During your average meeting, when to start the timer might not seem like too big of a deal but mess it up during contests, and you might have some unhappy contestants.

Fellow toastmasters and guests, how often is the timing messed up at your meeting? Do you know when to start the timing? Do you know now to use the Timer role as your greatest membership growth tool? You don’t? Well let me tell you…

When timing speeches, Table Topics and evaluations, I like to follow the contest rules. Toastmaster International has established that for contests, timing starts when the contestant is making an effort to communicate with the audience – verbally or not!

This is an important point, because many people will start to make faces, gestures, or interact with the audience in some way. Many people are confused by this rule and it can be interpreted in many ways so let’s look at an example. I gave a demonstration speech to a new club near my office. At the beginning of the speech I started to sniff around the lectern like something smelled funny. I then recoiled in disgust, waved my hand like I was fanning a smell and said, “Toastmasters stinks!”

If that had been a contest speech, then timing would begin the moment I started to sniff around the lectern. I was communicating with the audience that there was a smell coming up from the lectern so that was the starting point. Please note that this does not include when you are shaking hands with the person in control of the lectern or the moment or two you need to get posed before the audience, but when you move to communicate, I am starting the time.

So what does timing have to do with membership? If you watch the next meetings you are attending, guests tend to gravitate towards the back. Because of the layout of most meetings, they usually happen to sit next to the timer. Then what happens? They ask the timer what they are doing or the timer takes some initiative and tells them. Throughout the meeting you can always catch them looking at the time.

As you are filling roles for the next meeting, what happens? “Hey Guest, do you want to be the timer at our next meeting?”, says the VP of Education.

“Sure”, says the guest.

Before you know it, you have another happy member.

Thanks for visiting,

Chris

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