The Beating Heart Is In The Club

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Biggest challenge is uh trying to convince the clubs of Toastmasters that they have the biggest agency in us getting back to growth. The the beating heart of Toastmasters is in the club. They stay because they're greeted warmly, they have a good time, they enjoy the people, the camaraderie, and they build up their confidence. All the magic, all the warmth. The reason why you stay at your club is your club. They can get anywhere they want. They can say, wow, actually, Toastmasters is pretty good. We control a lot of our own destiny. Yes, you do.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

Hi, my name's Brendan O'Sullivan, a Toastmaster from Brisbane, Australia. Welcome to my Toastmasters

Welcome - Toastmasters World Tour

SPEAKER_00 0:45

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. Great balls of fire! This episode we rip through the sky, strapped into the F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, and buzz Boston, Massachusetts. Famous for the old South Weymouth Naval Air Station, near our guests' home base, Harvard University, and the Boston Marathon, the oldest annual marathon in the world. I chat with our shiny brand new international president, Stefano McGee. With vast experience

Great Balls of Fire! Buzzing Boston & Weymouth

SPEAKER_00 1:30

as a tech executive leading AI adoption and digital transformation, I sought his vision for incorporating tech and AI into the Toastmasters experience.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

I'm happy to be here, Brendan. It's another avenue to talk with our members, and that's what I'm really big on this year is trying to communicate as best I can with the members. So I'm thankful to have the opportunity to speak with you and the folks that uh will listen to your podcast.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

Very kind and generous of you. But I must admit, I'm also a little nervous. Why? Well, I've heard that you were in the United States Air Force, and I remember in 1986 watching Top Gun, in fact, several times. Such a great movie. And I remember the scene where Charlie was asking Maverick about being inverted over a MiG and

Meet International President Stefano McGhee, DTM

SPEAKER_00 2:30

where did he see this? And Maverick replied, That's classified. Charlie said, It's what? He goes, Maverick says, It's classified. I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.

unknown 2:41

Right.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

So I just want to emphasize if there's anything that's classified, Toastmasters classified, or questions you don't want to answer, that's fine. Just please don't kill me. You can count on that. It's all good, Brandon. It's all good. I believe you have a pilot's license, so you know, kindred spirit. But have you ever flown a fighter jet or been in a fighter jet?

SPEAKER_01 3:07

I'd say the answer is sort of. A long time ago, when I visited and spent some time at the United States Air Force Academy, one of the benefits that they had when we were freshmen is they took us up in a training aircraft. So it was a jet-powered training aircraft that we got to fly around in. I didn't get we didn't get to fly it. We got to fly with actual pilots. And it was uh quite a

Top Gun, Classified & The Air Force Academy

SPEAKER_01 3:30

quite a journey. It quite it was a bit of fun, but that's probably the fastest. The closest I've been to flying a fast a very fast plane was in that training, and that was some time ago.

SPEAKER_00 3:41

My background is a skin cancer doctor, and I've often thought I'd love to do that sort of thing, go and do some work for the Air Force, and then try and convince them that to really understand, you know, sun exposure in the you know, for fighter pilots, I really need to go up in the plane to to really get a feel for what I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

Sounds very reasonable. Sounds very reasonable. I I don't know why you haven't tried that angle yet.

SPEAKER_00 4:05

I think you've got I think you've got something there, Brandon. I think in 2014, you got your master's degree in military operational art and science and joint warfare. So I was wondering, have you ever studied the ancient Chinese text from the fifth century, The Art of War by Sun Tzu?

SPEAKER_01 4:23

Yeah, that was actually uh we had we had to do uh during the master's degree, they wanted us to do uh book reports, right? And we had to find books on on wars and military science, whatever. And I found The Art of War by Sun Tzu, and I picked it because it was the shortest book. However, uh it was a great read, and there's a lot of good things in there from very old for for being very old texts that I I think that modern military officers would be foolish not to read because there's a lot of stuff in there that you say, that's still valid. I know. It's an incredible book. Don't stop your enemy when he's making a mistake.

