SPEAKER_01 0:00

And if you go back to when we lived in tribes, and you're in like a tribe of fifty, and the whole tribe turns around and looks at you, you're in trouble.

SPEAKER_00 0:06

You know, it's in trouble. There's a reason for that.

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Embrace the audience. And so you have that mental thing that you stand up there and you almost it's almost like you put your arms out and you're embracing all the people in front of you in a warm way that you see them as friends, not foe. Even if you stand up there and they're all glaring at you, mentally I just still embrace them and see them all as being on my side.

SPEAKER_02 0:42

Hi, my name is Brendan O'Sullivan, a Toastmaster from Brisbane, Australia. Welcome to my Toastmaster's 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. David on how we learn to go from being almost a bit of a public speaking to now enjoying it. Welcoming every opportunity you can get. Very excited to be here at the Australian Skin Cancer Congress with my good friend and fellow skin cancer educator David Simpson. David, thank you so much for joining us on the show. I'm so excited to have you on. Yeah, thanks for inviting me, Brendan. It's great to come and have a chat. Yesterday I saw you do an amazing talk that has got everyone buzzing about new features on dermoscopes. But I'd like to start by going back to why you joined Toastmasters in the first place.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

Oh thanks, Brendan. Well, years ago when I was um just a junior doctor, uh I went through the same sort of intimidation that people get in medical school and um through medical education. It makes you sort of quite on edge about um having to give a talk in front of your peers. You're always going to be criticized, and I found that I started to develop a bit of a phobia about it and I was avoiding doing presentations, even though sometimes I'd do one that would go well, and other times I'd sort of feel intimidated and I'd sort of have shaky hands, shaky legs, and feel I'd sort of let myself down. And after a few of these sort of good ones, followed by bad ones, I sort of came to this conclusion that maybe it's easier and safer just to avoid them as far as possible. And then that became almost a pattern, and it probably stopped me getting quite a few job opportunities because I was actually quite interested in pursuing surgery, and I think at the time I was thinking, oh, I really don't want to go through all those audit meetings and presentations and feeling like this, so a safer bet is to go off into primary care. And then I emigrated here to Australia 21 years ago, and I wasn't really that keen on continuing primary care, uh sort of normal general practice, and I at the time they were running skin cancer courses on the Gold Coast, so I started embarking on those skin cancer college courses, and I found I liked it because you have a combination of uh primary care, sort of talking to patients, but also then surgery, and I continued it all the way up to today. And then, of course, uh um as you get more well known in your specialities, people start asking you, would you like to do some teaching and do some presenting at conferences? And I still had this hanging over me, but I didn't feel confident to just say yes, I'll do it, in case I had the same bad experiences I had like years ago. And so I thought, well, quite a few patients had said to me, just when we'd been chatting over the years, they said, Oh, you should do Toastmasters, it's the best thing ever, it's of sorting out of my job. And it took about ten years for me to actually uh ring up a uh or message a club and turn up and walk in that door and say, Here we go. And once I decided to do it, I threw myself in with sort of both feet, and the rest is history.

SPEAKER_02 4:46

What year was that, David?

SPEAKER_01 4:49

The year I joined Toastmasters would be just under two years ago, so it'd be 2024. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:55

And which club was that?

SPEAKER_01 4:57

Marucci Door, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:58

That's the club that you're currently at?

SPEAKER_01 5:00

And that's yeah, I'm currently the president of Roochor, yeah, Toastmasters Club, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:04

Oh, that's fabulous. And how's that gone?

