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From: Russ Hicks
Date: 15 Oct 2006
Time: 17:43:27 -0500
Remote Name: 71.252.204.114
Hi Stephanie, ..... Thanks for your kind words. And please tell Lee hi for me. She's a wonderful person - as is her son Michael. ..... Pardon me while I laugh a little. <smile> Quite a few students have asked me about Toastmasters, and after I answered the first one, I use the miracle of copy and paste (remember I'm a computer geek!) to tell other students - and anyone else I can get to listen to me - about Toastmasters. Here's what I've said... ..... Toastmasters International is an amazing organization. The Vision of Toastmasters International states: "Toastmasters International empowers people to achieve their full potential and realize their dreams. Through our member clubs, people throughout the world can improve their communication and leadership skills, and find the courage to change." The Mission of Toastmasters International states: "Toastmasters International is the leading movement devoted to making effective oral communication a worldwide reality. Through its member clubs, Toastmasters International helps men and women learn the arts of speaking, listening and thinking – vital skills that promote self-actualization, enhance leadership, foster human understanding and contribute to the betterment of mankind." ..... Their main website is www.toastmasters.org. It is a communication and leadership organization which is HUGELY successful in helping people overcome their fears of public speaking among many other things. Officially, "The mission of a Toastmaster Club is to provide a mutually supportive and positive learning environment in which every member has the opportunity to develop communication and leadership skills, which in turn foster self-confidence and personal growth." All those things sound like a lot of high sounding words, but they are absolutely true. We walk the walk as well as talk the talk. (No pun intended! <smile>) ..... Our Callier Communicators Toastmasters club in Dallas, founded in 1995, is the first Toastmasters club in the world dedicated exclusively to people who stutter. We have a special mission statement for our club which states, "The Callier Communicators especially understand the difficulty some individuals have in communicating. It is our mission to provide an environment that offers special support and understanding to people with communication difficulties or extreme fear of speaking." The URL for our club is http://www.geocities.com/callier3216/ ..... Toastmasters has about 200,000 members in over 8,000 (I think) clubs throughout the world. If you are scared of public speaking, Toastmasters is the best organization in the entire world to help you conquer those fears. It is a VERY friendly organization full of friendly and supportive people. It has nothing whatsoever to do with stuttering but people who stutter (and blind people, blondes, brunettes, bald people, tall people, short people, skinny people, fat people - you get the picture) are welcomed into the organization with open arms. And above everything else, it's FUN!!! You learn when you have fun. That's the fundamental basis for Toastmasters. ..... There are zillions of Toastmaster clubs in New York City. If you want to know more about Toastmasters, go visit one of these clubs. They would LOVE to have you and any of your friends and classmates as guests sometime. See http://www.toastmasters.org and find a club near you. Click on Find a Club, then specify United States, New York, New York, and you can see all the particulars. I'll bet there are some clubs on the NYU campus. ..... Okay, I'll put my finger back in the dike now. As you can well see, I LOVE Toastmasters! It's the most wonderful organization in the world outside of the National Stuttering Association. ..... Thanks for asking that question, Stephanie. I feel better now that I've had the opportunity to blow my Toastmasters trumpet for a while! <grin> ..... You also asked, "I am curious also as to why you said 'there was no hope for me.' Are you referring to the hope of being fluent someday?" Yes. I'll never be fluent, but that doesn't bother me any more than realizing that I'll never look like Brad Pitt some day. <grin> But I do admit to some initial disappointment when I found out that after nearly 20 years out of the stuttering community, they STILL hadn't found a cure! Boo, hiss! My own father has only recently come to terms with the NSA not helping ME with MY fluency. It's simply not about me. It's about me helping other people. And along the way, I've had a blast! <smile> I wouldn't change a thing! ..... Prior to 1950 there really was NO reasonable form of speech therapy. Yes, we had tongue cutting and swinging your arms like a metronome, but thank heavens I never did any of those goofy things. Stuttering modification wasn't introduced until many years later when people began to realize that there was more to stuttering than controlling the speech mechanisms. And the Iceberg Analogy of Stuttering (see my paper on the stuttering iceberg at http://www.mnsu.edu/comdis/isad6/papers/hicks6.html for details of this.) began to explain why this was so true. ..... Yes, my speech camp experience was my first "intervention." ..... I'm glad my paper had a positive impact on you, Stephanie. But if I have touched YOUR life, now it's your turn to touch SOMEONE ELSE'S life! That's the way this game of life is played. We're all role models whether we want to be or not. As a future SLP, you'll have more opportunities to affect other people's lives than you can possibly imagine. The bad news is that you probably won't even hear about 99% of them. But the good news is that the 1% that you DO hear back from will make everything you do all worthwhile! ..... I wish you the best in life, Stephanie. I hope our paths cross some day! ..... Russ