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! For this episode of Toastmasters World Tour, we travel virtually over the ditch to the City of Sales, Auckland, New Zealand, famous for its stunning harbours, boating culture, and volcanic landscape to chat to Nethmi Gala. Nethmi is a successful people manager in a finance company. Let's hear how Toastmasters expedited her career. Kia Aura Nethmi, welcome to the show. Thank you. How are you? Very well, thanks. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure. Uh you're gonna have to stop me if I start talking too much. Everybody's favorite subject, themselves. Right. Well, my name is Netmi Dulanga Gala, if I'm gonna give my full government name. I was born in Sri Lanka in Colombo, and uh my parents immigrated my brother themselves and I over to New Zealand. Oh gosh, I think like 2001. So I've I've grown up in in New Zealand, but my roots are very much in Sri Lanka. And yeah, I'm 30 years old, just turned 30 in November last year. You're old. And uh I I know I'm I'm aging at things creak now when I get up. Um I can't jump down from high places anymore. My knee might give out. It's there there are consequences to aging. No, and uh yeah, I I guess that's that's a very basic introduction. I've got a younger brother, uh two parents. But yeah, no, that that's pretty much me in a nutshell. I'm a toastmaster. What sort of work do you do? I'm a people manager, and that has been an interesting journey to get to that that career. That is not something I thought I would end up in, though nobody is surprised. I started off in legal recoveries, an admin position at Avanti Finance here in Auckland, and kind of just worked my way through to becoming a recoveries officer. So a lot of conversations with customers in difficult positions, being able to understand with some empathy and then navigate that conversation. But there was it was also the legal side of it, doing civil proceedings, serving, making sure customers were served with not notice proceedings, things like that. And then I kind of naturally went into training the team, created some training materials, really loved seeing growth and development in people and seeing them understand concepts and get better at things that they thought they'd never be able to conquer. And then I got the opportunity to interview for the management position of that team, and I was successful. And I was very, I was quite young getting into it, about 25, I would say, and managing people decades older than me, uh, who had lived life, had children. You were, you know, not that much younger than me. So it was a very interesting dynamic to navigate, but I'm super thankful for Avanti Finance for investing in me as a leader. They've they've sort of worked on developing me, and I got to lean into some natural strengths that I had, and it's been a really fulfilling career, I would say. So currently I've been seconded to the settlements team in Avanti just for a little bit of a change, and they needed some help as well. So that's been really fun. I've got to learn the front end of the business. Um it's a young team, so the opposite of what I had, and again, just a different dynamic. They're all really talented, they're very hungry for change and development, so it's really great. Yeah, that's that's me in a nutshell for work. I deal with people day in and day out, and I make sure that they're supported, that they're trained, um, and that we're meeting our KPIs, and and I communicate the needs of the team to upper management and take their wants and desires and communicate that to the team as well. Make sure everybody's happy and aligned. So it sounds to me like both communication and leadership skills would be important in that job. Both things that Toastmasters helps train. Why did you originally join Toastmasters? Believe it or not, my mother is the one that pushed me towards Toastmasters. She'd heard about it. She knew I could do speeches. I've always done well with giving speeches. I mean, I I've done stuff like that through high school and I've done debating, and I would always tell her that I'd get nervous going up. And I seemed to always do okay. Like nobody really said it was bad, but I essentially blacked out. I would get up there and whatever muscle memory I had would kick in and I'd deliver, I could execute. But then when I came off the stage, I was like sweating, like fully flushed, couldn't really remember what I'd said. And I really, if you get to know me well, I you would know that I like control and I like to be able to plan and execute and know what the outcome is gonna be. So for someone with that personality type, it really was not fun to be put in a situation where I felt like I didn't have control and I didn't know what the outcome was gonna be. So my mother hearing that directed me to Toastmasters, and then I went and visited Bar City Toastmasters at Auckland Uni and really loved the people there, loved that we got to practice it. It was a safe environment to do it. I'd never considered that as a concept, I'd never heard of it. It's such a