SPEAKER_00 5:09

That's a great quote. I was wondering now that you're international president and you're gonna have a board of other international directors. Yes. Do you have a favorite technique from the art of war in your pocket ready to crack out if they're playing up in a meeting?

SPEAKER_01 5:24

You know, I actually haven't thought of that. It's probably some good stuff. I should go back and read it because again, it was a short

Sun Tzu & The Art of War in the Boardroom

SPEAKER_01 5:30

book. I probably should go back and read it. I never thought of, you know, using the the art of war in a boardroom. It seems like maybe it's not the right place, but I uh you you make an interesting point, Brendan. I should probably check it out just to make sure, because preparation is part of uh pro warfare, being prepared. That's right. What is it? Uh no plan survives contact with the enemy. So that there's a lot of things that could probably work well there. I didn't think of that. Good good call, Brendan. We're gonna add that to my list of things to do. Revisit the art of war for the board.

SPEAKER_00 6:05

Stefano also very excited because it's not every year that we have someone with your technical background coming into the role of international president. And there's been a bit of talk around this. Given your experience leading technology teams and working with complex digital systems, I did want to take the opportunity to ask you a few questions around technology and AI. So with your strong technology background, but also coming up through the ranks in Toastmasters, what have you seen as the biggest opportunities for technology to improve the Toastmasters experience?

SPEAKER_01 6:40

I think the biggest thing is to take away the things that are less are more toil related. For example, the things that I've often wondered if we could do, and now artificial intelligence uh and things like Claude Cowork could probably do them well, is to look and say, which members haven't given a speech in a while, and then reach out to those members with a message and say, Hey, you haven't given a speech in a while. Would you like to put us you good to put you on the next opening on the agenda for a speech?

AI & Tech - Removing The Slog

SPEAKER_01 7:15

Or uh figure out how to get people, if somebody wants a speech slot, that they could go someplace that would find them a place to go there. It would pick an evaluator that they haven't had before and pull them in. Do a lot of the less glamorous parts of Toastmasters and leave the speaking and leadership. Take away the administrative part and leave the speaking and the leadership to the members so they can do the very best part and leave the administrative stuff behind. Uh, I think another one is to we had uh a subscription to Udly for a while and the opportunity that you had to instead of saying, Hey Brendan, I love getting your feedback on my speeches, but our time zones don't always line up, so it's tough to get time with you. But with Udley, they're available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And it can do, it can't give me the rich kind of evaluation that you can, Brendan, but it can give me a you use this many ums, this many ahs, you use this, had this many awkward pauses. So it gets rid of, again, the basic, the basic pieces of your speech can get refined at a time that's good for you, leaving the content evaluation to yourself, to another human being so that they can focus on. Here's how I think your messaging could get better. Here are some of the words I would suggest that you to get a bigger punch. That I think is a good balance for Toastmasters is using the technology to take care of the administrative and the basics of Toastmasters, leaving humans to do the speech generation and the leadership stuff, the real leadership stuff, not the administrative stuff. Those are a couple examples.

SPEAKER_00 8:53

Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Complementary, not one's better than the other, but it's just I'm taking out the slog. It actually leads to my next question because I think what you were just sort of saying that as examples were pretty much at the club level, but I've also spoken to district leaders, and they tell me that a surprisingly large amount of their time has been consumed by very manual administrative type tasks, things that could probably be automated in a modern business. Did you experience that yourself in district roles? And what do you think Toastmasters could do to give volunteer leaders more time to actually lead, develop clubs, and support members?

