Privilege of evaluations

This week I had the privilege of giving feedback to a fellow Toastmaster in his CL manual for his performance as Speech Evaluator.

This Toastmaster is putting in the effort and is striding towards becoming an advanced communicator. It was really hard for me to find areas of improvement in his performance.

I wanted to provide good feedback as my contribution to this great speaker. I admire his efforts and progress. I was able to offer only a single contribution for improvement.

It is hard to find areas of improvement for good speakers. And this is exactly the value that we each bring to Toastmasters - putting in the mental effort to think, think, and think of ways that good speakers can improve.

I was very tempted to just say "You can't improve - the speech was perfect". I often hear this in speech evaluations, which is simply not acceptable. You can always find something to suggest a speaker change in a speech performance. The speaker may not have thought of your suggestion, and it may spark off other ideas for the club.

The next time you are given the privilege of doing an evaluation, then make your contribution back to Toastmasters. You receive so much from the Toastmasters program, the one way that you can give back is through thoughtful evaluations. Good speakers especially need you to make the effort and find one thing that can be improved. Don't let yourself and your club down. Take the privilege of your evaluation seriously.