forth. Then we then we're really growing.

SPEAKER_02 30:28

Yeah, yeah. I think speaking from personal experience, we can always improve any aspect of our communication. But I was certainly comfortable with speaking to people one-on-one, where it was more of a challenge, and why I joined Toastmasters when I was asked to then educate other doctors, you've got to suddenly a group of people, so that's why it became more about the public speaking sort of aspect of it.

SPEAKER_00 30:54

And peers.

SPEAKER_02 30:56

Yeah, so you speak to you.

SPEAKER_00 30:57

Speaking to your peers is a is a whole other ball of wax than speaking to a group of people, you know, in an educational setting. So I think there's a lot of different aspects to it.

SPEAKER_02 31:08

Yeah. Is there anything else you'd like to share or discuss today, Fuzzy?

SPEAKER_00 31:15

I think one of the most important things to remember about any kind of speaking is that engagement. How do we engage? It's not just about talking. I was just working with a client um right right before this meeting, and one of the things that I discussed with her was you have to treat it as if it's a dialogue. And there's a continuous effort in a dialogue. You know, we can't just drop what we're doing. Well, we can't just drop the conversation and go off. There's a continuous effort between you and your audience, whether it's a large audience or one-on-one. And so I brought up the idea that um when you when you have to hold water in your hand, right? If somebody pours water in your hand and you you're trying to get some water, what do you have to do with your fingers to try to sustain that pool of water in your hand? There's a certain amount of attention to detail that you have to have. There's a there's a muscle memory there. You can't just you can't just hold your hand out and say, yeah, pour the water in. It's gonna go right through you. You know, you you have to hold tight, you have to cop, you have to be intentional. You find all the cracks between very quickly. And so same thing with a conversation. You you want to have that engagement with your audience and find the cracks so that it's sustainable. Your energy is sustainable, their ability to hold on to the material is sustainable. I could stand there in front of my kids for 30 years and yammer on, but that that's not going to lead to lifelong learning. The lifelong learning is when they feel like when they want to share back that I'm I'm gonna be listening. And so, as speakers, our greatest gift is our ability to listen and find engagement.

SPEAKER_02 33:18

Couldn't agree more. That's very wise. It's district season around the world, district competition season. I hear, I think you've had many invites to speak at district conferences. Where have you been and how's that going?

SPEAKER_00 33:33

It's been going really well. Last year I had uh Japan, Korea, India, and then uh an uh an online version uh the speech in Canada. This year, Chicago, Philippines, Malaysia, Cebu, Malaysia, and then two different conferences in India with an online conference in Australia, District 90. Oh, okay. Yeah, so I'll be I'll be dialing in for that one.

SPEAKER_02 34:06

It sounds like we need to clone you. Do you ever say no to invitations? I mean, because we've all got our limits, right?

SPEAKER_00 34:14

There was somebody who asked, and it was just at the wrong time. I said, I'm sorry, it's already been taken. That that timing, that slot is already taken. And I try to work out side by side, like the two India districts are able to share airfare to get me there. Japan and Korea last year were able to sort of share airfare. So I just stayed. Instead of like going there and coming back home, I stayed there so that they only had to pay for me one time. And so that's one way to find a solution, so much so that two districts have already contacted me about May 2027, and one of them is gonna shift their date, if they can, to accommodate me joining them. Otherwise, they were gonna be head-to-head on the same exact weekend.

SPEAKER_02 35:01

You're so incredibly generous in spending so much time helping the Toastmasters community. Do you have any plans to compete again in the World Championship public speaking?

SPEAKER_00 35:13

No plans at this point in time. You but you know, they say never say never. But at this point, I think my focus is really on that teaching and learning and helping others, doing the conferences, and and if I do the contest, I really can't do the conferences, and right now that's the the part of who I am that I want to grow, and I feel like that's where I can really grow how people can better their communication skills. The other aspect of that is I'm also coaching people in the contest. Like right now, I've got of everyone that I started with, I've got nine that are going to district. They're a district finalist this month. So I've got those nine folks, and and I want to keep sustaining that kind of support to everyone so everyone feels like, okay, I got a shot at this. I've got a shot to get better.

SPEAKER_02 36:04

Yes. I would have fallen off my chair, I think, if you'd said that you were competing again because I would have said maybe you've got a twin. How do you do it all? Reminds me of a Michael Keaton movie, I'll have to tell you about later.

SPEAKER_00 36:20

Multiplicity? Yes. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 36:23

I haven't watched it, but I remember seeing that. Oh, you've got it, you've got to watch it. It's a very funny movie. It's been around quite a while now, but uh very funny movie. Anyhow, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It's been an absolute pleasure and an honour. And I wish you all the very best for your book and for everything in the future.

SPEAKER_00 36:41

Hey, thanks for having me, Brendan. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02 36:51

Thanks for listening to today's show. One of the key elements of Toastmasters is evaluations. This is how we grow and improve, both by encouraging comments for things we've got right and points for improvement. We all learn and benefit from these evaluations, not just the person being evaluated. So any feedback in the comments is greatly appreciated. If you have a Toastmasters story you'd like to share or would like to be on the show, I'd love to hear from you. You can reach me at Toastmastersworldtour at gmail.com. Thanks for listening.