SPEAKER_01 9:30

Yeah, I often wonder, I of course I haven't had to do this for a while, but I know that the tooling has changed. For example, one of the tedious things that a program quality director does is they have club officer trainings and have to keep track of who's shown up, what role they're in, and then put it into a specific format so that can be uploaded to Toastmasters. And I always wondered, I wonder how difficult it would be to use something like uh a coding application and write something, even if it's a web-based application that would let you easily check people in, take that data, and then format it in a fork in a format, a format that actually can get uploaded and just do that work for you. Again, it's getting roots of the slog, like you said, the toil of the everyday and letting them focus on I just need to get people trained and make sure they get credit. So the training part is the useful part that we'd like to do. The toil, not so much. So are there ways to simplify that? Are there ways to look at club or

Giving District Leaders Time To Actually Lead

SPEAKER_01 10:30

look at district data and say, well, here are analyze the data that we get every day, every month or so, and say what parts of the district are doing well, what ones are not, what are we lacking, to do regular analysis and perhaps even suggest some solutions. Again, the could another human being do this? Sure. But it'll do it when you have time. And if it happens to be in the middle of the night when you have time, then you can do those analyses then and not have to wait for somebody to get up and do them for you. So that's what I look at is how do you remove the toil, the slog, and let them focus on enacting change and inspiring people in actual leadership. And a lot of that I think is just using AI to look through the data, to process reports and get them off to where they need to get to. Again, I never look at it as replacing the stuff that we want to do. I look at it as replacing the stuff I don't want to do.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

Some of the feedback I've had is that Toastmasters to date has seemed a little resistant to embracing technology. And in asking deeper about why that might be the case, some of the suggested reasons have been that, you know, we're a volunteer organization with limited resources, and at the moment there's been a bit of a membership decline. And it's not that there's a resistance, but it's just having the resources to implement that. So it leads me to wonder, you know, we do have a lot of people who are members of Toastmasters that are software engineers, data analysts, that have a lot of this technology and that have this skill set that could perhaps be uh harnessed for in a voluntary capacity on an approved basis. Is that something that you could entertain?

SPEAKER_01 12:15

So yes, but I don't think it would be any faster. We actually had. So I used to say the same thing when I was uh trying to, when I was endeavoring to be an international director, possibly even a second vice president. I said, you know, we have still uh a little less than a quarter million members around the world. There are software engineers out there that would love to help out and do things. But we've had some projects just over the last, I'd say, six months to a year or so, where we pushed hard and said, let's bring in some external folks to do some of the work to help out. And sure, there are people out there that are like single. One person will move fast, but when you try to pull in people from around the world, things move god awful slow. And to the point where we're like, this should take people like six months to look and do this thing, and it took like several years. And I said, Well, geez, this is not much faster than if we had world headquarters do it and we had members do it. So I think that on one hand, if it's a simple task, like if you said, hey, you're a software engineer, can you write something to do this? And you had the time to do it and the desire to do it, you could probably get it done pretty fast. But what I found is that many times people are like, well, you know, I'm busy. I've got a full-time job, I've got, you know, kids and family, and and when you say, well, I need

Volunteer Developers, Dashboards & The API Dream

SPEAKER_01 13:45

this quickly, well, you know, I'm just a volunteer. And I was surprised. So I think that there, I think that there is a role for that. We actually have are trying to bring in some regular members to actually look at some items for the board uh this time around, which is good. And we're trying to keep it on a nice tight timescale. But what surprised me very much is that sometimes our members are busy people too. And if you put together a group of, say, five people, because you don't want just one person working on this, Brendan, you want to get representation from different parts of the world so they can look at it different ways uh to make sure they get, you know, uh a good product. That means you have to schedule around different schedules with different children and different lives and what we're just like, wow, this just grinds things to a halt uh when we ask, you know. So I get like that's the balance, right? Is if it's one person, yeah. And I think that's the balance. But if you try to pull together even a small team of five, uh the scheduling and the coordination just become keller. It's not great because I would love to move things along faster. But that's what that's my experience with it when we've tried to do it in the past, or when I've tried to do it in the past.

SPEAKER_00 14:57

Sure, I hear what you're saying. And what you were saying then about a larger group of people slowing things down makes sense, which kind of leads into what I was going to ask. And I think you've at least partially answered it. But we've seen small Skunkworks projects, you know, small groups emerge from Toastmasters members and districts for decades, dashboards, websites, tools, and now apps that try to improve the member and leader experience. But one barrier I'm hearing is that there isn't any official way for those developers to access Toastmasters data, such as an API. Have you considered whether Toastmasters could provide controlled access to its data and platforms so that volunteers could build on top of them?

