Welcome to the limited series return of BETWEEN THE PAGES, running Mondays and Wednesdays now through mid-December 2020! Dubbed BETWEEN THE PAGES: FINDING MY VOICE, follow Shannon’s journey as she learned and grew to become more of a public speaker, and how she’s still learning today! Today is Installment 27, “Learning to Be a Better Online Speaker”.
Toastmasters focused on speaking and presentations, which we’d been doing in person when I first joined. In early March 2020, like the rest of the world, we found ourselves quickly ground to a halt by the pandemic.
However, with fast acting club leadership, and amazing support from higher levels in the Toastmasters leadership, we soon found ourselves online and adapting to using the Zoom platform. Given that more public speaking was already moving to happening remotely, and the pandemic only accelerated that, it ended up providing ways to grow in the craft in ways I never expected.
For example, in an earlier installment, I mentioned that episode 201 of LET’S VOLTRON was done on both audio and video. I took the feedback I’d received at Toastmasters into account when doing that – eye contact with the camera in particular – and I hope that it showed. While there have been some areas such as body language that have been more challenging to observe, for the most part the process hasn’t changed, and I find myself still growing.
What lies ahead? Find out in the final installment!