Yow Kia

Since July 2007, I started to step out from my comfort zone to visit other Toastmasters Club to do project evaluation. It’s a great breakthrough for myself as I always felt that my standard was not good enough to evaluate other’s speech. Someone told me that if you are not good in a particular area, just go to improve it! In evaluation journey, everybody started as an inexperienced evaluator. Actually, to do a good evaluation is not an easy job. It’s not a very tough job either.

The good thing to do prepared speech is you can get an instant evaluation from a Toastmaster during evaluation session. However, to do evaluation, you can’t get a direct feedback on how you’ve performed during the evaluation. Of course, you still can get feedback from the audience after the meeting, but usually I only asked feedback from Toastmasters who I’m closed with. Myself is my own evaluator for my evaluation. I have a habit to audio-record my own evaluation speech during chapter meetings. With the audio files, I can monitor my own progress. I have discovered that I have a strange habit on repetition. I always repeat the same sentence whenever I had nothing to say… haha…

A proven method for improvement is to practise continuously. This is so far the best way to improve yourself in any aspect. Practice, practice and practice. It took me a few months to design my own paradigm towards doing evaluation. The more you do it, the better you are. The more you do it, the more comfortable you feel. The more you do it, the more competent you are. This is the reason why whenever there is Toastmaster approaching me to give project evaluation in his/ her club, I always say YES.

Whenever I do evaluation, I always think of I’m the project speech speaker. If I were the speaker, what would I want to listen from my evaluator? There are two things that I always look for. I need encouragement (this is important to keep my momentum). I need tips for improvement (this is great for excelling myself to a higher level).

I still remember in my first few evaluations, I always went over time. The longest one was around 6 minutes (An evaluation timing is 2-3 minutes)! It’s equaled to a prepared speech timing. I was too long-winded and too much thing to say. After that, I learnt to speak succinctly. Occasionally, I still went over time, but not that bad compared to the SIX-MINUTE.

Now, I think I manage to control the timing pretty well. The next things I would like to improve on are “the time spent in preparation” and “my delivery”. I always spent a lot of time in preparing an evaluation. This had resulted that I couldn’t concentrate on other speaker’s speech. The worst thing was I couldn’t network with fellow Toastmasters during break time. For “my delivery”, I always got stuck half way during my preparation. Sometimes, I couldn’t think of what words to use to best express myself to the speaker. Sometimes, I felt that my words were not very encouraging…

To improve on these two areas, I think I will still stick to the best method: PRACTICE. Since I started my website http://iamkia.com followed by my club website http://thefrontiertmc.org , I always encourage people to leave comments on my and my club member’s presentation. However, the response was not very good. I am thinking of doing Online Evaluation on my club member’s speech as well as other Toastmaster’s. Perhaps I will do it weekly. Whatever I want others to do to me; I have to first do to others. I think that makes perfect sense.

Hopefully, after my improvement, other Toastmasters will be influenced to do ONLINE EVALUATION!