SPEAKER_01 15:37

It's a matter of that API would be have to be created, secured, probably licensed. Uh, I guess that was that's more of an operational issue that I would probably send you over to talk to the folks at World Headquarters for. But when I think about creating something like that, I said, yeah, number one is okay, now I have to create an API that is safe to get people to connect to the database. The data needs to be sanitized, because you know, there's privacy information in there. Then you have to make sure that it is secure so that there's rate limiting on it, so that somebody, because I I've I've looked at some folks that have written applications and they'll go hit the Toastmasters website multiple times in a minute. I'm like, you know, that's gonna slow down the site for everybody if you do that. Like, well, this is the only way to get the data. I'm like, oh, but do you need it every minute? Uh but again, that is that is the concern. And is this something that we could overcome? Yes. Uh with the right amount of funds. I mean, I've said that before, too, is it would be wonderful if there was a database API that we could secure, rate limit so that here you go, guys. If you come, you sign a non-disclosure agreement, we'll give you a token so that you can securely access it, hit the data, pull it out, and do your own thing. That way, maybe Toastmasters could stop doing dashboards altogether and let the population develop their own. I mean, there are already members I met at our international convention who shared their dashboards with me. And I'm like, this is beautiful. This is great. Because they're really close to the problem. They know what kind of data is useful to district leaders. And they're developing great stuff with no API access at all. And wow, wouldn't it be great if we could actually give them like straight up, you know, I say API access because there's no way you're giving members access to a database. It's just not safe. So an API where they could get the data, I I agree with

Responsible AI - Your Thought Partner, Not Your Ghostwriter

SPEAKER_01 17:30

you. I would love that. It's a matter of getting that funded and making sure and then getting it into the hands of the people that could use it. Because then, who knows, maybe we don't even need to have dashboards anymore. I mean, because they would be done by people around the world, purpose-built.

SPEAKER_00 17:44

So I'm with you on that. Sure. So let me ask you in a more general sense, what is your vision for AI and tech in your term for Toastmasters?

SPEAKER_01 17:53

Well, I'm hoping, I believe sometime in the near future, we're going to have some revisions come out around usefulness of AI and Toastmasters. Last year, I think the beginning of the, no, maybe the beginning of this calendar year, there was an article that came out that I was interviewed for around appropriate use of AI. I think it's a Toastmasters magazine, and somewhere else as well, uh, with an article that was written, I think, from Microsoft about the use of AI, how to use it appropriately. A member and myself were interviewed about how we use it. And that's what I'd love to see our members do is to use AI responsibly. And, you know, responsibly is so vague these days. But I look at it as, you know, you shouldn't have it write your speeches for you, but you should use it the way you and I would talk, Brendan, and say, Brennan, you know, I'm I have to write this speech that I want to do for this district. And these are the things I want to bring out. I want to bring out the fact that they've been distinguished for the first time in 10 years. I want to bring out this as somebody that's done great work for them on the international stage, and this and this and that. I like it in this order. I tend to write in this oratorical style. Look at this thing, like my inauguration speech that I wrote. This is the style that I like to use. I used to use these mnemonic devices or rhetorical devices all the time. This is how I like to do things, and then say, here, give me an hour, what do you think is a good outline for this? You'd be like, well, here's what I would do. I'd put stuff together like this. I like your idea here. Let's slide that around. We'd go back and forth for a few hours and we'd have a decent speech. Go ahead and do that with AI. But don't say, oh, you know what, I need a speech today for this, and then just go out and read it. And it's it's subtle. I agree. But I'd say the thing that you would do with a fellow Toastmaster is, hey, I wrote this speech out. Can you tell me how I can make it better? Sure. Use AI for it. Or I want to add some humor to this. Do you have any interesting jokes that you think would fit in there? I would ask you that. You're like, oh, you know what would be good. Is if this is one of my favorite jokes. All right, how do we get that in there? Great. Can you deliver it well? Yeah, I think so. Like, I think that that's a great use because it gets people, I think gives them more confidence to deliver the content that they want. Uh, because they'll say, Oh, yeah, I got some good ideas here. Uh, that's one of the biggest complaints that I hear these days is members saying, I don't know what to write anymore. Do you need an ideation partner? AI is good for that. Uh, I want to write a speech about this. Help me. Can you ask me, can you interview me about you know my life over the past couple couple years to see what's a good topic that I can write? Like you and I could do that. So why not use AI when you have the time, when it has the time versus us getting together. I mean, time with Brendan's way better than with Claude, let's be honest. But Brendan is always no, Brendan needs to sleep and do his own life stuff. So I'll get them when I can, and when I can't, I have AI.