SPEAKER_01 5:07

Well, the club, it's a great club. I I looked at a couple of clubs before I joined, and they're all good clubs, but one of the guests at a club I was visiting turned out to be the club president from Roachdoor Toastmasters, and she was so friendly and warm and open. I thought, well, I'll just come down to your club and see what that's like. And I found straight away that Roach Door Toastmasters, it's a it's a fun club, it gets the speeches done, it goes through the Toastmasters education, but it's there's a good vibe there. Everyone's sort of having a bit of fun with each other, and it attracts like it attracts people who enjoy that environment, and so you find you build a community of fun people who are all helping each other, and I I I loved it. And then after my first year, they invited me to be president, which seemed like a bit of a jump up, but then you realise it's just another leadership role, and it's been great for me because I can get the opportunity every couple of weeks to stand up in front of the group, lead a meeting, close the meeting, so that in itself is another skill beyond public speaking skills.

SPEAKER_02 6:13

I know that you lecture now, and I know from what you've just said that you were starting to get those sort of opportunities, so therefore joining the dots, I realise that it must have at least helped you face your fear of public speaking. Has it made you more effective and has it led to any other opportunities?

SPEAKER_01 6:31

Yeah, it's definitely made it I mean first of all, it's getting rid of the fear of public speaking, because I'd sort of got this phobia. I think I wasn't so much scared of doing it. I it's that thing that you're scared of um the unpredictable nature of the way your body reacts. Because I had, I suppose, my wedding speech, I looked back, I loved doing that, it was great, and I got great feedback. And then a couple of weeks after my wedding speech, uh, came back to work and I was thrown into a situation where I was very uncomfortable, where they essentially said you've got to be in the auditorium at 10am, present a case to the entire sort of faculty in the hospital uh with no preparation, and I didn't even know the case, and it obviously it went very badly wrong. And so I'd had these experiences, so I didn't quite trust myself to do a proper job. And then when you go to Toastmasters, you're still going to feel on edge the first few meetings, and it's not like you instantly become a confident public speaker, but the environment is so friendly and warm and forgiving. I always say when I'm talking to people as a president of the club, I say, Well, in a way, you can't, there's nothing you can do that would uh be that would upset the club. The club don't care. If you burst out crying and you sob, everyone would just put their arm around you and say, That's great, you know, because it's all part of the process. Whereas at work, or if you've achieved a certain level in your career, in your profession, people, it almost the pressure gets worse because people are expecting you as a more senior person in your profession to just naturally be confident and competent at everything. And when you prove that you're not, it seems like a bigger come down than if you were a junior when perhaps you'd expect a junior to not be very experienced. So the pressure almost builds. But once you join a club like Toastmasters, it doesn't matter whether you're a high-level executive who struggles with public speaking, or you're a student or someone who's just left school who struggles with public speaking, everyone's the same, and you're given the opportunity to practice and fail, and no one cares, and then you learn from that, and then the confidence comes from just merely standing up and talking to the group in different roles and doing your different speeches every week. It's that thing where you just become conditioned to it, really, don't you? That I think the big thing is when you stand up and you see all the eyes on you. We're not used to that. As humans, they all say that's something that's quite intimidating, and if you go back to when we lived in tribes and you're in like a tribe of 50, and the whole tribe turns around and looks at you, you're in trouble.

SPEAKER_00 9:05

You know, it's in trouble. There's a reason for that. That's what they say, don't they?

SPEAKER_01 9:09

I think there's a psychology there. So it's very, very built into us to not like being you know looked at by everyone else. But then when you what I find now is when I walk up on that stage, I actually welcome it. But yeah, I was given some good advice by a guy who I know who's an actor. And what he says, this is what they tell the actors, is to embrace the audience. And so you have that mental thing that you stand up there and you almost it's almost like you put your arms out and you're embracing all the people in front of you in a warm way that you see them as friends, not foe. And psychologically, I think that's that's quite a nice thing I picked up from him. So I don't even if you stand up there and they're all glaring at you, mentally I just still embrace them and see them all as being on my side. And that's um it's just little tips tips like that you pick up, and that after a while it becomes natural, and I can genuinely say I I enjoy it now. You know, it's it's still intimidating to stand up in front of 600 people, but my main worry about when I'm speaking now is not the speaking and not the standing up in front of people, it's that I want to do a good job.

