Speaker 1: 0:08

You're listening to the Talkative Toastmaster podcast. I'm your host, melanie Surplus. In this podcast, we explore how Toastmasters can help you to polish your public speaking skills, communicate with confidence and amplify your authenticity. You'll hear from my fellow Toastmasters and I how this global organization has impacted our lives for the better and how it could impact yours. Now let's get talkative. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to episode 28.

Speaker 1: 0:42

This week, I want to share with you my Malaysian Toastmasters Club experience, and originally it was going to start off with just two club visits one to the Malacca Toastmasters Club and one to the Summit Toastmasters Club in Kuala Lumpur. As fate would have it, I ended up at the District 102 conference, the annual conference not dissimilar to the District 69 conference I had been at in Caloundra the very week before, and so I effectively got a massive dose of Toastmasters, and I want to tell you a little bit about both the club visits and the district conference, because that was a complete unexpected bonus. Before I went on my holiday to Malaysia, I checked what clubs were in the area and I reached out to them via Facebook. Most Toastmasters clubs have a Facebook page, or certainly a way of contacting them, and I reached out firstly to the Malacca club and mentioned that I would be traveling from Australia and would they mind having me at their club, and I got a very fast reply from their VP of public relations the person answering the Facebook inquiries and his name was Eric, and Eric was lovely. He was very welcoming and very much happy to help me with details and logistics, and so we agreed that I would come on this particular night. And then I also reached out to the Summit Toastmasters Clubs in KL, asked the same questions and, yeah, basically teed it up in advance. While you don't need to actually plan ahead and ask ahead if you can visit a Toastmasters Club, it is always wise to do that, and particularly some clubs will alternate between meeting in person and meeting in hybrid mode, so I would recommend actually just reaching out, but you will absolutely be welcomed with open arms, as I was. And so I got to Malaysia and I was traveling by myself actually, and I knew roughly what I was going to do when I got to Malaysia, but I didn't have every day absolutely planned to the gills with things to do Along.

Speaker 1: 3:15

I went on the Thursday night to the Malacca Club and this was a great club. It was held in a cooperative working space and again, as I would expect, the club was very welcoming. I got to meet Eric, who I'd been chatting with via Facebook and WhatsApp, in person, and all of the club embraced me. Meeting-wise, the format was very similar there were prepared speeches, there were table topics, and they invited me to participate in table topics, which was nice.

Speaker 1: 3:51

What I really noticed about this club was the number of photos they took of the members and of the different parts of the evening, and this was great because they can load this onto their Facebook page and it really does give you an idea of who the people in the club are and what goes on at their meetings. And this is definitely something that I think some clubs do really well and some clubs could improve on, because if you're a prospective member and you're looking to see if a club's going to be right for you, it's always nice to see lots of current photos. So I thought this club did an excellent job of that and I really enjoyed that meeting and getting to know quite a number of the members there. What I also loved was that so many people in Malaysia use WhatsApp and I'm not a massive user of WhatsApp as a way of keeping in touch and virtual networking. I tend to use Facebook and Telegram and other apps, so I got my WhatsApp out and started to accumulate a lot of contacts, which is awesome.

Speaker 1: 5:01

But one of the things that came up, one of the questions I was asked at the club meeting was oh, did you come here for the conference this weekend? I'm like what conference? And they said, well, it's our District 102 annual conference and, as I mentioned earlier, that was effectively the same as the District 69 conference I'd just been at in Caloundra and for speech competitions, the whole thing. Now, this contest could have been in any city or any area of Malaysia, but it happened to be five minutes from where I was staying and it just happened to be on the weekend, where I actually didn't have any solid plans. And so at 10 o'clock I think it was maybe even 10.30 at night one of the ladies at Malacca, the Malacca Club, was WhatsApping the registration team at the conference and asking if I could still get tickets, and within five minutes we had it all sorted out and I went back to the hotel and booked tickets for just the Saturday and the Sunday.

Speaker 1: 6:16

I decided not to go to the gala dinner because there were parts in, I suddenly found myself with tickets. So when I arrived at the Doubletree Hotel, which was a beautiful hotel in Malacca, I was greeted with the registration desk and the registration team and it was very similar to walking into the reception area at Caloundra. From there I reunited with some of my newfound friends from the Malacca Club and they took me under their wing and pretty much then introduced me to the various people they knew in their areas and divisions and districts, and I was part of that environment. It was so nice to be so welcomed and completely understand everything that was going on. Having not ever been to a district conference until the weekend before and doing it again the following weekend, I had a pretty good sense of what was going to happen, so it was really good timing. There were some fantastic keynote speeches. All of this was in English as well, so it very much made it easy for me to understand what was going on, and there were only a couple of instances throughout the contest or throughout the conference where a speaker would use a little bit of Malaysian and my table mates would explain what was going on. So it was again. They made me feel very much welcomed and part of what was going on.

Speaker 1: 8:04

Then we moved on to the competition. So throughout the two days we had the humorous and international table topics and evaluation contests. The quality was phenomenal, the caliber of speakers and the fact that so many of them weren't doing it in their native first language to me was just a level of difficulty beyond what I'd seen at our own competition in Caloundra. All of the speeches were top-notch, the evaluations were top-notch, I feel the competition and the competitors were all very close and it was just such an interesting experience to see it all replicated in another country. And I guess that's the nature of Toastmasters. It's a formula that is adopted around the world and there can be regional interpretations and even club level interpretations, but at its heart I knew exactly what was going on and it all made complete sense to me. At the same time as the English language contests were going on, there was an entire contingent of contests and keynote speakers and almost a parallel conference running in Mandarin and being held in for the Chinese contingent, and that was a big contingent. There was a lot of people that I didn't really even see until they brought everyone back in to the main room on the Sunday afternoon to announce the contest winners. So to run those two concurrent streams, I suppose, of a conference was interesting to watch as well.