strange concept, right? You go there and you practice being confident whilst you're up there on a public stage and you get feedback, you learn how to give feedback. And then there's that leadership aspect to it as well, which I had no idea about when I joined, but I very quickly got roped into, as you do, and discovered that part of myself, I would say, at that age. I was 19 when I first joined in 1819, so pretty young. I think I always maybe had the qualities of a leader in there, like the building blocks, but I had never learned how to piece them together in an effective way. Toastmasters was a good proving ground to cut my IT. It was, and you get feedback from senior members as well who've held those positions, and you get feedback from area directors, and there's this whole hierarchy of support that just flows through the organization. And as a late teen at that time, you know, getting into what adulthood could be, trying to figure out how to leverage my skills and education into the workforce, it was a really pivotal moment for me to step into a leadership position within Avanti. Sorry, not Avanti, but within Toastmasters and then in in Avanti as well. I don't think I would have been in such a good position to accept that opportunity when it came my way, had it not been for Toastmasters. I'm quite fanatical about it at work. It's almost like I'm trying to induct people into a cult. But I do encourage everybody I encounter at work, especially when we talk about development. So many of them talk about confidence and that they may not have it, they can't articulate themselves. Have the art of having a conversation where they're giving feedback to somebody, but it's never received well, you know. That that kind of thing, you don't really get to practice that. And when you do get to practice it, it's kind of critical you get it right because you're in the work environment, you don't want to damage a relationship. So I always encourage my team, anybody who comes to me about for that kind of stuff. I always tell them, you know, come with me to Toastmasters. It's not just about getting up there and giving a speech, you there's a networking aspect to it, there's a leadership aspect to it. And just getting up and giving an evaluation, you learn naturally how to give feedback in a way that is comfortable for somebody to hear. So so many little things that you get to do that you might not think are the main parts of Toastmasters, that's actually what you can take away and use practically in a work workspace. So long rambling story short, Toastmasters set me up, I think, for success in terms of being ready to consolidate, like consolidating the skills that I may have already had, sharpening them and then kind of packaging them up for me when that management interview came along, for me to be able to get in there and sort of give it my best. And yeah, it just it just also means that I'm very ready at the drop of the hat if somebody comes by my desk to ask me a question about something, I'm I'm actually quite okay to turn around and give it give a two-minute answer. And that's table topics for you. I think you touched on something there when you mentioned fellow co-workers not having the confidence to try things out at work because work is something that's on the line, isn't it? And you're gonna be judged negatively if it could impact your career, which I think is one of the great benefits of Toastmasters, is that it's outside of that or you know, career environment, and so that it is a safe space. Everyone's rooting for you to succeed, yeah, and help you. And there's mentorship as well. There was a few people in that club when I first started out. I think his name was Joe Chang, or Joe at least. His style of evaluations and things really left an impact on me in how he was able to wrap up what could potentially have be seen as a very like harsh recommendation where it's like a really fundamental thing that person got wrong. But it sounded so pleasing, it sounded so supportive. The energy he put into his voice and his body language when he was giving that rec recommendation, it was really something you just learn by osmosis, you just learn by watching what you know those people are doing. And I've that was something I really had to work on growing up because my feedback had always been you're super blunt, you're you you you know, you you tend to steamroll people, you know, you don't listen enough. And it it's kind and I would always think, but I do, but I do. But going to Toastmasters sort of taught me that I'm seeing things really from my perspective. I haven't paused, you know, one, two, three, taken a step back and kind of seen it from that other perspective of how is that feedback being received when I'm giving it out like that? Words have power. I really learned that in Toastmasters, seeing how somebody made such a small tweak, a change of a word in a speech, and the impact was so much more different. Seeing the difference in wrapping your recommendations and commendations or or the energy you put into how you speak, how that can impact somebody. And