SPEAKER_00 21:01

When it comes to competitions, we have all sorts of rules, and one of them obviously is if you quote someone, you must make sure that you mention the person the quote is from, that sort of thing. With AI being integrated into helping people write their speeches, is there going to be a tool where

AI Detection, Authenticity & The Honor System

SPEAKER_00 21:15

we, you know, like universities might use to make sure it's not 100% AI? Because we do want authentic speeches as well, don't we?

SPEAKER_01 21:22

Yeah. That's an interesting idea. I wonder if we're well. I imagine we'll get it there at some point, but I wonder that's a good point. Is uh do will we have to start recording speeches to check for authenticity? But even that isn't fail-safe. Uh there are examples of people that have had their stuff flagged as being AI generated. They're like, no, I wrote, I wrote this stuff. Now will we ever know? Who knows? But I believe I believe that it is not foolproof to detect if there is if this is AI or not. It's not as simple as, oh, there's a bunch of M-dashes here. It must be AI. Or there's really words that are used here that doesn't that didn't really need to be used. No, that that's not. Yeah. So yeah, it's an interesting. I didn't think of that. But I imagine if we continue where we're going, that wouldn't be it wouldn't be surprising that that's on the horizon, which is unfortunate. Yeah, well, that's one of our core values, right? It's integrity. So it may be that we go that way. If you look at our program, much of it, much of the education program and the leadership program is on an honor-based system, right? So yeah, that's another good point, is perhaps it just has to be on your honor, right?

SPEAKER_00 22:42

Sure. When COVID hit, a lot of clubs survived by going online. And in fact, I believe the international contest at the international convention also had an online component. And we've now reverted back to being face-to-face only. And I mean, obviously, I understand the value of being face-to-face and having a live audience and all that. But it has been put to me that of course some people can't travel or are disabled too unwell, and it sort of rules those people out that may be fantastic speakers as well. Is that just a definite no-no that we're never going to see like a hybrid type international contest on the world stage?

SPEAKER_01 23:23

So the the board tried to bridge that gap with the online speech contest so

Online Speech Contests & The Future of Hybrid

SPEAKER_01 23:30

that there is a mechanism for that. But I think that the and they reintroduced that, geez, probably two or three years ago. And that was intended to be a mechanism where people in a district can do an entire speech contest all the way up to the district with um online. Online, and that will help those folks that can't travel for one reason or another. But going beyond that to the international stage, I don't think so. Uh that could change in the future. The board goes one way, then the board goes a different way as circumstances change. But the big desire that we're hearing from a lot of members was that we are our what does it call it there, unique selling proposition if you're a salesperson, or is the in-person experience. Because if you go out on the market, you can attend lots of speaking courses online, you can do a lot of stuff online, but I'm not aware of anybody else that's doing what we do in person. And while AI can do many things out there, standing in front of somebody in the flesh is something that you have to learn how to do. AI is not going to be able to do that anytime soon. There's still there's still something unique that will always be unique and visceral about a human being standing in your midst, telling you a story, trying to inspire you that this online thing is good, but it's not the same. And so that's, I think that's where the organization is right now. Could it change? Sure. Sure. Uh there's always the the there are things we're doing today that we never thought we'd be doing in the past. Uh our organization attempts to evolve just like the rest of the world.

SPEAKER_00 25:29

Sure. Could there be just a separate online competition that was its own thing and that went all the way to an international level?

