Asheville Toastmasters Club #436 members take prizes in NC district competition

From a press release:

Asheville Toastmasters Club #436 members take prizes in NC district competition

Two members of Asheville Toastmasters Club #436 won awards at the recent NC District 37 Competition in Greensboro. Ryan Barrington Cox won third place honors in the Humorous Speech Contest, and Lucian Stewart won third place in the Speech Evaluation Contest.

To compete in the District Competition, speakers must win first at other levels of competition. “You start in your local club, and then you compete in Area,” says Ryan Barrington Cox. “Then it’s Division, and then on to District.”

Ryan’s humorous talk was about a snake that got into his house a few years back. “I’m not particularly brave around snakes,” Ryan says. “The story was about 90 percent true, and then by the end it was embellished a bit.” Ryan’s talk was titled “The Deflated Black Bicycle Inner Tube,” because that is what the snake resembled sitting on the toilet seat.

Ryan joined Toastmasters last spring, seeking to improve his public speaking skills. “I only got the chance to speak publicly about once a year, and I’d always get really nervous, and it would not go well. So I was always living with the fear and defeat of not doing a good job,” Ryan says. “It really started to get to me, and I had this realization that confronting that fear of public speaking would be easier and more fun than just running from it for the rest of my life. I visited the Toastmasters group and after just one meeting I knew I wanted to join. It was a really friendly place, a really supportive place, with a lot of great speakers and a lot of humor. At the end there are always evaluations, where people give positive encouragement but also show you room for improvement. I love that. Constructive criticism and feedback is really one of the best ways to improve.”

Ryan encourages anyone who wants better communication skills to come to the Toastmasters group. “Investing in your communication skills is more important that ever,” he says. “Especially with technology, with texting, email and Facebook, the old art of speaking, of getting together with people and communicating, is kind of a dying art. Toastmasters is a 90-year-old organization that carries that torch.”

Asheville Toastmasters Club #436 meets every Thursday, 6:15 p.m. on the second floor of the YMI Cultural Center, 39 South Market Street, in downtown Asheville. Meetings are always free to the public. For more information, contact Nick Taylor-D’Ambrosio at ntd309@aol.com, visit www.ashevilletoastmasters.com, or follow @Toastmasters on Twitter.