I think district conference Kevin Parl, he made a mention of you know the fact that we go to Toastmasters, or you know, even in life, we give advice or we we give support and we don't think too much of it, or we just are who we are in front of people, and we don't know how many lives we touch, we don't know how many lives we change. And that's I think the beautiful part of Toastmasters because support and mentorship is such an integral part of the fabric of this organization. Everybody naturally sort of steps into it as you progress through. And and people don't unlike people don't realize how much of an impact that has. Um, so it's definitely impacted me, it's definitely changed the trajectory of my life. I would not be at my job had it not been for Toastmasters, I wouldn't have met that friend who referred me on. And so whenever I tell people Toastmasters is the reason I have my job, it quite literally is. I never attended Varsity Toastmasters, I would never have interviewed Adivanti Finance, I would never have found a management career and found something I genuinely really love. I mean, I might have gotten there like 30 years later, but it definitely expedited that journey. Um, and things sort of fell into place. So it's very uh serendipitous, I guess is the word. Do you think the public speaking aspect or the leadership aspect has been more helpful to you? That's uh that's an interesting question. I think it would depend on the time in my life. Um when I first started, um I think within eight months, I had somehow been like roped into a leadership position um pretty quickly. I mean, even if it was just like sergeant at arms or the secretary kind of role, you were still learning about communication, you're still learning about stakeholder management. It's not something that's you don't label it like that, but stakeholder management is a is a thing that you definitely learn at Toastmasters. You need to be able to manage people's expectations and communicate clearly what your needs are and what your expectations are, and that's all a part of stakeholder management, and that's a very big part of what I do as well. So got to learn that at a very young age, um, and how to do it in a way that makes people want to help you. Yeah, it's all in how you communicate, right? It's not always what you say, it's how you say it sometimes. Learned that as well. Um, but I would I would say uh back to your question, um, when I first started, communication part was the more important thing, uh particularly around giving and receiving feedback. That was the main thing that impacted me. Um, and it kind of became something I well, I became a little bit obsessed with it, I would say, um, which I'm sure we'll get to later. Um, but more than the the speech giving and the speech craft, which I did I did delve into a little bit because you kind of have to with evaluations, it was really the art of feedback, the art of that evaluation that really captured my interest, um, and how a good evaluation could change the quality of a meeting, um, change the quality of a mentorship. Um, and it there were so many takeaways for my own life, not just in the workplace, in how I would break bad news to a friend. Or if a friend was doing something that I thought, God, that's gonna end up really bad, instead of telling that friend, oh, you're cooked, that's not gonna be a good idea. I'd I'd I'd then be able to sort of see it from their perspective, tell them, I see what you're trying to do, I see this is the thing that you're trying to achieve. And that's this is the good part about that. I see where you're coming from, but have you considered this? And can we look at what would happen if we applied this to the situation and let's talk that out? And those are things you learn doing evaluations. So that was the useful part, I would say, in the first like three, four years of of being in Toastmasters. And then as I started to get more and more into the leadership side, I've I've done VP ed, I've done VP membership, and I've been the president. Um, I've and especially at a uni club where turnover can be high, there's a lot to manage. And I think all of that kind of I didn't realize it at the time because you sort of just get in there and you do it, and people give you feedback. But I got to practice management from that whole thing, and it didn't really realize it until I um started actually managing people at work, and I was like, oh, this is this is clicking a little bit easier than I thought it would. Um, because I was expecting a huge step up, you know. I was like, give me all the courses, give me all the management stuff. And when I got there, um a lot of this, the principles they were talking about, I had gotten to practice at Toastmasters, so that was actually really cool to discover. Um, so depends on the time of my in my life, but very early 20s, I would say it was definitely the communications piece, particularly the evaluations. But getting into my mid-20s, and I did take a bit of a break, but um I would say as I got older, the the takeaway from Toastmasters was the