SPEAKER_01 25:36

It's yeah, it's in I think it is something we talked about. It's not there yet, but it's something that we we thought about. It's it's a matter of then if we do that, what is the additional cost and overhead of doing that?

unknown 25:52

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 25:53

Because right now, I mean, that would be it would double the cost of running those contests. Uh now there'd be no travel, which is good. Uh, but there would be other issues, there'd be other things that we'd have to set up to make that work. Not I don't know that we how much it would be. I'd have to sit down and do that thought experiment, but there would be more that we'd have to schedule, get set up. I think some folks even suggested we do it uh six months opposed, like instead of doing it in the summer, well, summer, as you're in the southern hemisphere, instead of doing it in August, we would do it in February or something like that, so that it was offset by six months to keep it balanced, so to speak, so one isn't necessarily competing with the other. But like I said, there's nothing on the horizon at the moment, but that could change. Uh, and I'm the fact that we now have two contests, one that is entirely online up to the district, that never existed before. A few years may go by and we may change it again.

unknown 26:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 26:54

It's not unbelievable.

SPEAKER_00 26:56

Sure. I hadn't heard of that actually. So maybe other people, listeners hadn't heard

Biggest Challenge: Getting Back To Growth

SPEAKER_00 27:00

of that either. So that's fabulous.

SPEAKER_01 27:01

It's called the online speech contest. Districts can choose to do it or not, just like Tall Tales, you may have heard of, and the evaluation speech contest and the table topics contest. Years ago, we got rid of the videotape contest. Now there's an online speech contest, which is essentially the international speech contest, but entirely online. Online judges, online uh venue, all of that stuff. So if you haven't, if your district hasn't done it, you might not have seen it, but there are some geographically dispersed districts out there that do it every year. Okay. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 27:36

Stefano, what do you see as your biggest challenge ahead for yourself and for the organization over the next year?

SPEAKER_01 27:45

The biggest challenge is uh trying to convince the clubs of Toastmasters that they have the biggest agency in us getting back to growth. Uh that's what I was talking about most of the mostly in the inauguration speech that I gave a few weeks ago, which is the the beating heart of Toastmasters is in the club. Members, new members don't come to join world headquarters or the board of directors or regions or districts. They join the clubs that are scattered around the world, and they come expecting to, well, they don't know if they know what to expect, but they stay because they're greeted warmly, they have a good time, they enjoy the people, the camaraderie, and they build up their confidence. That's why people stay. That's why we have the quarter million members that we do. When we don't do that job well, we lose members. And I think the pandemic got us used to looking up, so to speak, to say, when are the districts going to do this for us? When is world headquarters going to do this? When is the board of directors going to do that? But all the magic, all the warmth, the reason why you stay at your club is your club. And I think that's the biggest challenge for me is helping clubs realize that when they change their mindset, that their success is unleashed. They can get to medley distinguished, they can get anywhere they want. And they can say, wow, actually, Toastmasters is pretty good. We control a lot of our own destiny. Yes, you do. I think that is the biggest challenge for me, is helping folks understand that. And uh, the other one is really, and that's related to the

Legacy: Being A Communicative President

SPEAKER_01 29:30

other part, which is a return to growth for the organization. Once we turn the corner to growth, that pushes all kinds of things into the realm of possibility, like uh an API access for databases, uh, so that we don't have to do that anymore. All sorts of other things that are cost related start becoming within the realm of possibility because now we have a lot more revenue than we do expenses. So that's I think that's why it's so important to me to say, and it's not, well, I just want to buy more stuff. This organization was built over a hundred years not on marketing, not not on, not on pathways, not on the counter communicator manual. It's for that warm experience that you get when you walk into your club. That's what it's all about. So I'd be that's what I think that's why I'm trying to help districts and clubs understand that the way that an organization turns around is within their grasp. It's not something out there, it's in your club.

SPEAKER_00 30:32

It's very empowering. I love that. Stefano, in 11 months, you'll be the immediate past international director. If you can cast your mind forward and think about your future self, when you then look back over your term, what would you like your legacy to have been?