SPEAKER_02 10:20

I just had the penny dropped because when you said about embracing the audience, yesterday I was sitting right at the front, listening to your lecture, and was feeling that embrace. I thought that that was something that you absolutely excelled at, that you were talking to us in a very engaging way that was very supportive as well, because we were learning about a new feature that dermoscopes have, and you took us through your own journey, which made it sound possible for all of us to take on. So that collaborative, engaging way, I think was highly effective, plus fabulous eye contact.

SPEAKER_01 11:02

I think basically there's tips and tricks you you can learn through uh public speaking. I think the first one is just to become conditioned to standing up in front of a group, and that's where Toastmasters excels, it gives you the opportunity in a non-threatening environment. Once you've got through that fear of everyone looking at you and you being on the spot, that's when you can then add on the skills. That's what I think. I think it's you can start thinking about the skills at the beginning, but the main thing is just to get conditioned to being up on that spot, and then you then get all sorts of different tips from different people. So I got that tip from an actor because actors excel at this, and I think one of the main tips I've got was that you see your speech as being a gift to the audience. So you're there uh to convey this message to them because it's gonna be beneficial to them, and you want to package it in a way that they can really appreciate it and it's gonna help them. And when you do that, it makes it takes the pressure off you. Because if you're up there saying, What do I look like? Develop my hair, develop my clothes, to be am I am I looking awkward, you know, am I handsome, am I ugly, am I fat, or am I thin? That's all that's all me-centric, isn't it? And when you when you start thinking about all those things, then you get more and more nervous, but you're also you're not doing a good job. Whereas if you go up there and say it doesn't matter what I look like, it doesn't matter how nervous I look, doesn't matter, none of that matters. I've got a great talk that I've prepared that I think is going to be really useful for these people. I'm I'm giving it's my gift. I've wrapped it up like a gift and I'm giving it to them. Yes, that that takes the pressure off you. And then and then you take that second bit I said about embracing the audience. You actually see the audience, you say, Well, I'm here to give you this because I care for you, you know, as an audience, and even if uh you don't care for the audience, even if you think they're a hostile audience, you can convince yourself to treat them all as someone who's going to benefit from your help. And of course, it's um and what you'll notice by having that good eye contact and looking around the audience, you'll see people warming to what you're saying because if you've produced a talk that's relevant to them, it is a gift to them. Yeah. And people appreciate it, and of course, then you become more and more comfortable with your talking. And I think you do, when you convey that warmth, people feel it, and when they feel the warmth, they convey that warmth back to you. And then the best part of all of public speaking is when you've done a good job and you know you've done a good job because people come up to you afterwards and tell you you've done a good job. Yeah. And then you sort of know, because pe if you've done a bad job, people will tend to avoid you, won't they? And you say they they've probably been polite, they don't want to come up and say, Oh god, that was terrible. Yeah. Uh so it's the first indication you know that it went well is when people flock up to you at the end of the meeting and want to have a quick chat. And then you feel you've probably created a bond with them, even though they were one of six hundred people in the room. They feel they've got a bond with you now, because they've just listened to you for 25 minutes and you 100%. You conveyed um, as you said it, you've made it conversational. So you've had a conversation with 600 people in the same way as you'd have a conversation with one.

SPEAKER_02 14:12

Yeah, yeah. I was gonna say I felt yesterday that I think everyone would have found that engaging and thought you were a fabulous speaker, but as a Toastmaster, I not only saw that, but I understood why it was such a good speech, because you had the eye contact, you had the vocal variety, you had the gestures, you had the stage movement, you you addressed all areas of the audience. I don't know that other people would have looked at it in such an analytical way, or now what's intuitive to me as a Toastmaster. But I was going to ask you about the feedback. I know that I ran out and and knew that I had to get a dermoscope with the UV light feature. Yeah. What other feedback have you had?

