I’m still on the fence about Toastmasters, I’ve heard mixed things.
There’s a chapter at my work holding an open house this week, I may go and give them a second chance.
I have some books in mind, but I don’t think this is the type of thing where any major gains will come from reading. Many of the authors I like (Cialdini, Carnegie) have already come up in this thread.
Groups differ alot! If you live in a big US city, you have many to choose from. If you decide it is not useful, I would like to understand why. It is—as was noted earlier—extensive practice.
It’s practice, but it’s non-field practice of a subset of the skills I’m interested in. It might have potential as one among several methods, but I don’t think it’s sufficient for what I’m after.
Inter-group variability in quality is a good point, I should be more careful to qualify my experience as particular to a single group and not Toastmasters in general.
As a side note it might be interesting to note when a group has important study points that you have already ingrained. TM is a point where some people learn to hold and structure meetings, which might or might not be something one already can do.
For the training of abilities I do not think that field experience is the only thing that counts. I would suggest to develop an accurate model of how to learn behavioral changes effectively, because so far there are way to many contradicting ideas.
I’m still on the fence about Toastmasters, I’ve heard mixed things.
There’s a chapter at my work holding an open house this week, I may go and give them a second chance.
I have some books in mind, but I don’t think this is the type of thing where any major gains will come from reading. Many of the authors I like (Cialdini, Carnegie) have already come up in this thread.
Groups differ alot! If you live in a big US city, you have many to choose from. If you decide it is not useful, I would like to understand why. It is—as was noted earlier—extensive practice.
It’s practice, but it’s non-field practice of a subset of the skills I’m interested in. It might have potential as one among several methods, but I don’t think it’s sufficient for what I’m after.
Inter-group variability in quality is a good point, I should be more careful to qualify my experience as particular to a single group and not Toastmasters in general.
As a side note it might be interesting to note when a group has important study points that you have already ingrained. TM is a point where some people learn to hold and structure meetings, which might or might not be something one already can do.
For the training of abilities I do not think that field experience is the only thing that counts. I would suggest to develop an accurate model of how to learn behavioral changes effectively, because so far there are way to many contradicting ideas.