SPEAKER_01 30:52

It's hard to say. Uh I I'd say to be uh a communicative uh president. I am trying to hold down a job, to have a family, to have hobbies on the side. But one of the most important things for me is to be able to communicate with all the members of Toastmasters. And your listeners are just a subset of that. So it's an opportunity to talk to members that I would not ordinarily get to talk to. So to be communicative, to be able to listen, to be able to speak as plainly as possible and say, well, I don't know about that one. Or

The Man In The Arena

SPEAKER_01 31:30

that's a good question. I haven't thought about that. That's that's pretty good. And then to evolve and say, Yeah, we can do that better, or this is why things are the way they are. I think that most people, not all, but most people, that's all they're really looking for, is somebody that they can talk to that's approachable, that'll be plain speaking with them and say, okay, I see where he's coming from. I don't have to agree with him, but I see where he's coming from. I understand that. And that's a gift to most of our members, is just to be able to talk to somebody about it. So that's why this is a part of that. I I was happy you gave me the opportunity to to speak with you and the member and your listeners.

SPEAKER_00 32:09

I was going to say, well, you're already achieving that, and I certainly appreciate it. It's very kind and generous of you. Anything else you'd like to add today?

SPEAKER_01 32:20

Sure. I I would add that the organization is very much needs, you know, members and leaders that care about it to stand up and and do things. Uh I am happy to have met you and see that you're trying to say, well, let me see if we can talk to some interesting people and ask some interesting questions and maybe learn a little bit about more about our organization runs and do it in such a way that you're genuinely curious. That's that's huge. Uh, there are a lot of folks out there that just want to cast stones and say, oh, everything's bad. It's actually getting a

Thank You & Wrap

SPEAKER_01 33:00

lot better, and it's getting better because members care about their clubs and they care about the organization enough to do things that make it better. Uh I started in Toastmasters 21 years ago. 21 years ago. Wow. 21 years ago, and my first role at the club was president, and I took it. I didn't even know what the heck it was, but I took the role because I said I want to learn more about the organization and see what I can do to make it a little bit better. That's the only goal. It wasn't to change the world. It was just to say, can we make our club a little bit better or at least learn about why things are the way they are, and then if you can fix them, great. And if you can't say, this is how it is, we can't fix it because, but at least now we know why. And again, I think I'll delts in the room, they'll say, oh, at least now we know why that's the way that it is. And that's that's the thing that I look forward to the most. And that's what I I wish for all of our members is to be curious and and to look and say, Oh, that's why that's just the way it is. Maybe we can do something about that. That that's how you make your organization better. That's how I got to where I got to. Maybe we can do something about that.

SPEAKER_00 34:07

I love that spirit of curiosity and also just giving things a shot.

SPEAKER_01 34:11

So you might be able to fix it, but you could try. And if it doesn't work, you say, I made an effort. I I don't know if you're familiar with the the man in the arena quote. It's one of my favorite quotes. Uh that to paraphrase it, it's like a whole paragraph. But basically it says that you are better off being the man in the arena that is fighting and trying to be successful and fails than one of the people sitting on the side looking at him going, Yeah, I would never do that. Uh, because they are the ones actually doing the thing, and they'll always have more weight, more credibility because they tried instead of just saying, Yeah. And so I I try my best to be the man in the arena. Do I succeed all the time? No. Uh, but I sure try, and I feel like that gives me some credibility.

SPEAKER_00 35:00

I love that, although I'm not so sure if it was the Coliseum days and I was a gladiator and they released the lions, you know. That's a fair point. Maybe not in that arena. What has Stefano got me into here?

SPEAKER_01 35:12

I don't want you to get into that, no.

SPEAKER_00 35:16

Thank you so much, Stefano, for joining me today. It's been such a pleasure and such an honour. It's been so kind and generous of you. It's been a pleasure to be here with you, Brendan. 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 Toastmaster story you'd like to share or like to be on the show, I'd love to hear from you. You can reach me at Toastmastersworld tour at gmail.com. Thanks for listening.