leadership side of things that I got to practice in my early 20s that stood me very well in my late 20s. So it's it's both really. I I can't I can't choose one over the other, it just depends on the time of my life. You're touching upon something that a lot of people find is that in my experience, anyhow, a lot of people join for the communication or public speaking because I think that's slightly better known outside the organization. Yeah. You get inside and you suddenly realize there's this whole leadership pathway. You've been club president. Have you been area director? No, I've I've never I've never attempted to to go further than that. And I think as much and I think one day I'll try. Um, but part of the reason I told you I took a bit of a break, my friend and I um we joined back up again late last year, September, October last year. And um for me, the reason I went back was I had to give a presentation to the senior leadership team sometime last year. And whilst everybody gave good same, same back to the same origin story, whilst everybody gave good feedback, I knew for myself, oh my gosh, you lost like you were no longer in control up there. You you've lost everything that you've gained. Um, as much as the leadership stuff stuck with me because I got to practice it continually at work, I didn't really get to do presentations at that level anymore. Um and the evaluation piece, I got to give feedback, I still got to practice that, but the actual art of giving a speech, I didn't get to do that anymore. And I thought to myself, gosh, you've gotten rusty, you need to go back. And my friend had gone through something similar. And so, again, we both met at Toastmasters, by the way, known each other for 10 years, even outside of Toastmasters. So, you know, you you get jobs, you make friends, uh, not just leadership and um communication. And um so we we went club hunting essentially and then landed on Auckland Toastmasters, and um, it's I think the most distinguished club in New Zealand, if I've got my facts right, which I believe I do. Um, we didn't know that at the time. We did very poor research. We just went, what's in the area? Let's go look. Um, and just the quality of the meeting blew us both away. I heard a couple of I had one speaker give an impromptu speech, and I thought, I need to I can learn from that. I that impromptu speeches terrify me. I don't like as much as the way I craft a speech can be a little off the cuff, I still have a lot of prep that goes into it. So that you wouldn't even know what the question is kind of blew my mind. But the quality of the evaluations, like um, there's a club member called Jill Nortwong Wong. He he is like a masterclass in an evaluation. You think I'm good, he's great. Like it's um his ability to pick out the most interesting points in a speech. Like he's he's got he's really got a good knowledge of rhetoric devices, rhetorical devices. And anytime he goes up to give an evaluation, my notebook is out because I know I can pick up one or two things or even more from what he is saying and how he says it and how he frames it. So when I heard him give an evaluation, I turned to my friend and said, I'm joining this club. I have to because there's too many people here that I can learn from, and I got really excited, and I hadn't felt that in a really long time in terms of growth. So yeah, we signed up and then yeah, I'm just uh been enjoying it ever since. How long had you been out of it? I want to say about five years. I think I I wrapped up around 2019-ish from varsity, yeah, around around that time. Well past when I should have. I should have probably tried to push myself out of that club because like you get involved in the executive committee, and then I stopped giving speeches. I had I'd I just got so into the leadership side, I just kept giving speech thoughts to other people, pushing their part like pushing their speeches and um pathways and things, and just kind of spent a lot of time in the running of the club and less in the doing and the practicing. And then you get a little burnt out and exhausted. Yeah, sure. And took a step back because I felt like I needed to, and then I focused on my career a little bit, got the management role, and then not soon after that. So yeah, would have been 2019, and then I would have started up. No, I think I must have wrapped up in about 2018. I'm not too sure. I could probably go on my profile and figure it out, but um, the years all blend together. But um, I I definitely at least five years of a break, I I reckon, before I joined up again. There's that saying use it or lose it. Yes, but I think you've hit the right word by saying rusty. I don't think you ever completely lose it. I think you probably get a bit rusty and just need to polish it off again. Yeah. Because you rejoined Toastmasters in September last year. Yeah. And then a month ago, you won the District Hundred and Twelve Harbour Division Evaluation Contest in New Zealand. How was the journey to get there? And you did it in such a short space of time. Look, I I wouldn't say it's a short, short