Pathways Level 4 and 5 Projects

For many members, the last two levels are the hardest part. After all, in most cases, you can’t just go to a meeting and do a speech.
This page lets you help your fellow members by showing what you’ve done as a project, why you chose a particular one, and what challenges you overcame. If you’d like to find out more about a topic, please email our Webmaster to get in touch with the member concerned.

Path in progress: Presentation Mastery

Level 5

Name of Project : High Performance Leadership

Brief description of project:

Whangarei Toastmasters 50th Jubilee Dinner – I was taking the lead on organising the Jubilee, so I was doing the work anyway, so why not use it for a Level 5 project and High Performance Leadership (HPL) was the obvious choice for me.

Challenges in working the project

Reaching out to past members * Due to flooding of the hall, we lost most of our paper records * Toastmasters International lost our early records, such as a list of charter members, in the early digitisation of club records * Local Newspapers and Radio Stations were not interested in covering the Jubilee unless it was a paid advert * Finding and reaching out to, as well as getting responses from past members

How those challenges were resolved

Accepting the situation - the records were lost. If you were on a road trip and there was a landslide taking out the road, you don't sit there moaning for days, you find another path. You accept it and move on Regular re-assement of the situation - assess where you are and how that compares to your original plan. Is this still realistic?. How do the plans need to adapt to the current situation?. *We had to scale back from original plans, but that did not stop us working hard to ensure the Jubilee was celebrated and those in attendance had a great time. * With the loss of records we had to knuckle down and get members reaching out to contacts, people they knew were past members, searching for old agendas from meetings and ABM's, old evaluations, anything with names and/or numbers. Set up a facebook page for the project/event, along with eventfinder and events section on the district website and district facebook page. Then when that was done, accepting we had done our best at trying to reach out and contact past members and move on. Utilize the experience in our district - I was fortunate to have Paul Leong, BJ O'Leary and Murray Coutts on my guidance committee, but I also got a lot of advice from Mike Diggins and others, who were only to happy to help out. Sometimes the biggest help was not when they came up with the answers but when they just listened and let me vent my frustrations or alarm, then planted a seed and left me and my working committee to grow that seed into a plan or course of action. Listen - to the whole story not just someones highlights reel, where they tell you all about what went well, get the bad with the good. Sometimes it was the stories where everything went wrong and they had to dig deep to avoid the whole project/event falling flat on its face, were exactly what I needed to hear at the time, were the most reassuring and the best at raising my spirits, I was not alone!.

Item added by : Gavin Lamb

Path in progress: Visionary Communication

Level 5

Name of Project : Develop Your Vision

Brief description of project:

Series of workshops aimed at improving uptake of L4 and L5 projects. Run in hybrid format, with Q & A opportunities after each section. Inspired by realisation that some were doing a large number of paths but not getting beyond Level 3 in any of them.

Challenges in working the project

One big challenge was bringing the problem description into simple terms. Those who were already working in the upper levels didn't need the workshop, those in the lower levels didn't understand the need for it in large part.

How those challenges were resolved

Spread the realisation that many of these projects can be applied to things that members were working on anyway, such as establishing hybrid formats, longer format speeches, and so on. To do this, I had to come to that realisation myself. The workshop series is working, but slow going.

Item added by : Mike Diggins

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Pathways Level 4 and 5 Projects