Speaker 1: 9:55

One of the unexpected highlights as well as the camaraderie and the caliber of speakers that I was seeing was the food. It was amazing. I'm a very big fan of Malaysian food and so when we headed down to the hotel's restaurant for lunch and went into the buffet, there was just all this amazing Malaysian food and my friends were telling me about what to eat and what this was and what I should try, and pretty much tried it all. I mean it would be rude not to right, but even that was adding to the experience of just doing all of this the Malaysian way. It was fantastic. And again, I made lots of contacts and I'm hoping in the near future to have at least a couple of Malaysian guests on the podcast just to hear their perspectives and, yeah, and hear their Toastmasters experience, which is probably quite similar to the experiences of Toastmasters here. So stay tuned for those episodes.

Speaker 1: 11:04

What I would do in future if I was traveling and I will definitely visit future Toastmasters clubs, but rather than just checking out what club meetings are on is perhaps looking at their district page to see if there's other district events running on at the time. For me it was pure coincidence, pure luck and absolute serendipity that it just happened to be running five minutes away from where I was staying the weekend. I had nothing much solidly planned, so that was an amazing bit of luck on my part. But next time I would definitely check, not only for club meetings but if there was anything else going on. And I guess if you are traveling and you want to visit Toastmasters clubs overseas anytime in that May timeframe you would be bumping into various district level contests around the world as people and areas gear up for potentially sending their contestants to the international conference in Anaheim or wherever it happens to be in the States each year in August. So May would be a good time if you wanted to experience different district level events. That said, throughout the year there's always area level events, division level events and whatever else. So I would personally check the district events calendar for the district I was going to be traveling through.

Speaker 1: 12:41

Then, throughout that conference as well, I met a couple of the ladies from the Summit Toastmasters Club. I had originally thought that their meeting was in person on the Monday night after the conference. But they mentioned that they were going to change it to purely online because many of them had to travel back from Malacca up to KL the next day. And, yeah, they just decided that we're going to run that meeting online. But they sent me the details and, again, because I didn't have plans on the Monday night, I dialed in and went to my first online Malaysian club meeting, which was, again, not dissimilar in format to the types of online meetings I've been to, and I thought it was a really well-run meeting, even though there were technical difficulties and there can always be technical difficulties when you're doing online meetings. You know that's Murphy's Law I felt the way they handled it and they this, this club had clearly run a lot of online meetings and were very flexible and able to switch things up and if a speaker was having difficulty, they moved on. And, yeah, I just thought that club handled it particularly smoothly.

Speaker 1: 14:04

And so what started out as two targeted club visits turned into an entire immersion in the Malaysian Toastmasters environment and it was fantastic. It was very much unexpected and I'm so glad that it panned out the way it did. I met some of the senior district leadership team in Malaysia and they were asking if I knew district leaders back in Australia, and sure enough I did, and so just being able to make those connections as well, I just felt it was super networking within the Toastmasters environment. And again, I have my WhatsApp list full of Malaysian contacts who I'll absolutely keep in touch with and very much would like to catch up with when I go back to Malaysia. It's not going to be an if I go back to Malaysia. It is going to be a when, because the people in Malaysia are lovely, the food is spectacular and I would highly recommend to anyone who may not have thought of going to Malaysia to firstly check out Malacca.

Speaker 1: 15:18

It was a beautiful little, I'll say little, little, I'll say little. Compared with KL. It was a very laid back town and full of markets and night markets. The Jonker Street markets in Malacca were a highlight as much as the conference. And, yeah, just getting that whole experience of meeting people and eating with them and chatting with them, it just made for quite an incredible holiday in a way that I wasn't expecting. So hopefully I can bring some of those Malaysian friends onto the show in coming weeks I'm certainly trying and just letting you hear about their Toastmasters experience.

Speaker 1: 16:09

So in summary, I would say that Toastmasters are Toastmasters everywhere. Toastmasters love to chat, they're very welcoming, they will bring you in under their wing and make you feel welcome and a part of whatever that's going on, whether it's a club meeting or a district conference or speech contest. I have seen this in various places and my Malaysian friends did not disappoint, I think as well. It's cool understanding that these types of events are running around the world at any given time and if you've been to one, you then know kind of what to expect when you're going to another one in a different country. Of course there are nuances and there's slightly different ways that different clubs or divisions or districts will go about it, but once you understand what goes on in a Toastmasters speech contest, you can more or less expect that format anywhere you go. And finally, I would just really encourage any Toastmasters who have the opportunity to visit another club, whether it's interstate, whether you're travelling for work or travelling overseas for work or holiday find some way of doing a club visit, because it just enhances the holiday or travel experience even more.

Speaker 1: 17:41

If you're ready to unlock your potential, consider joining a Toastmasters club near you. Check out the Find a Club link on the Toastmasters International website at wwwtoastmastersorg. It's worth visiting a couple of different clubs as a guest to see which club best suits you. If you do take the leap and visit a meeting, I would absolutely love to hear your experience. Feel free to message me at talkativetoastmaster at gmailcom or tag me in the comments if you found this podcast on YouTube, facebook, instagram or Twitter. Thanks for listening to today's show. Head to talkativetoastmastercom where you'll find the show notes for this and all other episodes, as well as links to some awesome Toastmasters resources. If you found value in today's content, I'd really appreciate if you could share it with friends and colleagues who may be interested or leave a review on iTunes. This helps more people to find us. Until next time, remember the words of DH Lawrence be still when you have nothing to say, but when genuine passion moves, you say what you've got to say and say it hot. Have a great week.