space of time. I had a lot of um years sunk into Toastmasters before I rejoined. I mean, at least five, five or six, I would say. You probably five. And as I was mentioned mentioning before, I became very obsessed with the art of an evaluation. I got really into it, into different styles, heard different speakers at different clubs and the way they evaluated and what the actual worth of an evaluation is. It really is in the recommendations, but is in how you give those recommendations, how easy is it for the speaker or even the audience to apply that back onto their speeches? And I've had a lot of great teachers come come through different clubs and um, and I mentioned Jill Nort, there was Joe from Varsity. I've learned a lot by watching those guys give evaluations. In terms of the journey, I'll give you a little bit of context and history. So late last year in November, 22nd of November to be precise, uh I turned 30, grand old age, and I had a bit of a self-reflection moment where I took a step back and I just went, Wow, you've you've gotten really, I don't want to say stale, but I've gotten very comfortable and I've stopped trying to push myself to try different things and grow in different ways. And that was not at all me in my early 20s. I did a lot of random things and I just I pushed myself to do lots of different things and I love that energy that I had. But I I don't know if it's just a natural part of growing or the fact that I have a mortgage now, but I just I've just sort of curled within myself. Um, and I thought to myself, this isn't good enough anymore. So I told myself, come January 2026, you know, for the year of 2026, the first three uncomfortable things that happen to you, three uncomfortable opportunities that are presented to you, you must say yes. You have no choice. And I made a promise to myself. It was not a resolution, but it was a promise to myself. And the first uncomfortable thing, would you know it, was our vice president of education, Raymana, coming up to me at a club meeting very early on in the year and saying, Hey, we have the international speech competition and the evaluation speech competition at club level coming up. I think you should do one of them. You've been a Toastmaster before, and we we need more numbers participating. And I was like, Oh, damn it, this is making me uncomfortable. I've got to say yes. So I thought to myself, well, okay, if I do the evaluation, I don't have to like prepare as much. So I'll pick that. And so that that is how I jumped in to do that. And it was terrifying. I think I'd only given one or two other evaluations since I joined back up at Toastmasters. So I think it was like my second or third since coming back. And there was a moment when I was evaluating the speaker where I kind of just flung my notes aside and took a step away from the lecture and in front of it. And according to the audience members I spoke with afterwards, that was really when I kind of took off. And I had not up to that point ever done a no notes evaluation. I think something in my hind brain just went, if you keep reading these notes, this is gonna tank. You need to step away and just say what you need to say. Uh and then I just kind of it just sort of took off from there. And then I I sat back down and I threw my notes on the table, so disgusted. Um, I got a chuckle out of the audience. I didn't think anyone was watching. But I no one was more shocked when my name came out first. But I guess the analysis came through somehow. And then I remember thinking to myself, okay, I think you're on to something here. We're not gonna do notes anymore. We're gonna spend those five minutes just rehearsing. You're gonna just practice what you're gonna say during the speech, get down your commendations and recommendations and make sure they make sense to the purpose of the speech. So I kind of consolidated that this is the style of evaluation I've had historically as well. I've always been taught to speak to the purpose of the speech. And I think a lot of good evaluators do that. I've heard at like competition level as well, everybody tries to tie it back to what kind of speech are we giving here. So for me, it's like it's your classic, it's a humorous speech, it's it's trying to be inspirational, it's a persuasive speech, it's informative. And you know, you can also have like you can identify a speech can be many different things. You can identify it as it look, this is supposed to be a storyteller type speech where it's purely for entertainment, it can be a combination of one or two. And as the evaluator, as the audience, you can decide how you're receiving that and then evaluate it from that perspective. So I typically like to pick a couple of things that fall under that branch of that type of speech. So if we're looking at a storyteller type speech, which is what I had at district, what I identified at district um competition, I thought to myself, you know, what makes a good storyteller? You need to have a human connection, a human story that's always the best kind of story. One one that we can all