SPEAKER_01 14:50

Uh the first thing as I say, you always get people come up to you if you've done a good talk, they want to talk to you straight away and ask you a few more questions. So they rather than avoid you because that was a really uncomfortable presentation sit-through. They it's the opposite, they want to flock to you. So that's your very first one. I've had heaps of people ask me questions about the technology in my talk. But uh I've also had a lot a lot of people just yeah, compliment me on you know the speech, the speaking style, how they found it very engaging. Uh had a few people say it was the best talk they listened to so far, and so all this is great, but there were definitely it was a mixture of the people asking specifics about the subject, but also people just general comments about how they just thought it was a great talk in the sense of it was presented well. And that's that is down to you know tr speaking for the last two years every two weeks at Toastmasters, isn't it? I just went up there and did my you know table topics competition. I think I had table topics and speech evaluation, and you know how at Toastmasters for competitions they draw cards, yeah, and so and so when I went to the I was quite um nervous, I suppose, going on to the air contest. I'd never spoken at any big event like that. And I was doing, I think, table topics first, and we drew the cards, I drew number one. So I was first speaker at the contest, and I just had to you just have to look at the stage and up you go and throw yourself into it. And of course you can do that at Toastmasters, and then when you come here and you're talking to your peers, people who might be maybe a bit more cynical about you or critical, uh, you've already gone through that process and so it makes it just so much easier. And it's the same, I will say speaking to 20 people at Toastmasters, if you can do that, you can speak to a hundred people. If you can speak to a hundred people, you can speak to a thousand people. It's it's the same thing. It's not that it gets more and more nerve-wracking. In some ways it can even be less nerve-wracking, uh, but I think when you I say that because sometimes when you've got more people, it seems less personal, and you have people all staring at you. But on the other hand, I think by even when you're speaking to a 600 or a thousand, you still want to create that conversation with you and them and make them feel that you're it's almost like a one-on-one. So, yeah, these are all skills from Toastmasters, aren't they? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:18

Where do you see yourself going to from here?

SPEAKER_01 17:22

Well, I definitely want to continue I'll stay with Toastmasters. I think it's a good routine. I think even later on in life, if I was retiring or something or moving, I think it's a good thing to do, is just join the local Toastmasters Club, keep it going. You can then pass your knowledge back to other people, but it's a social thing. And as far as work goes, I'd like to do more and more teaching. That's what I'd like to do. Teach more, present more, and make that uh bigger part of my life, really.

SPEAKER_02 17:48

David, is there anything else you'd like to add today?

SPEAKER_01 17:51

I think I'd just say that if you're considering joining Toastmasters, don't leave it ten years like me. Uh when you I look back, I wish I'd taken the plunge ten years ago or ten years before I did join, and that would have enhanced my career. But there's other knock-on benefits that what you find is once you become confident in your public speaking, especially if it's been something that's been a bit of a phobia or it's been in the background for a long time, it seems to increase your enjoyment of life in lots of ways, doesn't it? It gives you social skills, you just feel calmer and more confident in all different areas of life. And it's hard to quite sort of say why, but you just find that you you are a more calm, collected person, I think. So may maybe having that sort of fear in the background that one day someone's gonna ask me to stand up and give a talk, and carrying that fear for a long time, probably does affect you in ways you you don't realise. And you know, so it's a knock-on benefit from improve your public speaking and improve your life, you know.

SPEAKER_02 18:53

Thank you so much for joining us today, David. It's been an absolute pleasure and an honour. And once again, congratulations on an amazing uh lecture yesterday that inspired so many of our colleagues.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

Alright, thanks very much, Brenda. Cheers.

SPEAKER_02 19:11

Thanks for listening to today's show. One of the key elements of Toastmasters is evaluation. 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. Any feedback in the comments is greatly appreciated. If you have a Toastmaster story that you'd like to share, we'd like to be on the show. I'd love to hear from you. You can reach me at Toastmasters World at gmail.com.