By John C. Spaith, ATMB

After serving as president of a Toastmasters club during the 2004-2005 term, I thought it would be good to list all the Fool Things I had done and share them with the readers of this magazine. I got the idea for keeping a Fool Things list from Dale Carnegie’s How To Stop Worrying and Start Living. (Airing my dirty laundry in public was all me, though.) I asked one of the members of my club what he thought about my idea.

“John,” he said. “The magazine will only give you 2,000 words for your article. That’s nowhere near enough to cover all the foolish things you did last year.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I can ask the editor for a little extra space.”

“John, the entire magazine is only 30 pages long. That’s nowhere near enough to cover all the foolish things you did last year.”

This fellow is not the most supportive evaluator, though he had a good point. The only way I can make this fit is by focusing on the time between 7:35 and 7:50 on Saturday mornings – ten minutes before and five minutes into my club’s meeting. My problems can be summed up in four words – messing up my priorities. With apologies to those who have suffered me the other 167 hours and 45 minutes of the week, I begin:

Know Your Priorities
Picture it: Redmond, Washington 2004, an early Saturday morning in July. It is 10 minutes before our meeting starts. Those members who are early are out of the room on errands, leaving me alone. I am busy untangling all the ribbons on the club banner. A guest walks in just then. After a few moments he manages to speak.

“Hi, uhm, my name is Maximilian. Is this Toastmasters?”

“Yup.”

I don’t turn my back. Preparing the banner is serious business, after all. The club worked hard to get all those ribbons and we want to make sure they’re laid out neatly. What would everyone think if our “Distinguished Club 1983” ribbon wasn’t clearly separated from “Home of Area Governor 1992?” (Look for my article in next month’s Toastmaster about the new Competent Banner Hanging manual.) I’ll get to Maximilian in a minute or two. He’s not going anywhere. I want to solve this problem right now.

Fool Thing Number One is thinking that fixing our banner was more important than welcoming our guest. It’s people skills like this that landed me in engineering. The fundamental problem here isn’t my profession, though. It’s that I didn’t know our club’s priorities. For the club to receive Distinguished status, we needed eight new members. Members are much more likely to come back if they feel welcome. Unless Maximilian is similarly obsessed with our ribbons being neat, he’s probably not going to think too highly of me or the club. More important than the Distinguished Club Program (DCP) is the fact that Maximilian is a human being. Even if he enters the witness protection program next week and never steps foot in our club again, we should still make his experience as pleasant as possible. Remember how nervous you were at your first Toastmasters meeting?

You have to know what matters in life. We’re lucky in Toastmasters that we have a list of priorities already given to us – the Distinguished Club Program. Outside of Toastmasters we’re on our own. Figuring out our priorities has to be more than a New Year’s resolution that is forgotten by February. Sitting down, thinking deeply and writing down the things that really matter to us will help make sure we don’t ignore our duties the same way I ignored Maximilian. Though as we’ll see, knowing priorities is just the first step.

Look Around
Picture it: Redmond, Washington 2004, an early Saturday morning in December. It is 10 minutes before the meeting and once again I’m alone in the club, still struggling with the banner. A guest walks in.

“Hello. My name is Rutherford. Is this Toastmasters?”

I’ve learned something in the last few months. I have decided that Rutherford is my priority, not the banner.

“Ruf-ord,” I say. “It’s great you could come. We always love to have new people come and visit. Make yourself at home and...”

This sounds good so far. It just doesn’t look so good. You see, I haven’t made eye contact. I mispronounced his name. And I haven’t even bothered turning toward our guest! The problem is that there is big spec of dust on the club’s “Home of the Trainee Assistant Area Governor 1979” ribbon. It’s not coming off with just my fingernail so I’m going to have to spit on it. I’m so engrossed in this that I soon forget what I really should be doing.

Fool Thing Number Two is knowing that Rutherford is more important than an inanimate object isn’t good enough. I need to live it! Having a good game plan isn’t good enough. You have to execute it. I would argue that this is worse treatment than I gave poor Maximilian. Now I’m lying to poor Rutherford, telling him he matters when he clearly doesn’t.

Actually keeping your priorities straight in real life (not just when you put them on paper) is almost as hard as figuring out the priorities in the first place. Yet it is essential. A recruiter at my employer said that the key factor for successful employees is that they execute their highest-priority tasks first, and then their next one next, and so on. The recruiter did not say they know their priorities – he used the word execute. He could have said that effective Toastmasters don’t let their lives revolve around the dust on the “Home of the Trainee Assistant Area Governor 1979” ribbon.

Think Back
Picture it: Redmond, Washington 2005, an early Saturday morning in June. I have finally learned about living out my priorities. The guest this morning could never imagine that the banner and I were once blood enemies. The meeting is about to begin and I’m all set to give our Toastmaster an awesome introduction.

When a good club president introduces the day’s Toastmaster, he or she doesn’t give the “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” introduction á la “Grover is our Toastmaster today. Thanks, I’ll sit down now.” And she doesn’t humiliate herself with the over-the-top, “If Dr. Smedley knew that a man of such towering genius as Grover would be in Toastmasters one day, he would have named us Grovemasters.” No. The good president gives an upbeat introduction that captures something special about the day’s Toastmaster without making the listeners’ stomachs churn.

I hit the gavel and the meeting comes to order. I take a deep breath...and realize I don’t know who the Toastmaster for the day is going to be. Oops! The next two minutes are hectic. I manage to figure out who the Toastmaster is by sneaking a peek at the program right after the Pledge of Allegiance and try to come up with a memorable, personalized introduction during that exercise. Only I can’t pledge and exercise and think at the same time.

So I say, “Grover is our Toastmaster today. Thanks, I’ll sit down now.”

I grumble to myself. Next week I’ll do better. I mean it. The problem is that as the meeting goes on, I slowly forget about my minutes of panic. I have bigger priorities to take care of. After the meeting there’s groceries, the gutters and...Then it’s a week later and I’m goofing up Sally’s introduction because I haven’t thought about how badly I messed up Grover’s.

I needed to write down the lessons I learned from all those botched introductions. I can’t turn my introductions into Table Topics if I want to be any good because apparently I’m not very good at Table Topics. And I need to review that list periodically.

Fool Thing Number Three is not keeping a Fool Things list in the first place. What would Dale Carnegie say? The first time I do something new I’m probably going to mess it up. The point of the Fool Things list is so I don’t screw it up the third or fourth or 40th time. You can create a “Smart Things I have Done” list if you’re of a more optimistic bent, but regardless of your disposition you need to always evaluate if you want to grow. Evaluation is more than for just speeches; ultimately it has to come from within.

Looking Around and the One Fool Thing I Did Not Do
Lest I be thought a complete fool, I will close by mentioning the single, undeniably smart thing I did when I was the club president. That was serving as president in the first place. In my term I discovered things I could have and should have learned from any of a large number of books but did not. All those books that talk about having a list of priorities and living them and reviewing your progress are spot on.

Ben Franklin said, “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.” We’re all fools at some stage in our lives. Who do you want to be your schoolmaster? Do you want your schoolhouse to be a stressful, unforgiving work place or the supportive environment of Toastmasters? There are few natural speakers and fewer natural leaders. Even a first-class fool like me can learn. Serving as an officer – or any role for that matter – may expose you as a fool. But what better way to come up with a Fool Things list of your own?

John Spaith, ATM-B, is currently making a fool of himself as Area 51 Governor of District 2. He can be reached at johntm@spaith.com.