immediately relate to because we're all human. Um, and the next thing any great storyteller will have is a good structure that is easy for the audience to follow. And then the last thing is a show, not tell. It's great to paint a picture with words, but paint it with your body language as well and in a way that uplifts the words. So I focused on those two, those three things in my evaluation. And the way I took my notes, and this is something I've been trying to pass on to anybody who sort of talks to me. Um, this is something I got from Joe back from Bar City, Toastmasters. I do a T chart, I go comment C on one side, R on the other, and I always look at what did they do well or what could they do better, and how did they do it well, how could they do it better, and then why is it important? Why am I picking this up? And the in the why you link it up to the purpose of the speech. So it kind of writes itself when you take your notes like that, and then you can practice it for that five minutes. So I consolidated that. Jill Nort really helped sort of identify different recommendations and commendations I could pick out, you know, things like speech topic, things like authority and and uh like um stage presence and what feeds into that. Um everything from you know the way they look to to their eye contact, and and just things like uh rhetorical devices are really important, especially when you get a great, great speaker up there. And I think division we had um one of the humorous contest uh contestants for district one one two, they were our test speaker. And so it was an incredibly high-level speech. The like it took me maybe 40, 30 seconds into her speech to go, oh no, no, this person knows exactly what they're doing. Um, now it ceases to be recommendations and more how do we elevate this? How do we take this to the next level? So that switch was flipped immediately at division. Um, I think for her, she had an extended metaphor about the corporate jungle. And I thought, what a what a lovely piece of imagery. And the fact that she extended that from start to finish and had a like a thematic, you know, imagery going through her speech, it would in a humorous speech, especially, is not something you would necessarily expect, but it really lent itself to the humor of you know characterizing certain co-workers as as species in the jungle, you know. Um and I told her she could take it further because she really had it at the start and she had it towards the end, but the middle kind of lost it. So there was a moment where somebody swooped in and picked up the footrest when somebody was distracted. And I thought, you know, she could liken that to like a like a lion or stalking its prey and then jumping when the the mother gazelle was off somewhere and the baby was left on on their own. So it's just extending that metaphor just a little bit to paint that picture and make it even funnier. So it's kind of picking up on those novel, I guess, recommendations and commendations that people might not necessarily think to look at that can enhance a speech, I found has stood me in good stead as well. But yeah, I'm it's it's been an interesting journey. I really it's gone from one shop to another because I didn't I didn't expect to to win area or or division. I don't think I I heard some of the speeches, some of the evaluations in division. I didn't get to hear a single one in district. I was last. So I was like wigging out by the bushes in the back, like trying to calm down. So I had no idea where I stood, what kind of other evaluations came out. All I remember thinking when I got up there was, you know what you want to say, just say it and don't trip up over your heels. Like that was the only thing that was going through my head. But I've been supported quite a bit by everybody at my club. Um, John Favel, who was um, I think a previous, he's a previous international past president, and he's a font of wisdom. And he taught me a good trick to calm my breathing down before I started, because I I don't know if you've picked it up, but I talk very fast sometimes. And especially when you start to lose breath and you lose control of the way your diaphragm's working to take in that breath, your heart rate increases, the words coming out of your mouth increase, or you lose potency and intensity in your voice. So that's something I've been trying to work on, and I think I have like grown in that sense throughout this whole like competing period from club to district. I've slowed down quite a bit. Um, I've put some pauses in. My breath control still needs some work. I'm not 100% happy with it, but um yeah, it it's it's been a an amazing surreal experience, and I have to give a lot of kudos to the members of Auckland Toastmasters who have been very supportive. And that that's a part of Toastmasters I really missed. There's a whole community of support that want you to do they they just want you to fly, and it's it's so great to have that around you consistently. 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 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.