The Toughest Job

It's the toughest job at any Toastmasters meeting. You need to pay attention, organize your thoughts, then smoothly cover your assignment. If done well, the meeting will benefit. Anything less and all you can hope for is good advice on how to do it better.

But what job is so vital?

Every job is important

Every job can be make or break

Every job is worth your best effort.

Let's take a look at a couple jobs in the meeting and what it means to do them well. Then let's try to generalize things a bit.

You have the toughest job at any Toastmasters meeting – grammarian. It's more than providing and listening for the word 0of the day. If you do your best, you listen for grammar so carefully you have no idea what the speech was about. If you do your best, you notice both good and bad word usage. If you do your best, you are proof-listening the speech, you are Conan the Grammarian.

You have the toughest job at any Toastmasters meeting – general evaluator. You take evaluation notes on all the speeches so you know what evaluators should comment on. You listen to evaluations to see if the points were covered and evaluate the evaluations. You do this while leading the meeting and you get no time to collect your notes. 

You have the toughest job at any Toastmasters meeting. Regardless of the specific job, you need to do it, whatever it is, as well as you can.

Imagine what doing the best would be like.

What would you listen for"

How would you take notes?

Of all the things you could say, what would you choose to say?

Imagine what doing your best would be like.

Then do that.

Every job can be make or break

Every job is worth your best effort.

And then there's the big payoff,

The job outside this room

The tasks you joined Toastmasters to do better.

And then there's the rest of your life.

This part we offer as a logical induction without evidence, without proof. 

Every job is worth your best effort.